TEACHING PORTFOLIO: MEGAN THOMPSON
REFLECTION
Reading and listening to secondary social studies experts regarding historiography motivated me to redouble my efforts in the classroom to help students develop discerning thinking skills. In world history, my goal is to help students think more deeply about the popular culture that is so intrinsic to their lives through a film analysis. In years past, I struggled to find a way to help them analyze, but Doran's suggestion of utilizing Loewen's ten questions for secondary-source analysis will provide the scaffolding that students need to better evaluate the movies they select.
In government classes, hearing fifteen different headlines about the same event ultimately helped students feel that reporters from major newspapers are doing a fairly consistent job. However, this made me wonder if perhaps the better assignment would have included asking students to look up information on Trump's State of the Union without guiding them to particular news sources, helping them to critically evaluate whichever source they personally find trustworthy. In this case, ironically, I assumed that my news sources are the same as my students, making some of the same mistakes as historians do when neglecting to consider the impact of their personal cultural lens.
HIST 694: ALTERNATE
PLAN PAPER
Secondary Source Artifacts and Reflection
READING RESPONSE
Sam Wineburg, Carole Hoefferle, Matt Doran, and Kyle Ward all espouse the importance of analyzing secondary sources for historiography. After reading and watching their books, articles, and videos, respectively, I worked to re-prioritize this work in both my world history and government classrooms. Considering historiography is a higher-level thinking skill helps students develop critical consumption and evaluate the validity of sources that they encounter on a daily basis. In my reading response, I consider their suggestions for developing these skills in a high-school classroom.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION
Students in world history select a film that they analyze for historical accuracy, audience, and editorializing. We vote as a class to choose a film to analyze together, serving as a model for their work, and then students individually select a historical film. Their work not only considers what is well represented in the film and where its inaccuracies lie, but they also consider why those inaccuracies exist by researching the film's target market and studio incentives.
CLASSROOM APPLICATION
To continue with critical analysis of secondary sources, following the State of the Union address, students work in pairs to analyze a major news source's reporting of the events. They analyze the source's headline for word choice and focus, identify which parts of the speech they chose to report and what, if any, subjective interpretation the reporter includes. Ultimately, students draw conclusions regarding whether they believe that the source had a political slant in its reporting and why that might have been the case. This reinforces Sam Wineburg's cautionary tales regarding the danger of accepting sources at face value and the importance of considering the interpretive nature of secondary sources.
