Elise Fillpot | Bringing History Home: A K-5 Curriculum Design | The History Teacher, 42.3

Bringing History Home: A K-5 Curriculum Design

Elise Fillpot
University of Iowa

I suspect that until more systematic research occurs and additional studies such as this one and those with longitudinal designs begin to populate the literature, we will continue to tinker at the margins of history teaching practice. In the meantime, many of our children will likely miss out on the powerful advantages that those encounters with history can produce. If nothing more, of course, history teaches us that we can choose, if we wish, to have things differently.¹

BRINGING HISTORY HOME, an elementary history curriculum and professional development project, began in 2001. As originally conceived, the project's main purpose was to move history from the margins described by Bruce VanSledright into the mainstream of the K-5 school day. Seven years later, the Bringing History Home (BHH) instructional units are taught in six Iowa school districts, and pedagogical elements of the curriculum are spreading to schools in Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and North Dakota. Nationally, Bringing History Home has yet to have much impact on elementary education. In the schools where it has been adopted, however, it is the center of Social Studies in all K-5 classrooms.

At the conclusion of the Teaching American History grants that supported the project pilot phases, preliminary results from a systematic external evaluation of student learning suggest that the program results in extensive and significant outcomes.² In preparation for future descriptions and discussions of the program's outcomes, this article describes the BHH curriculum and explores how its design was informed by and aligns with theory and research in history education.

Children in the United States study math, science, reading, and social studies in a year-by-year sequence that begins in kindergarten. Encountering ever-increasing complexity in these subjects, children meet these challenges because they have incrementally acquired skills and abilities. In contrast, history is not usually systematically taught in the early and middle elementary grades. The research on teaching and learning history does not justify the delay. Instead, it suggests elementary students are capable of learning historical patterns and sequences.³

The original BHH goals for student learning were motivated by and aligned with the research, but our pragmatic goal to introduce historical inquiry into every elementary grade and classroom in a school lacked precedent. To close the critical gap between what students are capable of learning in history and what they are taught, during the past 6 ½ years, we developed and piloted a curriculum in which regular classroom students in a K-5 elementary institution construct historical understandings. The resulting student learning outcomes suggest that much previous literature on history education has underestimated children's abilities to study history.

BHH consists of two instructional units per grade level. The lessons center on trade books, historic images, documents, and statistics, with activities to engage students in analyzing and synthesizing the information sources. Teachers have continual, free access to the lessons and non-book sources on the project website at <www.bringinghistoryhome.org>.

Unit Topics

The unit topics were originally selected on the basis of various criteria and considerations, with the following being among the most important:

1) Post-Civil War era topics are applicable to almost any community in the U.S., and local documents may be studied in addition to the BHH documents to provide local perspectives on historic movements and events.

2) The first units in kindergarten and 1^st grade focus on students' life histories, the most effective means to teach very young children a vocabulary of history and the general concept of change over time.

3) The topics parallel existing social studies curricula whenever possible. For example, environmentalism is a widespread 2^nd grade social studies topic. Accordingly, BHH provides a 2^nd grade unit on the history of the environmental movement. In another example, slavery and civil rights are often taught in 3^rd grade; BHH's segregation history fills a critical gap between these topics.

4) The units emphasize significant issues and events in political, social, and economic history and they align with Barton and Levstik's rationale for teaching history:

[S]tudents should be exposed to historical topics that force them to consider issues of justice—the impact of racism, for example, or gender roles, dictatorship, warfare, colonialism, economic relations, and so on.⁴

Anecdotal evidence from BHH confirms Barton and Levstik's recommendation that students explore justice-centered history topics to prepare them to deliberate for the common good.

While each of the original units centers on a different major topic in 19^th- and 20^th-century U.S. history, they also engage students in five processes for history exploration: 1) Timelining, 2) Reading for background knowledge, 3) Interpreting sources, 4) Mapping geographic historic information, and 5) Synthesizing various sources to design a narrative. The processes were designed to develop in children a perception of history as multi-perspectival accounts constructed from various sources of information. At each grade level, the five BHH processes are embedded in every unit. Because of this, every year when students engage in a new history unit, they may connect with and extend their skills from previous years.

This principle of continually activating and extending student learning is also embedded in the curriculum history topics. In the interest of helping children connect with and use prior knowledge, the BHH explorations have common recurring themes. Students may inform and expand their understanding of a current topic by making connections with events, figures, and themes they remember from previous units. Immigration and environmental history units in 2^nd grade inform and enrich students' study of Industrialization and Segregation in 3^rd grade, their understanding of Progressive era and Depression era history in 4^th grade, and their understanding of Native American and WWII homefront history in 5^th grade. Industrialization processes and effects are introduced at the earliest level, when kindergarteners compare toys and household implements of long ago and today. Similar concepts recur in more complexity when 2^nd graders examine differences in natural resource extraction methods between long ago and today, and the interrelationship of industrialization and immigration; and again when 3^rd graders study the evolution of late 19^th-century industrialization. By 4^th grade, when children examine popular and government responses to industrial abuses in the Progressive era, they have a strong prior knowledge of industrialization and change over time.

