Jada Kohlmeier | The Impact of Having 9th Graders "Do History" | The History Teacher, 38.4

The Impact of Having 9^th Graders "Do History"

Jada Kohlmeier
Auburn University

"I just know now that not all historians would agree."

—Joran, 9^th grade world history student

ONE DAY IN A 9^TH GRADE world history class, one of my students asked me a typical question, "Why do we have to know this stuff?" Instead of answering her, I turned the question back to the class. We engaged in a ten-minute conversation about why we require history and several other courses the students were taking at that time. Craig answered by saying, "History is one of the classes that is the most interesting, I just think it's more interesting than math, but I don't see it as one of the most important, I think it's important, but not one of the most important, like I know I'll need the skills I learn in math and you know some of the other stuff so I just see history as more fun and interesting." Craig's opinion drew both oral and nonverbal agreement from his classmates. I was crestfallen. This was not the first week of class. I had been teaching these students for almost six months and, in my attempt to prepare my students for active citizenship, I took pride in lessons I felt blended critical reading, analysis, and writing skills with factual content. However, my view was obviously not translating into their understanding of the subject of history. Craig and his classmates saw history as important for some interesting facts, but not as useful for their future as math or science. Even though I had been making attempts at explaining why and how world history could prepare them to be thoughtful and engaged citizens, if my students heard this message, they did not believe it. Craig's quote is nearly identical to an example cited by Levstik and Barton (2001) in which they quote a 7^th grade student saying, "we're in science, we're not in history" (pp, 31–32). My students' views about history caused me to reflect on my teaching, specifically, what I was lacking in my attempts to teach civic competence through history. This process led me to research historical thinking and design a study in which I exposed my students to the rigors of history. My motives were to demonstrate to them the analytical and interpretive skills involved in the discipline of history, because these skills are consistent with those needed by citizens to evaluate information and to make responsible decisions. I wanted Craig and his classmates to see history as relevant to their futures in the same way they saw science and math.

Theoretical Framework

The National History Standards (1994) state, "Real historical understanding requires that students have opportunities to create historical narratives and arguments of their own" (p. 59). The Standards make clear that history instruction should encourage students to enter knowledgeably into a historical record and bring sound historical perspective to bear in analysis of a historical problem. It should include opportunities for students to be taught to thoughtfully read historical narratives written by others and to analyze the assumptions of the narrator when he searched for and assessed the evidence used to support his narrative. Students should learn to consider both what is included and what is excluded. Students should understand the interpretive nature of history and that historians differ in the weight they give to political, economic, social, and/or technological causes of events, and develop historical perspective by trying to see events through the eyes and experiences of those that were there. Studying the literature, diaries, letters, debates, art, and artifacts of past peoples will engage students in taking on this historical perspective and avoid "present-mindedness" (pp. 59–61).

I not only accepted these goals, I thought I was achieving them in my teaching. Why then were my students not seeing the value of history as I did? What did I need to do differently? In my research into historical thinking, I focused on studies dealing with elementary and high school classrooms. I found considerable research that showed that the process of interpreting and analyzing documents had to be overt: Levstik and Barton (2001) offered numerous examples of historical thinking with 5^th grade students; Davis (2001) studied historical empathy in an 8^th grade assignment; Ashby and Lee (1987) and Yeager (1997, 2001) had been interested in giving students opportunities to work with historical empathy: VanSledright (1999) had attempted to teach historical thinking to 5^th grade students; and Wineburg (1991) had compared historians and high school history students. I concluded that I would have to place my students in the role of historian in an obvious and direct way, and that I would have to tell them what kind of thinking I was expecting. Grant (2001) and VanSledright (2001) had published studies calling for more research into the complex world of the classroom in order to explore the relationship between teacher created activities and the students' abilities and perceptions of historical reasoning. Levstik and Barton (2001) and Wineburg (1991) had argued that the novelty of the experience was one major obstacle for students as they attempted to interpret documents, write a historical narrative, or exercise historical empathy. Based on this research, I decided to take advantage of a unique opportunity to study the consistent use of instructional strategies that might expose a new dimension of the complex relationship between my teaching strategies and my students' historical abilities and their understanding of the discipline of history.

Grant's (2001) study of 9^th grade history students and teachers helped me narrow my focus to the three aspects of historical thinking: historical knowledge, historical significance, and historical empathy. He defined historical knowledge as an epistemological understanding that history is an interpretive discipline consisting of a collection of stories, rather than a stagnant and indisputable narrative. Historical significance was said to involve evaluating the importance of a document or story to the greater historical record as well as appreciating the value of that account by placing it in the broader context of the past. He asserted that historical empathy moved beyond historical imagination to appreciating the perspective of people of the past and attempting to understand their motives, beliefs, and behaviors. I will limit my endeavor to explore these three aspects of historical thinking by focusing on my students' experience writing a historical essay and its influence on their understanding of historical knowledge.

