How to Teach with Primary Sources in Social Studies
By Emily M. Schell, Ed.D., Executive Director of the California Global Education Project at the University of San Diego
Supporting Agency, Inquiry, and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
Explore Part 7 of our series, “Voices in Social Studies” where educators and thought leaders share the latest in social studies teaching and learning. Read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6.
How are you using primary sources in your Social Studies classroom? More importantly, why are you using primary sources?
These are important questions to consider as you plan for the school year and develop lessons that are engaging and meaningful. Primary and secondary sources are considered critical components of an effective Social Studies programs. At the same time, they can be used to support three larger goals for education: fostering inquiry mindsets and practices; developing student agency; and creating more culturally responsive, relevant, and sustaining learning environments.
Promote Inquiry to Think Critically about Sources
What happened? When and where did that happen? Who was involved? Why did it happen? How could that happen?
We hear these questions often — on a phone call with a friend, during a dinner conversation with family, and in a Social Studies lesson with engaged students. When we are presented with information about an event that piques our interest, we have questions. If our curiosity is aroused and we want to understand or make better sense of what happened, the answer to one question typically generates more questions. When we seek the answers to our questions, we learn more and more about the world around us.
Social Studies classrooms should reflect this inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning. Students become centered in the learning process and continue to develop their knowledge, skills, and agency for civic engagement that transcends the classroom. By pursuing investigations that yield better understandings of people, places, and events, our students gain a better sense of themselves, their communities, and the world. More importantly, the inquiry process should motivate students to do something productive with their new learning and take informed actions that contribute to the common good. These actions might be seemingly small behavioral changes, such as considering stereotypes when referring to groups of people, or the actions might be larger in scope, such as organizing a campaign or running for public office.
Ultimately, inquiry-based learning results in students identifying and following new lines of inquiry to satisfy their interests and pursuits of knowledge so that they become better informed and engaged citizens.
In today’s fast-paced and highly interconnected world of information, students will benefit greatly from the lessons provided in an inquiry-driven Social Studies classroom that guides them in identifying, sourcing, corroborating, and using primary sources to draw conclusions about the past and present.
Where can you and your students start? Consider how you “go to the source” when you want to find information firsthand. You probably look at the origins of the story or incident and investigate by talking with people who were there, looking at photos or video footage taken in the place and time of the event, and reading available accounts from reliable sources. Gathering, evaluating, and analyzing evidence from multiple perspectives helps you to figure out what happened, when and where it happened, who was there, how things unfolded, and perhaps why this happened.
Run through this scenario with your students and see if these basic steps ring true. However, finding and interpreting sources from the past can present additional challenges to any historical investigation. Those challenges can be addressed in lessons that help students to find and contextualize information, translate texts, interpret artifacts, and identify missing perspectives. Here are some tips for developing those lessons to help students following their own lines of inquiry within your curriculum framework:
Sourcing: When students encounter a primary source, they should learn to determine who created the document/artifact/image and the perspective of that person. Students should also learn to determine when, where, and why the source was created. Unlike investigating a recent local event, most of the primary sources students encounter in our classrooms come from events that took place long ago and far away. Therefore, students might have to use context clues to appropriately identify the source.
Contextualization: Understanding each primary source requires students to place the source in historic and geographic contexts. They must gather background information about the time period and environment in which the source was created. Learning as much about the person who created the source and the social, political, economic, and geographic circumstances for that person in that time will aide in interpreting the source.
Corroboration: Just as we would not listen to only one person’s account of a large event today, we should not rely on only one primary source to provide an account of what happened. By accessing and interpreting other primary sources related to the event, students can find evidence that either corroborates or contradicts another account. In the process, students must determine which sources are reliable and explain why. Would you trust an account provided by someone who was not at the event and shared the story many years later?
Explore the new 6–12 U.S. and World History programs:
🌏 Inspire students to experience history through multiple lenses and inquiry as they learn to practice civil discourse on their way to becoming future-ready citizens.
Foster Student Agency with Primary Sources
Students who have agency take charge of their learning and exercise choice, self-regulation, responsible decision-making, time management, and organization. They set goals and experience ownership of their learning, persevere when challenged, and learn from their mistakes. There are many strategies for teachers to use in supporting the development of student agency while learning with primary sources. Here are a few examples:
Self-direction: Students are empowered to set goals, manage their time, and determine roles for themselves and peers in collaborative projects without step-by-step instructions from the teacher. After students have learned how to access, evaluate, interpret, and analyze primary sources, they can determine where to look for sources and what to do with them. They understand that there is “no one right answer” in interpreting these primary sources. Instead, they reflect the work of historians in defending or building arguments
Choice: Rather than providing students with a pre-determined set of primary sources for them to interpret and use in a lesson, teachers can point to some options for accessing sources and allow students to select their own primary sources to analyze. In the process, students become familiar with reliable libraries, archives, and collections and practice skills used by historians, scientists, journalists, and other investigators.
