TwHP: Social Studies Methods Course In Using Place
Infusing "Place" in a Social Studies Methods Course
As a social studies methods professor for elementary teachers (but as one who has taught secondary methods as well), I see numerous opportunities to use historic places to advance the goals of my course. Indeed, one could envision "place" as an organizing theme around which the goals of a social studies methods course might be organized. But a proper starting point, I think, is to consider "the social studies methods course" as a general idea and to proceed carefully from there.
Is there such a thing as a "typical" social studies methods course? Probably not, for two main reasons. First, how social studies methods are taught depends greatly on the target teaching level: elementary, middle, or high school. Second, in the spirit of academic freedom, university methods professors march to their own drummers (subject to licensure/certification requirements imposed by the particular states in which they teach). So even within grade levels, there is a fair amount of variation across course syllabi.
Nonetheless, it might be useful to present a "sample" sequence of class sessions for an imaginary social studies methods course in order to illustrate some of the opportunities the capitalize on place to advance the goals of preservice social studies teacher education. The sample comprises 15, 3-hour class sessions, for a total of 45 contact hours.
Use of Place |
|
Session 1. |
Maintaining and transmitting a cultural heritage through preservation and study of historic places |
Session 2. |
Historic places referenced in national and state standards across the disciplines and social studies themes.
|
Session 3. |
Concrete concepts that have specific physical referents/exemplars in the built environment can be used (such as “temple,” “school,” “park”). |
Session 4. |
Places as 3-dimensional primary documents. Places foster empathetic understanding of and connections to the past. |
Session 5. |
Provides experience in using place as document, and acquaints methods students with local historical resources.
|
Session 6. |
How civic values and institutions are reflected in the physical spaces in which civic deliberation and governance are conducted. |
Session 7. |
Historic preservation as local public policy, community engagement. Historic places that were the settings for social justice movements.
|
Session 8. |
Historic places as case studies in which the key concepts and six “essential elements” of geography interact.
|
Session 9. |
A selected historic place can be used as a case study for the interplay of geographic themes and elements. |
Session 10. |
Places as cases studies of work life, industrial change, and commerce. |
Session 11. |
Places as reflections of changing technology and the vagaries of the free market. The rise and fall of industries as revealed in historic places. |
Session 12.
Life is Complex: Social Studies as Interdisciplinary Study |
Opportunity to use a specific historic place to demonstrate how evidence from history and the social sciences (and the humanities) are brought together to create a more complete picture of a time, a place, a person, or a group.
|
Session 13. |
Historic places of significance to diverse cultures can come into play. |
Session 14. |
Using technology to research historic places. |
Session 15. |
A variety of assessment techniques applied to the study of historic places. |
Sample Methods Lesson Using Historic Places
The following sample lesson focuses most particularly on the inquiry process in history – a perennial methods topic across grade levels in U.S. methods courses.
3. To discuss historic places as sources of two-dimensional and three-dimensional primary sources
4. To consider what different primary sources contribute to building inferences and testing hypotheses in the inquiry process
5. To demonstrate the use of a historic place to carry out an inquiry exercise
6. To catalogue what a teacher needs to know and do to prepare for the use of places in historical inquiry
I. Introduce Steps in the Inquiry Method
A standard model for inquiry in history/social science is as follows:
A. Describe the Problem (What needs to be explained;the problem is often a puzzling question or other kind of discrepant situation that must be resolved.
B. Generate Hypotheses (Educated guesses that provide possible explanations)
C. Test the Hypotheses (Use evidence to confirm or refute hypotheses and to generate new hypotheses)
D. Formulate a Tentative Conclusion (What is our tentative explanation or resolution of the problem, based on the available evidence?)
II. Highlight the Role of Evidence
A. Key to the inquiry process is the search and analysis of evidence and the making of inferences based the evidence.
B. Historians and other social scientists draw evidence from primary sources.
C. Primary sources ("original sources") are materials (documents, artifacts, buildings, and the like) that were produced during the historical time period being examined and provide first-hand descriptions of places and events;secondary sources provide commentary or interpretation of primary sources and are derived from original sources. Provide a couple of examples of each.
D. Historic places offer a range of primary sources with which students can make inferences and draw conclusions about historical events and times.
III. Primary Documents
A. Traditional primary documents
1. Letters, diaries, maps, newspapers, public records, artifacts
2. Analyzing traditional primary documents: see http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets/ for worksheets used to analyze documents
B. Places as documents –what places can tell us about people and the times they lived in (White and Hunter, 1995 Teaching with Historic Places: A Curriculum Framework, pp. 19-26)
1. Spatial relationships: how elements within a place are distributed and related to each other
2. Temporal relationships: what the place tell us about the time in which it was built or established, and the ways in which it has changed (or not changed) over time
3. Humans and the natural environment: how humans adapted to the place in which they settled and how they changed the place to accommodate human needs
4. Design: what values people embraced that were represented in the built environment of their time through design, use of space, building materials employed, and other attributes;how these characteristics reveal clues about innovation, about the economics of a particular time and place, about the intended function of the space(s), and about the cultural heritage from which they are drawn.
