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Jumpstart your history homeschooling with “Reading Like a Historian”

Primary Sources are hard, but worth it

Stanford’s Reading Like a Historian site at https://sheg.stanford.edu/history-lessons is a treasure trove for all homeschoolers. Along with lessons on specific times and events in history that use primary sources (more on that below), there are also sections on this website for civic reasoning and digital literacy. Misinformation is rampant these days on social media and regular media, and it is critical for students to learn how to evaluate articles and reports for accuracy and bias. The skills and tools your student learns with history analysis work for digital literacy as well, so read on for details.

Background

The group responsible for all of the Reading Like a Historian (RLAH) resources on SHEG is the Stanford History Education Group. Professor Sam Wineburg (see his personal site https://samwineburg.com/ for more details) is the founding member and has spent his career in guiding educators in how to teach historical thinking and analysis skills and digital literacy to middle and high school students. Founding the Stanford History Education Group has been an incredible (and free) resources for educators in teaching those skills.

Why do the Reading Like a Historian lessons?

In their words: “The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features a set of primary documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills”.

Learning and doing history isn’t about memorizing dates and facts but rather learning how to investigate historical questions and using the big 4 strategies endorsed by SHEG: sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading (see https://sheg.stanford.edu/history-lessons). In short, these strategies means evaluating the trustworthiness of different sources on history, sifting through claims and evidence to make your own historical claims that you can defend.

Deep Dive into the Dark Ages lesson to illustrate the RLAH method

This lesson is available here: https://sheg.stanford.edu/history-lessons/dark-ages?check_logged_in=1 You will need to make a free account, but there’s no requirement to be a teacher at an accredited school, it is available for everyone.

For all lessons, RLAH provides a central historical question, or in the parlance of some teachers, the Big Question. The question for the Dark Ages lesson is: Were the “Dark Ages” really dark? Why is this important? having a question to answer with your reading and sources is a crucial pivot away from reading a text and just absorbing the material. When there’s a question to answer, students are looking for evidence that answers the question. Think about reading 2-3 sources about popular dishes during the Roman Empire. You can read the material and you might remember a few details a month later. But if you need to answer the question: Did noble Romans use expensive and rare foods to show superiority and wealth? Now you are looking for an ansswer to that question as you read, you evaluate and refine your answer as you read – it makes all the difference to have a problem to solve as our read history, and the historical skills students master are applicable to other fields and academic topics, indeed, you can consider it critical thinking in action.

Back to the Dark Ages. As you look through the teacher’s copy, you will see some background material on why this period of world history is called the Dark Ages, along with a nice timeline. Students should have already studied the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of the nation-states in western Europe, since these lessons aren’t meant to be a complete history course but rather a way to make your history reading more complete and help to build skills of historical thinking in your students.

Flexible primary and secondary sources

This lesson has 6 documents for the students to work through, and the people of RLAH provide a simplified version of each document as well as the original documents, which can be longer and more difficult to analyze. So you can use the simplified versions with younger students (7th – 9th grade) and the longer documents for 10-12th grade students or more advanced students who need challenge. And sometimes you don’t have the time for the full lesson, and that’s okay too, even the simplified documents are well worth the time.

The 7 documents include:

Secondary sources

Document A: 1954 Textbook excerpt on the Dark Ages (The Record of Mankind)

Document B: 2002 Textbook excerpt about Dark Ages (World History Before 1600: The Development of Early Civilization, 2002)

Primary sources

Document C: Abbey of Xanten Records from 800s (modified from the yearly records of the Abbey of Xanten, a city in modern day Germany).

Document D: Medieval Economic Laws (from different laws of the late 8th and early 9th centuries defining the worth of currency, regulating the exchange of currency, and establishing penalties for people breaking these laws).

Document E: Journey to Chartres, 10th Century, an excerpt from a history of France, written by a monk named Richer in the late 900s. In this passage, Richer describes how he went to the town of Chartres, in what is today France, to study. The passage illustrates medieval education, which was provided primarily at monasteries or church schools and was not available to most people.

Statistical facts and figures

Document F: The Rise of Universities, a list of the 10 oldest European universities in Europe. (from “List of Oldest Universities in Continuous Operation,” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in_continuous_operation)

Document G: Images of 4 Gothic Cathedrals from 800-11oos.

The seven documents are a range of primary sources (firsthand accounts of someone who lived at the time of the Dark Ages), secondary sources (the two textbook excerpts), and factual evidence (the images and list of universities. Primary sources are used by all history teachers, but the hard part isn’t finding the primary sources, the hard part is knowing what to do with them to make learning history effective. And this is where the RLAH lessons shine, because they walk you and your students through the process.

Guiding questions to help with reading the documents

First, you need to read the documents. The lessons include guiding questions to help students learn close reading skills. For example, for Document A, it asks:

  1. What type of document is this?
  2. When was it written?
  3. How long does this textbook suggest the “Dark Ages” lasted?
  4. Why, according to this textbook, were the “early Middle Ages” a “Dark Age”?
  5. What is similar and different about this account and the Document B entry?

Once you’ve read the documents and thought about the guiding questions, it is important to weave in the strategies for historical thinking: sourcing, contextulization, But how do you do this??

The Four RLAH Strategies in detail:

Sourcing

Sourcing asks students to consider who wrote a document as well as the circumstances of its creation. This poster reminds students before reading a document to ask:
• Who wrote this?
• What is the author’s perspective?
• Why was it written?
• When was it written?
• Where was it written?
• Is this source reliable? Why? Why not?

Contextualization

Contextualization asks students to locate a document in time and place and to understand how these factors shape its content. This poster reminds students when reading a document to ask:
• When and where was the document created?
• What was different then?
• What was the same?
• How might the circumstances in which the document was created affect its content?

Corroboration

• What do other documents say?
• Do the documents agree? If not, why?
• What are other possible documents?
• What documents are most reliable?
Establish what is probable by comparing documents to each
other
• Recognize disparities between accounts

Close Reading

• What claims does the author make?
• What evidence does the author use?
• What language (words, phrases, images, symbols) does the author use to persuade the document’s audience?
• How does the document’s language indicate the author’s perspective?\

Carondolet Children’s Clothing

Font used Handlee:

Once Upon a Time Antiques
Font used: Playfair Display
Cross-town Shuttle Service
Font used: Oswald

Link to my Typography Hierarchy page: http://lifeisacarondolet.knittermom.com/2023/03/17/typography-hierarchy/