Reflection: As students reflect on their learning, they can articulate what knowledge, skills, and dispositions they have and need to support their progress. Recognizing that learning happens on a continuum, students may identify specific challenges they have in finding, interpreting, or corroborating sources in order to seek out help from peers, teachers, or tutorials. Students might also identify strong skill sets or a keen interest in working with primary sources to unearth missing voices, identify outliers, or piece together different accounts.
Embrace Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Pedagogy
As teachers embrace culturally responsive, relevant, and sustaining pedagogy, the use of primary sources allows to students to bring their own cultural interests and viewpoints into their investigations while accessing perspectives that might not otherwise be found in the lessons. For example, culturally responsive pedagogy leverages the perspectives, experiences, and tools that students bring into the classroom to make learning more relevant and effective. (Caraballo et al, 2020) While studying a topic such as school segregation in the U.S., students should explore primary sources that go beyond Brown v. Board of Education and provide various examples of exclusion from public schools due to ethnicity, including Mary Tape’s 1885 letter to the San Francisco Board of Education referencing her children of Chinese descent and documents related to the 1947 court case Mendez v. Westminster filed by five Mexican American families. (Tran, 2021)
Culturally relevant pedagogy focuses on student learning and academic success, develops students’ cultural competence to enhance positive ethnic and social identities, and supports students’ critical consciousness (Ladsen-Billings, 1995).
When students have access to primary sources that exist within and outside of the classroom, and are encouraged to find and interpret sources using their cultural lenses, they are developing their cultural competence while recognizing and using evidence to critique social inequities.
Primary sources can help to achieve the goals of culturally sustaining pedagogy, which seeks to go beyond accepting, affirming, and connecting to cultural knowledge and experiences in order to establish schools as places where students of color and their rich cultures are sustained. Rather than confining studies of the past to a selection of primary sources, teachers can open up their curriculum to be inclusive of all existing primary sources — including non-linguistic artifacts or traditions — for students to explore, investigate, interrogate, evaluate, analyze, and corroborate. Sources reflecting non-traditional narratives will engage students in new ways while enhancing their interest, critical thinking, and investigative skills.
How will you use primary sources in your Social Studies classroom this year? Why will you use primary sources in your classroom?
Keep these questions and answers alive and well in your planning, instruction, and assessments.
Explore the new 6–12 U.S. and World History programs:
🌏 Inspire students to experience history through multiple lenses and inquiry as they learn to practice civil discourse on their way to becoming future-ready citizens.
About the Author
Emily M. Schell, Ed.D., is Executive Director of the California Global Education Project at the University of San Diego’s School of Leadership and Education Sciences. She is co-chair to the California Environmental Literacy Initiative, Ambassador to HundrED, and an author for McGraw Hill’s IMPACT Social Studies program. Dr. Schell is a former teacher, principal, and Social Studies Resource Teacher for San Diego Unified, K-12 History-Social Science Coordinator for San Diego County Office of Education, Liaison for National Geographic Education, and Teacher Education Faculty at San Diego State University. She earned her B.A. in Diversified Liberal Arts and Ed.D. in Leadership Studies at University of San Diego, and M.S. in Journalism at Northwestern University. Dr. Schell combines her years of experience and interests in social studies, geography, and interdisciplinary education to promote global education as a way to support student agency and social justice.
References
Caraballo, L., Martinez, D., Paris, D. & Alim, H. S. (2020). Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Vol. 63, №6, pp 697–701.
Hutton, S. (2015). Using primary sources. California History-Social Science Project: University of California, Davis. Retrieved from https://chssp.ucdavis.edu/blog/using-primary-sources
Ladsen-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, Vol. 32, №3, pp. 465–491.
Stanford History Education Group. Historical thinking chart. Retrieved from https://sheg.stanford.edu/history-lessons/historical-thinking-chart
Tran, T. (2021). Teach Asian American and pacific islander history. California History-Social Science Project: University of California, Davis. Retrieved from https://chssp.ucdavis.edu/blog/AAPI
Vogt, K. (2016). How next gen learning can support student agency. Next Gen Learning. Retrieved from https://www.nextgenlearning.org/articles/how-next-gen-learning-can-support-student-agency
