Teaching for Historical Literacy

As a history teacher, I feel like teaching and using literacy within your classroom is the easiest of all the subjects not including English Languages Arts. There are just so many paths that you could take within your classroom, whether it be the simple essay on history, debates, historical speeches, the use of primary sources, history of famous poets and writers, and the list goes on and on. They key to using all these different forms of literacy in history is to keep the students motivated in your classroom. As Frey and Fisher put in their article “It doesn’t mean that we as English teachers should abandon what we need to teach; it does mean that we need to closely consider the task demand and the instructional design we use to support it. Students are eager to take on a difficult task.” (2010, p. 35) this could mean that you do not need to toss the standards that you are required to teach, it just means that you should be creative with how you teach them to gain student interest.
I myself want to include all these ideas that I have mentioned within my classroom and even steal some of the other fantastic ideas that were used during the presentations of this classroom. I definitely want to implement debates into the classroom because I feel like there is so much to debate on throughout the course of history. But I will make sure to demonstrate to the students how to properly debate and then work the students into less controversial debates before working them into the controversial subjects. Deciphering primary sources is definitely something that I want to be a huge part of my classroom, of course you would also have to teach students how to do this also. Most students would not how to decipher a tablet from 500 BCE right off the bat, so maybe show them how to decipher a political cartoon from the 1900’s and then slowly work your way into harder sources. Plaut even talks about demonstrating before applying when she says “Teacher or peer modeling shows them how to focus on key aspects of a text and applying metacognitive strategies they apply to each content text.” (Plaut, 2009, p. 27) I would also like to implement more reading into my classroom than I have seen through my observations, maybe more reading aloud rather than just having the students read to themselves and write down the definitions. “It has been proven statistically . . . that all of us . . . if we read regularly, we have a better chance in life every single day and in every single way because reading is one of the unique features of human beings.” (Abulhoul, 2013, 8:37) This is a quote from Isobel Abulhoul during one of her speeches at TED Talks, this is something that we have all thought about before but there should be more reading with in the classroom because I know when I was in school, there was mainly reading silently in a textbook by yourself. I would like to read more speeches, newspaper articles, and letters to the kids to help walk them through their understanding. I also want to use technology whenever possible with the students, especially new ideas because it always gets the students interested. Like we have talked about before the literacy used in the classroom does not always need to be perfect grammar, Lerer even states in his speech “It is as if the students do not care about the correct grammar nowadays, so therefore we must embrace it as teachers.” (2013, 15:12) When using text-in response systems among other uses of technology.
Now the goal is to also gain the interest of students every single day you come to teach. This is something that can be difficult is a trial and error process, something that I know that I need to continue to work on. “The students improved greatly when given a historical event that peaked their interest or when using new technology in the classroom.” (Schleppegrell & Greer & Taylor, 2008, p. 177) This is something that I think is obvious when comes to teaching history, everyone knows that World War II is far more interesting than the idea of sharecropping but the goal is to get the students just as excited about less exciting subjects. I mean even if you are talking about Edgar Allen Poe, which we know is one of the more interesting poets, it is hard to get the students excited about poetry but you have got to find a way like Gutzmer and Wilder talk about in their article “At the end of the unit, Andre stated “It takes a lot to write a poem. I never really appreciated poetry, and they are hard to write but when they are done, they do sound good.’’” (Gutzmer & Wilder, 2012, p. 42) helping the kids realize that at the end of the day, poetry can be interesting and it takes a lot to make a few lines interesting. I look forward to finding a way to mixing up classroom activities and challenging them to do more advanced work every single day because the more they are challenged, the better they will understand. (McTighe & Seif & Wiggins, 2004, p. 28)
I want to implement all these ideas into my classroom and so many more. The numbers of possibilities of using literacy in a history classroom are endless and I look forward to getting creative with it. Like I have said before, every child is good at something which is why look forward to mixing it up in the classroom, in order to try and touch on every kid’s full potential.

Works Cited
Abulhoul, Isobel. (2017, December 2). Why Reading Matters. Lecture presented at TED Talks in New York, New York. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gbKWco-u-I
Frey, Nancy, & Fisher, Douglas (2010). Motivation Requires a Meaningful Task. English Journal, 100(1), 30–36. Accessed December 2, 2017 https://clemson.instructure.com/courses/30774/files/1697312?module_item_id=485973.
Fisher, Douglas Frey, Nancy, & Lapp, D. (2010). Responding When Students Don’t Get It. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(1), 57–60. Accessed December 2, 2017. https://clemson.instructure.com/courses/30774/files/1697314?module_item_id=485975
Gutzmer, C., & Wilder, P. (2012). Writing So People Can Hear Me: Responsive Teaching in a Middle School Poetry Unit . Voices from the Middle, 19(3), 37–43. Accessed December 2, 2017 https://clemson.instructure.com/courses/30774/files/1697311?module_item_id=485972.
Lerer, Seth. (2017, December 2). The History of Reading and the Literate Life. Lecture presented at TED Talks in California, San Diego Lerer, S. (2017, December 2). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Z5HNRC_Ic
McTighe, Jay, Seif, Elliot, & Wiggins, Grant (2004). Educational Leadership. Teaching for Meaning, 62(1), 26–31. Accessed December 2, 2017 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.libproxy.clemson.edu/doi/10.1111/gwat.12458/epdf
Plaut, S. (2009). The right to literacy in secondary schools: creating a culture of thinking. New York: Teachers College Press.
Schleppegrell, Mary, Greer, Stacey, & Taylor, Sarah (2008). Literacy in History: Language and Meaning. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 31(2), 174–187. Accessed December 2, 2017 https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=180659010342538;res=IELHSS