I vividly recall, as an undergraduate history/education major/minor, the push to use primary sources in history class.  The mystique around them was thick and felt like a mandate passed down from upon high. In turn, I followed dutifully including primary sources as part of my lesson plans and educational philosophy statements.  However, soon in my teaching career, I noted the celebration of primary sources (PS) based on flimsy claims rooted in aesthetics, “authenticity”, and misunderstood application of educational theory. The back slapping that goes on among social studies educators (individuals and organizations) around the use of primary sources in history classes should be challenged around purpose, utility, and claims to the “best practices” label. Common refrains among educators who elevate the use of primary sources in social studies include:

• PS are ends in themselves as they expose students to a physical past.
  

  Kneel before thy master!

• Using PS makes students “little historians” and replicates the process of “doing history”
• PS encourages empathy and allows students to “feel” how people in the past did.

Under these auspices, primary sources sit at the altar of history’s hallowed halls providing a direct link to how people felt, thought, acted and experienced life in the past. In this pedagogical stunt, the use of primary sources becomes essential to history courses, an expected dimension  in a teacher’s repertoire, and a key indicator of a their expertise.

But, I contend, the mystique around the de facto use of primary sources is misleading.  Purposeful use of PS, as well recognizing the limits of their utility is key. Secondary social studies programs that aspire to create “little historians”  attempt to recreate, in an internal version of STEM educational objectives, a professional practice  or type.  This objective is better framed as a life skill (college and career readiness) than a self-promoting rationale for history classes.  Stephan Levesque notes in his work  Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the Twenty-first Century, “the terms ‘doing history’ and ‘historical thinking’ are so widespread and en vogue in educational jargon that educators may wonder about their meaning and significance.”

PS are typically celebrated over secondary sources as classroom tools and resources. This is often done under the (faulty) premise, held by teachers and students alike, which elevates PS to the level of “truth” because they (supposedly) capture the moment in the past.

 

They are, as Dr. Jones’ rival Rene  Belloq faultily and lethally argued, viewed as direct connections to a real, true past. This interpretation of history, as an external true story to be memorized/learned, removes inquiry from historical study, a quality central to effective social studies education. “When students approach history as an inquiry-based enterprise”, an HNN article by Craig Thurtell about the most recent NCSS conference reported, “they come to grasp that history is not a single story, but a contested one, and they can, once they have mastered the skills, make their own meaning out of the evidence left to us by the past.”  I contend, to this essential end, that decoding secondary texts and understanding theories and philosophies of history bring  about a more transferable skill than engaging with reified PS and are more related to the demands of Common Core State Standards literacies and skills for social studies course of study.

 

 

Guiding Lights:

Empowering teachers’ knowledge and use of primary sources is central to harnessing PS potential with students. Information is  widely available online.  A brief selection of opportunities is below:

Library of Congress: The Teaching with Primary Sources Program works with colleges and other educational organizations to deliver professional development programs that help teachers use the Library of Congress’s rich reservoir of digitized primary source materials to design challenging, high-quality instruction.

Teachinghistory.org: Teachinghistory.org is designed to help K–12 history teachers access resources and materials to improve U.S. history education in the classroom. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) has created Teachinghistory.org with the goal of making history content, teaching strategies, resources, and research accessible

National Archives: Teaching with primary documents encourages a varied learning environment for teachers and students alike. Lectures, demonstrations, analysis of documents, independent research, and group work become a gateway for research with historical records in ways that sharpen students’ skills and enthusiasm for history, social studies, and the humanities.

Primary Source: This site features teacher-created, classroom-ready activities designed around key primary sources, including written documents, artifacts, audio clips, visual evidence and much more. Each cluster of sources includes key questions, objectives, and a background essay to help you teach the activities with confidence and infuse more global content into your curriculum.

The Historical Thinking Project: A history textbook is generally used more like a phone book: it is a place to look up information. Primary sources must be read differently. To use them well, we set them in their historical contexts and make inferences from them to help us understand more about what was going on when they were created.

Edutopia: Online Photography Archives Enable Teaching with Primary Sources; Analyzing photographs inspires visual literacy and critical thinking in students. A photograph is far more than a pretty picture. It’s also a visual document, an object that scholars call a primary source because it captures an unfiltered, unique moment from a distant time or place.

Likewise a websearch for “teaching with primary sources” will yield numerous state initiatives, digital archives, and professional development opportunities. The guidance and information is out there. However, I must return to my initial concern over the cult of primary sources existing among educators; purposeful use and utility in social studies education.  I find myself close to but not…

At the End of the Tunnel

Primary sources allow students to engage in a variety of literacy skills including but not limited to reading comprehension, source evaluation, research,and  contextualization. Likewise, engaging with primary sources relates with other  historical thinking skills (continuity and change, perspective, narrative creation etc.) However, using PS as an aesthetic icon framed in a supposed career related skill that allows students to act like a historian and get closer to the truth is bad teaching. Using primary sources (as the real past) so students magically “know the past” is riddled with instructional and epistemological delusions. Sam Wineburg in his famed work Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, elaborates on the myth of primary sources’ power, “Trying to shed what we know in order to glimpse the “real” past is like trying to examine microbes with the naked eye.”

Wineburg follows with a triad of commentaries on truth, primary sources, and history education, by contemporary historians.  The first, Italian historian  Carlo Ginzburg argues: “The historian’s task is just the opposite of what most of us were taught to believe. He must destroy our false sense of proximity to people if the past because they come from societies different fork our own.”

Second, Robert Darnton, from The Great Cat Massacre writes “Other people are other…And if we want to understand their way of thinking we should set out with the idea of capturing otherness… we constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity of the past, to be administered doses of culture shock.”

Finally, Richard White,  past President of the Organization of American Historians reminds us that “Any good history begins in strangeness…The past should not be a familiar echo of the present…The past should be so strange that you winder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.”

Students should be taught the skills related to the construction of historical narratives. This is an empowering skill to foster in students which  represents the larger societal discourse on the democratization of historical knowledge and understanding. Primary sources are one way to engage students in this objective. The seductive illusion of primary sources’ power to better realize the past is a myth

replicated in social studies classes by people who should know better, teachers.  Indoctrinating a cult of “little historians” in a social studies program through exposure to a select primary sources furthers myths of external truth in history which can be excavated from archives, textbooks, and other repositories.  Instead, historical understanding emerges from the landscapes of our memories, experiences, knowledge, and mental frameworks. Preparing teachers to teach students this is a timeless, priceless endeavor that reminds us of another, more emboldening myth… “History is a myth that men agree to believe.” (attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte)