Teaching Texas History: Stimulus + Strategy = Success
The General Land Office serves many purposes that benefit the citizens of Texas. While much focus is given to the development of resources such as land, oil, and other minerals, the Land Office’s contribution to history and education is also a top priority for the agency. The GLO promotes history and education by participating in outreach events, hosting online Texas history lessons, crafting TEKS-approved lesson plans, and much more.
History can be a tough sell in the classroom — even the best teachers admit to having mixed results — but it doesn’t have to be.
Students may lack the maturity or patience to try to make sense of the past, or they may see the study of history as having no relevance to their lives today, and disengage from the lesson. Given the right tools, however, a motivated teacher can make a difference in their students’ appreciation of history.
When it comes to teaching history, teachers need two basic foundations: a stimulus and a strategy. Combining these two foundations in a meaningful way creates a depth of education that cannot be reached by a document alone.
The General Land Office is a vast resource from which to pull stimuli for history lessons. Documents, maps, and other artifacts are sometimes referred to as the “raw materials” of history with which students “build” understanding and meaning. The GLO Archives contain over 35.5 million documents and over 45,000 maps and sketches that tell the history of Texas’ lands, dating back to the sixteenth century. Censuses, inventories, and personal letters are just the tip of the iceberg — the classroom potential for this material is enormous.
What about strategy? While there is no magic bullet, there are a number of useful strategies teachers can use that have beneficial success rates. One of the most interesting, researcher-based strategies is called Mind’s Eye. Mind’s Eye is a pre-reading strategy that helps build students’ ability to create mental images by “visualizing” key words from the document.[1]
Research has shown that effective readers create mental images as they read.[2] The technical term for this is dual coding, which is defined as the ability to “see” a text as both language and image.
How does this strategy work? First, we need the stimulus. Let’s suppose the class is beginning a study of the causes that led Texas to join the Confederacy. The Texas GLO Archives happens to have the perfect document for this activity, a letter written by a fiery Texas secessionist named T.C. Neel, in 1861.
The teacher reads and selects key words from the text. The words chosen should ideally evoke a sensory response and provide clues to textual meaning. Based on these criteria, these words were selected: war, Yankees, steal, subdue, overrun, destroy, Mexico, antagonism, liberty, slave, sacrificed, and appreciate.
The students are shown this list of words and follow along as the teacher reads each word slowly and dramatically. The students then reflect on these key words and develop a mental “snapshot” of what they think the text is about. Each student then creates a snapshot in one of four ways: draw a picture of the image, develop a question, generate a prediction, or describe their personal feelings. Students are then placed in groups, share their snapshots and discuss how the letter might unfold and what it has to say about Texas and the Civil War.
After discussing snapshots, the students then read the letter and compare their predictions to the actual text. Once students have a deeper understanding of the text, real learning can begin. How is Mexico involved in the Civil War? What does “liberty” mean to T.C. Neel, and, by extension, other Southerners? What are the “antagonisms” other than slavery?
Combining the Mind’s Eye pre-reading strategy with historical resources at the General Land Office is time-saving, simple, and, perhaps most important for teachers, free! It’s just one of many tools teachers have at their disposal to help increase student comprehension, and perhaps create a greater appreciation for the past while utilizing the priceless historical maps and documents held in the GLO Archives.