5. Context: how a place sits in relation to other places, spatially and temporally, because where a place is located and what it shares visually with its surroundings provides evidence on which to base historical inferences.
6. Artifacts: how the people of the time carried out the daily necessities of life and how these compare to the routines of life today.
IV. Case Study: A Lesson Using an Historic Place
A. Use an existing TWHP lesson plan to demonstrate how a variety of evidence types presented (2-D documents, maps, architectural drawings, and visuals of the place) work together to allow students to formulate and test inferences and draw tentative conclusions about a historical question.
1. Present a photograph, map, or other piece of evidence from the historic place that generates a problem to be solved or a circumstance to be explained.
2. Based on what students see/read, generate several hypotheses.
3. Provide additional pieces of evidence from that historic place that allow students to test the plausibility of these hypotheses.
4. Allow students to construct a tentative conclusion that solves the problem or provides a valid explanation based on the evidence.
B. At the end of the sample TWHP lesson, review the steps of the inquiry lesson that were illustrated in this lesson.
C. Review how different types of evidence were drawn upon in the lesson, including those unique to "place" as a document.
V. Preparing to Use Place in Historical Inquiry
Much of what a teacher needs to know in order to use place in the inquiry process is the same as for any inquiry lesson.
A. Here are questions that a teacher must ask in advance of an inquiry lesson:
1. What is the problem to be solved, the situation to be explained, or the puzzle to be unraveled? For example, what explains the different street patterns in different parts of our city? Why were the earliest mills in America built where they were? What was daily life like in colonial New England village? How did towns and aspiring cities in the Midwest and Great Plains attract settlers and businesses?
2. Based on current scholarship, what are reasonable conclusions one can reach with respect to the inquiry problem? What are competing conclusions about which historians disagree?
3. On what evidence are these conclusions based?
4. How can I make this evidence accessible to my students, in the form of 2-D and 3-D primary documents –accessible in the multiple senses of "proximity" (is it a place that can be visited), "retrievable" (is it a document or an artifact that is available for examination/use) and "understandable" (for example, is the language of the document comprehensible to my students)?
5. Is there an initial document, artifact, model, photograph, map, or physical setting can I present to students that:
a. will generate an awareness of the problem,
b. will spark interest in constructing an explanation that resolves the problem, and
c. will prompt students to propose several testable hypotheses for which additional evidence can be brought to bear?
6. How shall I make that additional evidence available to students in a way that will help them analyze the evidence, make inferences from the evidence, and test hypotheses leading to a well-reasoned tentative conclusion?
7. In short, the teacher works backwards from the tentative conclusions to the evidence that is accessible to students. The teacher makes that evidence available to students, who can use it to test hypotheses and develop tentative conclusions (and perhaps also generate additional questions worthy of further investigation).
B. Good resources for teaching inquiry using historic places:
These materials are available from State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPO) around the country. A visit to your state's SHPO can put you in touch with a wealth of primary and secondary sources and with a collection of dedicated professionals. You also can search online for National Register sites in your area by using the National Register of Historic Places online database. From the National Register homepage, click on "Database/Research" in the lefthand menu, click on "National Register of Historic Places database," and follow the instructions.1. Check the TwHP website, especially the section on Lesson Plans. You may find an existing TWHP lesson plan that addresses a place of interest in your curriculum and provides the necessary materials to support inquiry.
2. The second source is the National Register of Historic Places, with offices in every state in the nation. Specifically, one can consult the nominations for historic places and districts in your local area. Nomination documentation contains evidence of historical significance, including references to (or actual examples of) primary documents. Architectural style and other design data can provide visual clues, accessible to students, to the history of the place.
VI. Extensions
A. Have students search the National Register online database for local places on the National Register.
B. Students can search for TWHP lesson plans that might be appropriate to use or adapt for their final unit plans.
C. With a partner, identify a place in the community that may be historically significant (even if not listed in the National Register of Historic Places) and conduct a small research project on its history and significance. Include the kinds of evidence you examined and how they supported your conclusions.
D. Using the resources described above, and others, plan for a field study in your local area that demonstrates the kinds of evidence that place can provide in historical inquiry. This will allow your students to apply what they've learned about using place in the inquiry process.
VII. Assessment
A. Provide students with two or three hypotheses about a given historic place and have students
1. identify a variety of primary sources (both 2-D and 3-D) that could be used to test the hypotheses and
2. explain how these sources could be used to support or refute each hypothesis.
B. Have students select a historic place, either locally or from the National Register database and construct an inquiry lesson that uses sources from that place to make inferences and test hypotheses.
C. Have students select a lesson plan from the TWHP lesson database and identify the steps of the inquiry process that are implicit in the lesson.