Based on Wineburg's (1994) study demonstrating historians were much more critical and evaluative in their reading of primary sources than were high school students, I was inspired to begin by challenging 9^th grade world history students to read and analyze historical documents more critically. One of my first tasks was to select historical documents that would be engaging, accessible, and enhance the topics we were studying. Because my world history materials seemed to emphasize the male perspective of events, I decided to use personal narratives from ordinary women living during three time periods we would study.

The first set of documents I used was set during the Renaissance period. The book Magdalena and Balthasar: An Intimate Portrait of Life in 16^th Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife, by Steven Ozment provided a rich selection of personal letters Magdalena and her husband Balthasar wrote to each other. Balthasar was a merchant in Nuremburg, and his work required long periods of travel and necessitated communication through letters. I selected four letters written by Magdalena which I felt revealed a side of women during this period missing from our curriculum. They discussed her concern for her husband's safety and health in his long absences, her love and concern for their child, her social engagements, her personal views on ethnic groups, and her partnership with him in the family business.

For a later time period, I chose an interview with Irina Ivanova, a peasant woman who lived in Siberia under Stalin's regime and granted an interview when she was eighty-four. It is one of a collection of interviews conducted by Barbara Alpern Engle and Anastasia Posdskaya Vanderbeck. The book is titled A Revolution of their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History. In her interview, Irina describes her family's granaries being wiped out by both the Red and White Armies during the civil war following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. She describes her father being sent to prison for hoarding grain for his family. She provides detailed descriptions of being moved onto a collective farm and the work she did trying to feed her four children. She shares her feelings of not being able to confess a sin of stealing grain to feed these children to a priest for forty years, something she only did then in secret. Her interview gives a personal depiction of the effects Stalin's policies had on peasants, particularly women.

The final document I selected was chosen to provide not only a historical, but also a cultural perspective on Mao's Cultural Revolution in China. My students struggled greatly to empathize with people who desired his leadership and followed him so devoutly. To explore this problem I chose selections from Red Scarf Girl by Ji Li Jiang. It is her personal memoir written for young adults based on what she remembered about being eleven years old at the beginning of this tumultuous time in China's history. Her family represented the conflicting values and loyalties many Chinese felt at the time. Ji Li believed strongly in the ideals of Mao, but when her family members, and later she herself, became targets of criticism, she began to question the motives and methods of the revolutionaries. I selected one chapter in which she describes the ethical dilemma of having to write criticisms (called da-zi-bao) of her teachers and her aunt. Later one was written about her. I hoped that my assigning this set of three documents for evaluation would oblige students to exercise Grant's (2001) three aspects of historical thinking in that they would be interpreting the historical significance of a woman's story by determining what her document reveals about the time period in which she lives, and also empathizing with her personal situation within the historical context.

For each set of documents, beginning with the Renaissance and ending in modern China, I designed a three-step set of instructional strategies which mirrored the process used by historians and which was intended to lead the world history students into a deeper analysis of primary sources. It was intended to provide a consistent structure for their analysis, yet allow for flexibly and adaptability to different types of sources. The students would create a reading web on their initial reading (Appendix A), discuss the documents in a Socratic seminar, and finally, write a historical narrative comparing the woman's experience to their prior knowledge of the period (Appendix B). Each strategy was designed to build upon the former: the web would introduce them to the documents and provide a framework for the rich data in the text, the seminar would allow for a more in-depth discussion to deepen their understanding of the documents, and the essay would allow them to create new meaning based upon their assessment of the primary sources. My interest, however, was not in the strategies themselves, but in the thinking they might produce if used consistently over the course of a semester. To study my three-step approach, I played the dual role of teacher/researcher and asked: what would be the effect on the historical thinking of 9^th grade world history students of consistently using a three-step instructional approach? In order to give maximum voice to my students and their thinking in the space of this article, I will focus my description and analysis on the relationship between how the students interpreted and understood the story of these women as shown by their historical essays (the third stage of the three-step approach) and the students' understanding of the interpretive nature of history, or their historical knowledge.

Study Design

Participants. For the research study, I selected a purposeful sample of ten students that I felt best represented the fifty-two 9^th graders I had in world history during the spring semester of 2001. At the time, I was teaching in a suburban school district in a mid-western city with a fairly homogeneous population of white, middle class students. As the teacher/researcher and my students' first high school history teacher, I would be exposing my students to the complexity of reading, interpreting, and analyzing historical documents in a formal way. As far as I know, this was my students' first exposure to historical perspective taking and analyzing the authenticity of historical documents and narratives. To create my sample of ten students, I selected five boys and five girls that represented the spectrum of ability and motivation across my two classes of world history.

Data Collection. My study generated three distinct, yet interrelated categories of data. First, the students' work: 1) reading webs, 2) transcribed tapes of Socratic seminars, and 3) the historical narratives they wrote to demonstrate their attempts to understand historical thinking. Second, my research log included notes I kept each day during which I planned or used a strategy as well as notes to myself when reading and evaluating their work. Third, the students' meta-cognition: 1) "historian journals" in which the students talked to me about their thought processes with each of the strategies and 2) a group discussion at the end of the course with the ten students in which they shared with each other and me their thoughts and reactions to their semester of "doing history" (Levstik & Barton, 2001).

