“Can we trust this source?” And other questions history readers ask

When Valeria Ziegler High School’s social studies students look for political news, most don’t turn on the TV or look at the home page of The New York Times. Instead, they get on their phones and open TikTok.

So Ziegler, a teacher of economics and U.S. government and politics at San Francisco Unified’s Abraham Lincoln High School, spent time in September teaching her class how to analyze these videos like savvy consumers.

After the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Ziegler asked students to look into the origins of TikToks they watched that analyzed text messages between the candidates. Who provides this information? And what is their agenda?

“Essentially, we are trying to make citizens informed. … I’d like to think we’ve given them the skills to navigate the media so they can navigate the content that comes to them,” Zilger said.

This adversarial stance—evaluating a source’s bias and perhaps challenging its claims—is central to civics and history teaching, educators and experts say. This is different from the way students approach writing a novel or expository essay in an English/art class. And this is a key example of how literacy skills operate in social studies.

Students need these discipline-specific literacy skills to do well in history, government, civics, and economics classes. But they also need them for life after school, says Sam Weinberg, co-founder of the Digital Inquiry Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to social studies curriculum, and professor emeritus of education at Stanford University.

They teach young people how to “struggle between the cacophonous voices of democracy,” he said. “You can’t just look at something at face value. You say, “Wait a minute, who wrote this?”

What does “literacy” mean in social studies?

This distinction is important now as districts across the country consider how best to structure their overall literacy programs.

One idea that is slowly gaining traction is that of building students’ general knowledge of science, social studies, arts, and culture through so-called “skill building” reading programs—ELA curricula that incorporate these topics, often through paired groups. fiction and popular science texts. Research shows that as students learn more about the world around them, their reading comprehension abilities benefit from this background knowledge..

But these reading programs cannot replace specialized instruction in history or civics, experts warn. This is partly because they do not always teach the ways of reading, thinking and writing that are unique to the social studies.

“There are important disciplinary skills and literacy practices that will not be reflected in your ELA curriculum,” said Nell Duke, executive director of the Early Literacy Center at Stand for Children, an education advocacy organization.

Literacy is a general term, Duke said. This may relate to reading and writing skills in a reading lesson, but is not limited to that subject. Students use literacy skills throughout the school day.

At a basic level, students must be able to read and write well in order to access materials in other subjects, Duke said. For example, reading a textbook in history class requires general reading comprehension skills and an understanding of academic vocabulary. Students can use skills such as summarizing text or using evidence to support their claims. in written responses to questions.

However, Duke said there are literacy skills that are specific to the social studies content students are taking. In economics, students must be able to understand various graphical representations of data. For geography, they need to be able to read a map.

And in history, students must be able to identify the source of a text and explain why that origin matters.

How historians read documents and how it differs from other fields

“Historians read documents in a very specific way,” said Joel Breakstone, executive director of the Digital Inquiry Group.

Historians want to know who wrote the source material and for what purpose, because these factors determine how the reader will interpret the information. They triangulate information presented in one text with others, “looking for points of similarity and deviation,” Breakstone said.

“And they want to place the text at a specific point in time,” he said. For example, to analyze the Gettysburg Address, students need to understand what was happening during the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln delivered it.

Placing documents in context is essential to history reading, Breakstone said, and how a student might approach it in this class is different than how they might approach it in another class.

Students can analyze the Gettysburg Address “as rhetoric” in English classes, he said. (In fact, the Common Core State Standards suggest that this as a sample informational text that 9th and 10th grade students could work with in ELA.)

But, he said, “it’s another matter to read it as a specific document presented by a specific politician at a specific point in time.”

Teaching students to “get the facts”

The distinction between general literacy and discipline-specific literacy skills can be unclear, and teachers typically tell students to master the former in elementary school, while work on the latter becomes more focused in middle and high school.

To prepare students to think this way in social studies, they need to master reading and writing about the subject, and teachers need to actively develop those skills, says Monica Brennan, a K-5 learning coach at Hillside Elementary School in the Farmington area. in Michigan.

As a former 2nd grade teacher and in her current position, Brennan has used several different curriculums aimed at achieving this goal.

One of the social studies lessons had a lot of reading and writing assignments. In another, students studied the same topic across disciplines in an interdisciplinary unit—for example, learning about rice, exploring what the food means to different cultures, and exploring how seeds grow.

In the reading program she currently works with, some lessons focus on social studies topics. It helps teachers make connections between these topics and the content of their social studies lessons.

“I think there’s no one way to do it. But as an educator, I began to realize that we needed some flexibility in our classrooms,” Brennan said, referring to the distinction between social studies and ELA. “It’s part of my role to help teachers understand that blurred lines are okay.”

Before elementary school students can learn more discipline-specific ways of reading and writing, they need to master the basics, she said.

In one civics class taught by Brennan, students wrote to the local government about improving facilities at a local park. This class was to be preceded by lessons in persuasive writing.

“I give a very clear picture of what it is: you make the arguments, you describe them in detail,” Brennan said. “There are still some ELA activities that need to be done to make the social studies lesson successful.”

By the time students reach high school, they have learned and honed discipline-specific ways of evaluating text and persuading audiences.

When Ziegler, a California teacher, teaches U.S. history, she asks her students to analyze a painting that purports to depict the first Thanksgiving..

“At first the students look at it and say, ‘Wow… this must be it, and they’re all happy,’” Ziegler said. But she encourages students to explore additional questions: When was this painting created? By whom? – it was revealed that it was written in the 1930s, hundreds of years after the event supposedly occurred.

The lesson she uses encourages students to think about how the author’s time and place, as well as his motivations, can influence the source he creates.

Ziegler wants her students to ask these questions of information sources in their lives, whether they’re learning about local ballot initiatives, looking for tips on filling out student financial aid forms or trying to understand headlines about unemployment numbers.

“I hope we give them the skills to say, ‘OK, I’m going to get the facts, I’m going to sit down with people and talk about it and not just see what I find online, but actually make an informed decision,'” she said.