Inquiry Tasks. I based these tasks on the realization that reading historical documents is the best exposure to the "strangeness" of the past (Wineburg 1989). The language, the subject matter, the writing style, and the expressions demonstrate better than anything else how differently people thought, communicated, believed, and even acted in the past. In order to help the students analyze the documents, I designed a graphic reading guide to help them organize their thinking based on Wineburg's (1994) study explaining how historians read primary documents. To simplify his complex assessment of the historian's thought process, I created a "document web" (Appendix A) that replaced Wineburg's terms with simple, one-word questions:

Wineburg's Model Historians	Kohlmeier's Reading Web Questions
Representation of Text	What? (What is the document describing?)
Representation of the Event	How? (How was the document written?)
Representation of the Subtext	Why? (Why was the document written?)

This document web's purpose was to introduce the students to considering the author's point of view, but was mostly to provide a visual representation of the information they felt was most important about the author's situation. The "what" section of the web would be their first opportunity to make decisions about the most historically significant aspects of the document. I led the students through the process of making their webs in class. With the first set of documents, Magdalena's letters, we did the first letter together as a class with the students each filling one out on paper while I did one on a overhead projector. I then assigned groups of three students the task of completing a web based on the last three letters. They were encouraged to discuss their webs and work together as a group. With Irina's interview, we read the interview together, stopping periodically to add to our webs, then finished the interview with the students working in groups of three to complete their webs. With Ji Li's memoir, we read the memoir together, but they did the web individually with no assistance from me or other students. However, the usefulness of the web was primarily as a preparation for the next step, the Socratic seminar. (Please note that although I focused my research findings on the work of ten students, the exercises they performed were done by the entire class at appropriate times during the year.)

Taking on Historical Perspective. The Socratic seminar allowed the entire class to discuss an essential question designed to encourage consideration of the perspective of each author. The reading guide merely introduced this crucial aspect of historical thinking by asking "how" and "why" the documents were created, but did not encourage a thoughtful consideration of the author's perspective. The Socratic seminar style of discussion encouraged participants to "seek deeper understanding of complex ideas in the text through rigorously thoughtful dialogue, rather than by memorizing bits of information" (Murphy 2000). The format we followed was for the class to sit in a large circle with name tags and the document and their reading webs on their desks. I always opened each seminar with a question. For the three seminars the questions were: 1) Do you think Magdalena was happy?; 2) What would Irina say was the greatest contributing factor to her suffering?; and 3) Was Ji Li a true revolutionary? The students were encouraged to answer the question based on the text and to use quotes from the text to support their answers. For follow up we worked on asking "questions to expand our understanding" which meant asking seminar participants to explain what they meant by words or ideas, to provide examples, to point out where in the text they had evidence to support their claims, and the like. The seminar allowed me to remind students of their prior knowledge of the time period, to challenge their assumptions about the beliefs and practices of the people under discussion, and to assist them as they decided what information was important and what was inconsequential. These discussion sessions allowed us as a class to explore the texts at a deeper level, adding a layer of perspective-taking to their analysis of the documents.

Writing Historical Narratives Because historians weave stories which are both analytical and creative by using threads from the primary source material, I had the students write a response to a historical question that required them to create a picture of the time period we studied using both the information from the documents and their prior knowledge. An example of a question they answered was: What can we learn about the life and experiences of women during the Renaissance by reading Magdalena's letters? (Appendix B & C) In order to prepare their essays, I worked with them in class on an outline. I asked them to consider a sub-question, was Magdalena unique or typical for her time period? They would select three topics to write on, such as religion, role in business, health, or economic status. I worked with them on writing a thesis statement as the introduction to their outlines, then guided them in forming three paragraphs elaborating their thesis, followed by three quotes from the document for evidentiary support. While grading each essay I underlined all sentences that included analysis. I also selected two or three paragraphs from several essays as examples of analysis and typed them onto overhead transparencies. We evaluated one paragraph as a class as I underlined the analysis sentences on the overhead, and then in groups of three they evaluated the remaining paragraphs. We then compared what they found with what I thought was evidence of analysis. It was my expectation that through writing these essays, students would experience first hand the three aspects of historical thinking described by Grant (2001): historical knowledge in the difficult process of interpreting the documents' information, point of view, and credibility; historical significance while attempting to select what they felt was revealing and important historical information from the documents; and historical empathy as they attempted to understand the point of view of the writers of the documents and these writers' interpretation of the time period in which they lived.

Data Analysis. I used the grounded theory approach to finding meaning in my data (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) which involves reading through the data with no preconceived ideas about themes. In this method the researcher then begins to note topics or emerging strands in the data and continues this process multiple times, checking and rechecking the categories against each other, constantly trying to filter them down to the most meaningful topics. I began to recognize five themes: did the students recognize important information, show perspective, have a view of history, were they self-centered, did they seem to be in past versus the present. As I continued to read more log entries and evaluate my codes, my list changed to these five: I would look for evidence of interpretation; important information; past versus present; empathy; and use of evidence. Eventually, however, I settled on Grant's three aspects of historical thinking: knowledge, significance, and empathy. I felt they captured "important information" and "evidence" in significance, that "past versus. present" and "empathy" could be combined into empathy because the same basic ideas were expressed by the students and that "interpretation" meant the same to me as knowledge meant to Grant (2001).

Findings and Implications

"I see that it's really hard to write history. It's hard to know exactly what was going on just by reading documents so I'll remember that when I read history. It's one person's view of what happened and I'm not saying it's not right, the historians know a lot more about the time and stuff, but I just know now that not all historians would agree."

—Jordan

Jordan, a student with reading and writing challenges, expressed his historical understanding of the interpretive nature of history and the difficult, yet important job of the historian. After analyzing my data, I found that all ten of the students' views of history had changed drastically from Craig's, who had said that history, while interesting, did not teach him thinking skills. The opportunity to create a historical narrative from a complex historical document demonstrated to the students a new understanding of the interpretive nature of history. By comparing each woman's story with the broader historical period, the students challenged their previous understandings, filled in gaps in their knowledge, questioned the perspective of the woman in each document, and asked themselves whether or not her experiences were typical for her time. They ultimately confronted their own preconceived notions of women and their roles beyond the family. In each of the individual teaching strategies, their historical thinking abilities became more sophisticated, but also the three strategies seemed to work collectively to improve their overall understanding of historical thinking more profoundly than would have occurred by only using the strategies separately. For this paper, I will focus on analyzing the culminating strategy, the historical essay, and it's impact on my students' understanding of the discipline of history.

The question I posed for each of the three essays was designed to encourage the students to consider the broader historical context these women could provide (Appendix B and C). With practice, the students became more astute in evaluating what the documents revealed about the time period in which the authors lived. The students moved from selecting important topics from Magdalena's letters and describing her situation to finally comparing the events in Ji Li's memoir to their prior knowledge of the Cultural Revolution in China. This shift from description to comparison demonstrates their increased sophistication in appreciating the broader historical significance of these documents.

In their first essays about Magdalena's letters during the Renaissance, the students determined what they considered to be the major history themes evident in her letters as their important topics and described what she said, but they attempted very little inference in depicting her feelings and actions. They had difficulties comparing Magdalena to the typical women in the Renaissance, which can be attributed to their lack of sophisticated knowledge about daily life in the Renaissance. However, they did demonstrate a capacity for connecting what they knew with her letters. For example, every student felt her strong religious beliefs would be fairly typical because they had studied the importance of religion in politics and art. Several students also decided Magdalena was a Christian because she asked for a New Testament and because they knew most people in Europe were Christians. Three of the ten students chosen for my study, Chyla, Zach, and Chris, inferred she was probably a Lutheran because she was from Germany and her letters were dated after the Protestant Reformation. They felt Magdalena was a woman of strong faith, which helped her endure many hardships such as the long, frequent absences of her husband as well as the suffering of losing her only son. They also felt Magdalenas's experience with illness and death was common. Another student, Whitney, wrote, "She said that a friend seemed to be passing on every time she wrote to Balthasar. But I think people dying was a part of normal life with all the germs they didn't know to stay away from."

One example of the way in which my students struggled to put Magdalena into the historical context was their uncertainty about her role in the merchant business. It was obvious to me from her letters that she played a prominent role in keeping the financial records and in the distribution of the goods her husband bought while traveling to markets in other towns. This surprised my students and many weren't sure how to categorize this information. For example, Brandon said, "From the letter, we can notice the independence and respect that Magdalena possesses. This is strange, because it is believed that women during the Renaissance are considered inferior to men." This is an example of what Levstik and Barton (2001) said about students making their own meaning from history and the importance of our creating opportunities to encourage more conscientious efforts by them. Another student, Chris, recognizes a substantial gap in his understanding of the time period, which was exposed by Magdalena's letter, but he stopped short of making inferences about what her letter might mean for his understanding of women in general during the Renaissance (Appendix D).

The second set of essays, about Irina's memory of the Russian Revolution, showed improvement by half the students in their attempts to move beyond description to analysis and recognition of Irina' broader historical significance. When compared with their first efforts, there were more attempts to compare Irina to other peasants, but a disappointing lack of this analysis at times. One student, Whitney, demonstrated what almost half the students recognized. "It is hard to tell whether or not all the peasants have a strong religion just because Irina has one. She went to a community church so obviously enough people had interest in a place for worship or else a church may not have been built." Brittany's insight into the relationship between the Soviet government and the Russian peasants demonstrated a strong attempt on her part to appreciate Irina's historical perspective. "Irina's family was impartial to the fate of the government. Her family supplied both the Red and the White Army with food and shelter, and still remained unopinionated. From her opinions you get the impressions that maybe peasants had no input in the government, therefore no matter what they did, it was out of their hands."

One example of the weakness in the students' comparison of Irina to other peasants was that even though we had discussed Stalin's literacy programs for peasants in the unit, they did not utilize that prior knowledge to evaluate whether Irina was unique or typical of other peasants. Irina describes trying to attend classes but because of her responsibilities to the collective farm and her family, being too tired to concentrate and able only to attend sporadically. Most students included this information in their essays as an example of the lack of education of all Russian peasants instead of recognizing that Irina was probably an exception, instead of the rule. This failure revealed their struggle to read the text as a historian, constantly "measuring" it against their prior knowledge (Appendix E).

In their final essay, the students demonstrated a significant improvement in consistent attempts to compare Ji Li's experience with other people during the Cultural Revolution. Brittany said, "I can tell that not all the students wanted to write da-zi-bao. For example, Ji Li was speaking to her friends telling them that she couldn't think of anything bad to write about the teachers." One student, Bob, wrote, "Chairman Mao used the da-zi-bao to get people to uphold revolutionary discipline." He recognized Ji Li was struggling to think of something to write and assumed other students would have struggled in the same way. "It may have just been her that felt this way, but then one of their friends Zhang Ji also could think of nothing to write." Chyla wrote, "Ji Li describes her grandmother living in constant fear that the Red Guard would be at their home when she came back from a quick errand. Life became depressing and lonely. Ji Li shows that clearly by the words she uses and how she describes home and school, a total turnaround from the beginning of her story. However, some of these new laws don't seem to be a problem for the common people. But other laws many seem to question. This leads to the idea that maybe not all fully supported this new system." Clearly, my students recognized why Ji Li's story could be significant in revealing a richer aspect of this period of China's past (Appendix F).

The students' essays showed an increased comfort in and understanding of their role in interpreting the documents. They gradually moved from choosing information they felt described Magdalena and occasionally mentioning the broader context, to a sincere, conscientious effort to explain how Ji Li's experience could teach us about life during the Cultural Revolution. Throughout the documents, the students showed a greater capacity for using prior knowledge to consider the viewpoint of the authors of the documents and an increased appreciation for the distinctive nature of past periods.

In addition to the data available from the students' essays, I also could use two valuable aspects of mega-cognition demonstrated when the students wrote in their journals and discussed together the process of writing the historical essay and how doing so impacted their view of history. In the case of Magdalena's letters, Jenna, Brandon, and Brittany admitted having difficulty in knowing what to write about, so they had to keep rereading the document to find out "what Magdalena went through" (Jenna). Eric, Chyla, and Jenna all said the essay-writing process helped them identify with the role of the historian much more strongly. They felt they better understood what a "historian has to go through to write a book" (Eric) and "what historians have to look for in finding information" (Jenna). Commenting on their second attempt, Chris and Whitney are good examples of how the students began to discuss their difficulties in comparing Irina to other Russian peasants. Chris felt writing the paper "really made me think about what peasants as a whole, not just Irina, would have had it like. It helped me understand what we can learn from this interview about people other than Irina." Whitney agreed, "Writing this paper made me understand Irina's life most because I had to prove how life was different, not just read it."

The students' final attempt using Ji Li's memoir demonstrated the most improvement. Bob and Chyla provided the best examples of insights into the comparison of their document to their prior knowledge. Bob said, "I think I've changed the way that I write my paper. I tried to think like, okay, what did I learn about the Chinese Revolution because of Ji Li? I feel that it is important that you stay as close to the document as you can." Chyla felt as she was writing her paper that she began to see the similarities and differences between Ji Li and the other people of her time. She continued, "By these historical papers, I have learned how to prove my case, which will help me later in school as well. Good topics can either make or break your paper. Being a historian is a lot of hard work, but once you do it, it seems worth it!"

At the end of the semester, I talked with small groups of the students in my class about the overall experience of the semester and how they felt after their experience with historical thinking. Because I wanted to know if they could articulate the skills necessary for a historian, I asked them if they could describe what they learned by reading and analyzing the documents. Eric said, "I learned to question a lot. Before I just kind of would look through them, but now I'm looking for controversial questions and questioning the person who wrote the document." Brandon added, "I don't think you should ever see history as written in stone." Hartzler-Miller (2001) claims that when students are asked to grapple with the same tasks as historians, their view of the discipline of history will be altered. My students seemed to experience this shift, but they also revealed a discomfort with their new view of history. Chris said, "I don't think it changed the way I see history. I have a better understanding of history and what historians do, but I don't think it changed the way I thought about it. The stuff that we went over and talked about in our papers and stuff, I didn't know about so I got a better understanding of the time and what happened back then." Brandon came back to his point, "I'm not saying you should disagree with a work and not do it and get a bad grade, but I think I know history was written by someone and it's from another person and not as if Time Itself came down and wrote it." Jordan continued, "I see that it's really hard to write history. It's hard to know exactly what was going on just by reading documents so I'll remember that when I read history, it's one person's view of what happened and I'm not saying it's not right, the historians know a lot about the time and stuff, but I just know that not all historians would agree."

These students support what Levstik and Barton (2001) believe is critical to historical understanding, that history is interpretive and explained through narrative. I hypothesize that playing the role of the historian several times helped my students understand the complexity of interpreting a person's story. They demonstrated to me a sincere desire to be true to the women they were portraying, while recognizing their own limitations in fully appreciating what the author experienced. Their understanding of the interpretive nature of history moved from novel excitement to a more mature appreciation of the role they themselves played in writing essays telling a woman's story with a strong desire to be true to her. However, this new understanding of history did not diminish their respect for history. Chris, Brandon, and Jordan all made careful comments that indicated a continued trust of history. They recognized that their understanding of history was enhanced because they had come to appreciate the difficult task of making a historical argument. Such comments suggest a reluctance to become cynical about historical narratives, even though they recognized the historian has a point of view that should be considered when reading historical information.

Conclusions

"I realized to the historian anything is possible and everything is essential."

—Chyla

By these words, Chyla expressed her realization that the historian plays an important role in the interpretation of history and, in writing history, no detail, perspective, event, or fact should go unexplored. She appreciated the complexity of the discipline in a new way and her view contrasted completely with the comment of Craig's with which I began this article, a comment in which he saw history as a collection of knowledge, but not important for teaching thinking skills. My study demonstrated that students can gain a new appreciation for the interpretive nature of history, which Grant (2001) calls historical knowledge, in three important ways. First, in using these strategies, my students demonstrated an understanding that historical events impacted individuals in personal ways. The requirement to write a historical essay in which they had complete control over the decisions about what topics would be important, gave them a sense of ownership and attachment to the women about whom they were writing. As was evident in the quotes by the students, they began to strongly consider the points of view of the women as they decided what events and issues were important to them. They had an opportunity, in powerful ways, to become acquainted with a real person who experienced the time periods we studied. I was impressed by the pride they took in portraying these women's stories as accurately as they could. I think one very important point in this journey with them was to watch them move from merely finding the topics and issues in Magdalena's letters that matched their prior knowledge, to their more sophisticated efforts to compare Irina's and Ji Li's situations with others during that period. What my students did not do, and what historians repeatedly do, was to fill in gaps in their prior knowledge with the documents. I wonder what improvement I might have seen in them if we had done even one more set of documents, or worked together for another semester. I was able to see remarkable improvement in one semester, but how long does it take to get students to begin seeing historical documents as missing links in the historical record?

The second shift that occurred in my students' thinking was that they saw that the events of history impacted individuals in different ways, which caused them to see history as a collection of multiple stories. In the first set of documents, they were focused on Magdalena. They asked to read letters from Balthasar (which were not there) because they had difficulty inferring what he might be like from her letters. The same was true with Irina. Even though Irina mentions other people in her family and community often, the students were very focused on her experiences and made very few and feeble attempts at considering how she might or might not have been typical. It was with Ji Li's memoir they began to consider all her classmates' points of view and how that might shed light into the broader context of Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. However, it took two attempts by me to get them to compare Ji Li's experience to their prior knowledge. In this and in other aspects of the assignment, I was consistent and without this consistency, I'm not sure I would have ever gotten them as far in their analysis as I did. With practice in the essays, they began to be more comfortable with the format and my expectations, but with this type of writing being so new and sophisticated, we had to make progress slowly.

The third and final change my students experienced was having their perception of what a historian does become real. They now understand that the historian plays an important role in interpreting documents and selects information to shape a historical narrative. Before having been given the responsibility of telling a woman's story themselves, and supporting their inferences with evidence, they saw history as a static story of facts that were not to be questioned. They saw history as written by "Time Itself," to quote Brandon. They now appreciated the interpretive aspects of writing and telling history and this will help them as readers of historical information as well as consumers of the media.

I was pleased to have Brandon come in my room one day after school and borrow a news magazine from me. On his way out, he turned and asked "Ms. Kohlmeier, is Newsweek a liberal magazine?" I asked him why he thought this. He said, "I've been reading articles on President Bush for three weeks in a row and every one has been critical. I was just wondering if they were liberal." We entered into a discussion about how it might be interesting to read an issue of two different magazines the same week and compare the tone of the articles for criteria of liberal and conservative. I asked him what made him suddenly notice this. He said, "All this work we've been doing with these documents has changed the way I read everything." I could not have been more pleased. This was the goal of the entire process. I was not teaching my students historical thinking and careful analysis of historical texts to train them to be historians, but rather to be future citizens. I felt strongly that the skills learned in evaluating bias and credibility, considering perspective in a text, and writing an interpretation based on comparing sources had been excellent training for civic duties in a democracy. I can't say if all my students left my class with this newly found sense of critically analyzing the news media, but Brandon certainly did and that inspires me to continue studying this relationship between historical thinking and civic competence.

Appendix A

Reading Guide for Historical Documents

Good reading is about asking questions of your sources. Even if you believe you can't arrive at the answers, imagining possible answers will aid your comprehension. Reading primary sources requires that you use your historical imagination. This process is all about your willingness and ability to ask questions of the material, imagine possible answers, and explain your reasoning. This reading guide is designed for you to organize your thinking on paper so we can both evaluate your progress. It was designed from a research study on historians and how they read historical texts.

Appendix B

Guide for Response to a Historical Question
Ji Li's Memoir

Once a historian has read and evaluated historical documents, the next stage is for them to present that information to the general public. This brings a good deal of responsibility to represent the information as accurately as possible. Having thoroughly read, discussed, and contemplated the interview with Irina, you should answer this question: What can we learn about the lives of the Chinese people during the Cultural Revolution through Ji Li's memoir? You will need to select what you find to be the most significant pieces of evidence from the chapter to explain your position. Remember a historian must be true to the documents so you should refer to the memoir extensively. Below is a suggested format for your response:

Section 1: Your answer to the question based upon the letters.
Choose aspects of Ji Li's memoir you think provide insight into the lives of the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. Include the evidence you think best captures their situation and is of significance to us historically. What information does she provide that we can generalize to other Chinese people? What information is unique to her situation? What information in the interview is consistent with what you know about the Cultural Revolution and Mao as a leader? What information is new to you?

This section should be organized as follows:
     Introduction—thesis statement which answers the historical question and lists your main topics.
     A paragraph for each topic of her life you will include and support with evidence from the interview. Discuss the limitations of her interview as well. See the questions in the above paragraph.
     Conclusion—restate the information you covered and tell us what these documents mean to us historically.

Section 2: Explain your experience in historical inquiry during all three stages.
How did each stage of the historical study influence your ability to interpret Ji Li's memoir: Web, Socratic Seminar, and Writing the Paper. Mainly focus on how your third attempt compares with your first two. I want to know how you felt about the experience, the strategies you used in each stage, successes, struggles, excitements, frustrations, etc. What has this semester's experience meant for you as a student of history?

Appendix C

Grading Rubric for Response to a Historical Question
50 points

Evidence from documents used in response	Thorough	Adequate	Limited	Poor
Main subject clearly communicated	4	3	2	1
Uses evidence from documents for support	4	3	2	1
Evidence selected was important	4	3	2	1
Clear understanding of limitations of evidence	4	3	2	1
Ability to take on perspective of author
Captures voice or tone of the documents	4	3	2	1
Understands how the document was created	4	3	2	1
Understands why the document was created	4	3	2	1
Understands limitations of document	4	3	2	1
Ability to put the documents into the historical period
Analyzes how the evidence in the document is or is not consistent with prior knowledge of the time period	4	3	2	1
Demonstrates ability to empathize with author of documents	4	3	2	1

Total points _____ (40)

Point Average (Total Pts/10) _____

Grade % (100) ______

4.0 = 100%	3.5 = 90%	3.0 = 80%	2.5 = 75%
2.0 = 70%	1.5 = 65%	1.0 = 60%

Appendix D

Samples of Paragraphs Written for Magdalena's letters
Evidence of glimpses of analysis but mostly description and summary

I have selected Brittany's essays as what I feel is a typical glimpse into the progression in writing I observed in my students. In Brittany's first attempt at interpreting what Magdalena's letters might reveal about life in the Renaissance for women, we see mostly description with a few attempts at analysis. Usually that analysis is immature and not supported with textual evidence.

Appendix E

Samples of paragraphs written for Irina's interview
Evidence of little analysis and mostly description and summary

Most of Brittany's essay is descriptive, with little analysis, but she does get to it in one paragraph. She has made strides writing transitional sentences, something I stressed and modeled with each essay. I was disappointed she did not compare Irina's educational experience with their prior knowledge. We had discussed Stalin's literacy programs, yet she assumes Irina's inability to take advantage of the literacy programs meant all peasants were illiterate. I would have liked to have seen her at least consider whether Irina's experience might be typical or an exception.

Appendix F

Samples of paragraphs written for Ji Li's memoir
Evidence of much more consistent analysis

Brittany is now consistently comparing what she read in Ji Li's memoir against itself and against her prior knowledge. She is comparing people within the memoir for their motives and feelings about the situation, which is a new step in analysis she had not achieved before. In the previous essays she might compare the woman to her prior knowledge, but was not really seeing other perspectives within the document with which to compare the author. She has now reached a more sophisticated level of reading and analysis.

References

Alpern Engle, B., & Posdskaya Vanderbeck, A. (1998). A revolution of their own: voices of women in soviet history. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

Ashby, R., & Lee, P. (1987). "Children's concepts of empathy and understanding in history." In C. Portal (Ed.), The history curriculum for teachers (pp. 62–88). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Falmer Press.

Barton, K. C. (1996). Did the devil just run out of juice? Historical perspective-taking among elementary students. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, New York, NY.

Barton, K. C. (2001). A picture's worth: analyzing historical photographs in the elementary grades. Social Education, 65(5), 278–283.

Barton, K. C., Downey, M. T., Epstein, T. L., Levstik, L. S., Seixas, P., Thornton, S. J., et al. (1996). Research, instruction, and public policy in the history curriculum: a symposium. Theory and Research in Social Education, 24(4), 391–415.

Barton, K. C., & Levstik, L.S. (1998). It wasn't a good part of history: national identity and students' explanations of historical significance. Teachers College Record, 99(3), 478–513.

Britt, M. e. a. (1994). Learning from history texts: from causal analysis to argument models. In M. Britt (ed.), Teaching and Learning in History (pp. 47–84). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates publishers.

Davis, O. L. (2001). In pursuit of historical empathy. In O. L. Davis, E. A. Yeager & S. J. Foster (eds.), Historical empathy and perspective taking in the social studies. (pp. 1–12). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Downey, M. T. (1995). Perspective taking and historical thinking: doing history in a fifth-grade classroom. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco.

Downey, M. T., & Levstik, L. S. (1991). Teaching and learning in history. In J. Shaver (Ed.), Handbook of research on social studies teaching and learning (pp. 400–410). New York: Macmillan.

Foster, S. J. (1999). Using historical empathy to excite students about the study of history: can you empathize with Neville Chamberlain? The Social Studies, 90, 18–24.

Foster, S. J., Hoge, J. D., & Richard, H. (1999). Thinking aloud about history: children's and adolescents' responses to historical photographs. Theory and Research in Social Education, 27(2), 179–214.

Foster, S. J., & Yeager, E. A. (1998). The role of empathy in the development of historical understanding. The International Journal of Social Education, 13(1), 1–17.

Gagnon, P. (1989). History's role in civic education: the precondition for political intelligence. In W. Parker (Ed.), Educating the Democratic Mind (pp. 241–262). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine.

Grant, S. G. (2001). It's just the facts, or is it? The relationship between teachers' practices and students' understanding of history. Theory and Research in Social Education, 29(1), 63–108.

Hartzler-Miller, C. (2001). Making sense of "best practice" in teaching history. Theory and Research in Social Education, 29(4), 672–695.

Jiang, J. (1997). Red scarf girl: a memoir of the cultural revolution. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

Levstik, L. S. (1986). The relationship between historical responses and narratives in a sixth-grade classroom. Theory and Research in Social Education, 14(1), 1–19.

Levstik, L. S. (1989). Historical narrative and the young reader. Theory Into Practice, 28, 114–119.

Levstik, L. S., & Barton, K. C. (2001). Doing history: investigating with children in elementary and middle schools. Malway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Levstik, L. S., & Pappas, C. (1987). Exploring the development of historical understanding. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 21(1), 1–5.

McKeown, M., & Beck, I. L. (1994). Making sense of accounts of history: why young students don't and how they might. In G. Leinhardt (Ed.), Teaching and Learning in History (pp. 1–26). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Merriam, S. B. (1998). Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc.

Merryfield, M., & Subedi, B. (2001). A global education framework for teaching about the world's women. Social Education, 67(1), 10–17.

Murphy, J. (2000). Professional development: Socratic seminar. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Office of Education.

National History Standards Project. (1994). National standards for United States history: exploring the American experience. Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools.

National History Standards Project. (1996). National Standards for History, Basic Edition. Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools.

Ozment, S. (1986). Magdalena & Balthasar: an intimate portrait of life in the 16^th century Europe revealed in the letters of a Nuremberg husband and wife. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Seixas, P. (1995). Conceptualizing the growth of historical understanding. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), Handbook of Psychology Education. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sexias, P. (1994). Students' understanding of historical significance. Theory and Research in Social Education, 22, 281–304.

VanSledright, B. A. (1996). Closing the gap between school and disciplinary history: historian as high school history teacher. In J. Brophy (Ed.), Advances in Research on Teaching: Teaching and Learning History (Vol. 6, pp. 257–289). Greenwich, CT: Jai Press.

VanSledright, B. A. (1999). On the importance of historical positionality to thinking about and teaching history. International Journal of Social Education, 12(2), 1–18.

VanSledright, B. A. (2002). Confronting history's interpretive paradox while teaching fifth graders to investigate the past. American Educational Research Journal, 39(4), 1089–1115.

Wineburg, S. (1991). On the reading of historical texts: notes from the breach between school and the academy. American Educational Research Journal, 28(3), 495–519.

Wineburg, S. (1994). The cognitive representation of historical texts. In G. Leinhardt (Ed.), Teaching and Learning History (pp. 85–135). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Wineburg, S. (1999). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(7), 488–499.

Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: charting the future of teaching the past. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Yeager, E. A., & Foster, S. J. (2001). The role of empathy in the development of historical understanding. In O. L. Davis, E. A. Yeager & S. J. Foster (Eds.), Historical empathy and perspective taking in the social studies (pp. 13–20). Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Yeager, E. A., Foster, S. J., Maley, S. D., Anderson, T., & Morris III, J. W. (1997). Why people in the past acted as they did: an exploratory study in historical empathy. The International Journal of Social Education, 13(1), 8–24.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.