As students progress through the grade levels, they meet on multiple occasions the subjects of Native Americans, immigrants, activists, injustice and hardship, businesses, industries, legislative action to address problems, and African American leaders.

Making use of students' prior knowledge in the earliest grades posed a different challenge to the curriculum design. To connect to young children's memories and concepts of the past, BHH introduces history by connecting it to children's most substantial trove of prior knowledge—themselves. In subsequent units over the years, students explore what daily life was like for children long ago, how their community has stayed the same and changed from long ago to today, and where their ancestors lived before arriving in what is now the United States. As the children delve into environmental history, they learn where household goods and food in their cabinets originate, how those materials were and are gathered, and how agriculture has had an impact on the environment. As they begin to learn about business and mechanization, students experience work on an assembly line in a classroom factory.

Five Student Learning Processes

The five processes that recur in every BHH unit are distilled from the list of Historical Thinking Skills and a similar list by the National Council for History Education titled History's Habits of the Mind. By delineating process skills, the BHH program makes transparent the interpretive, evidence-based nature of history as a complex exploration of diverse sources.⁵ This sort of transparency is essential for K-5 teachers new to teaching history, and often new to the nature of history in general. Elementary teachers typically experience few history courses in their own formal education, and are rarely, if ever, exposed to history as an interpretive activity. By providing lessons in which varied processes for studying history align with specific history explorations, BHH simultaneously introduces teachers to a constructivist history paradigm and provides concrete activities that immerse children in such a paradigm from the beginning. The five processes align with effective practices identified in current research on history education, although the BHH program design predates a number of relevant studies.

Reading for Background Knowledge

Barton and Levstik emphasize the power of narrative to help students understand the chronology of, and actors in, historic events. Affectively, narratives also may engage students' interest and inspire their further study.⁶ Taken together, these narrative elements can provide students a basic framework for understanding a historic period or event and the motivation to investigate various sources to expand, deconstruct, and reconsider that understanding. When we designed the BHH activities, we incorporated trade fiction and non-fiction, primarily in picture book format, to build student background knowledge of history topics and whenever possible chose titles to engage children's empathy or caring for people and situations in history.

In determining how we would approach narrative accounts, several other issues also influenced our emphasis on picture books. An important consideration was our determination to meet student needs at all levels of reading skill. Illustrated books lend themselves to read-alouds that may capture all students' imaginations, and help children who greatly benefit from visual reinforcement of verbal accounts. Read-aloud sessions also provide opportunities for teachers to guide students in active reading techniques such as predicting, questioning, making correlations, and similar strategies.⁷

Secondly, we chose trade titles to help students avoid the perception of history as a singular correct account. By encountering various elements of a topic in various books, we hoped to introduce students to the idea of multiple and varied interpretations even within one type of source. Yet another consideration was our intent to engage student empathy and interest. Textbooks rarely lend themselves to this purpose. Finally and most pragmatically, we did not want to preclude schools with very limited budgets for books and materials from adopting the curriculum.

The original scaffolding for guiding student interactions with the background readings centered on simple question lists. As the curriculum has been implemented in subsequent years and various schools, teachers have aligned their district reading strategies with the history books. Examples of teacher-created literacy strategy alignments are provided in the K-3 units on the project website.⁸

Timelining

Shiny, multi-colored, commercially-produced timelines are often attached to classroom walls. Most of us adults were exposed to and ignored such timelines on a daily basis in one classroom or another during our own school years. Some of us might lament the loss of those shiny lines for the sake of inspired decoration, but few would lament their loss based on their educational value. In BHH, our premise was that the educational value of a timeline lies not in the line itself but in who creates the line, and how they use and invest it with meaning.

Timeline activities in the BHH program align with Alleman and Brophy's 2003 advocacy for using timelines interactively as pedagogical tools.⁹ During the course of a BHH unit, students build timelines as a class and individually. They choose images and documents or create their own drawings to illustrate and represent historic events. They use the lines to contextualize new information from primary sources and books, to establish chronology, to visually represent change over time, and to review understandings of cause and effect. It is intriguing to view student-constructed timelines through the lens of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development. As teachers help students situate on the line historic events, figures, and documents they have studied in various sources, the line becomes a dynamic tool, a feedback loop that both advances learning and records the progression of learning.¹⁰ The timeline that is constructed and examined on an ongoing and systematic basis, throughout a unit and school year, vividly illustrates a child's expanding knowledge and provides visual cues that help students continually activate that knowledge.

Because children's concepts and awareness of time develop gradually, BHH timeline activities begin in kindergarten and first grade with the child's life and with terms such as "long ago" and "long, long ago." Teachers improvise and elaborate on degrees of long ago, relating the terms to immediate family generations. A favorite delineation: Long ago is when your grandparents or great-grandparents were alive; long, long ago was before anyone alive now was born. Because the learning goals in these earliest grades are for children to become familiar with timelines and their construction, and with the concept of change over time, the children's explorations of history beyond their own lived experience are contextualized with a sense of a past before they or anyone alive today was born.

In later grades, classes build timelines gradually, updating and adding events on a daily basis. In considering the evolution of timeline activities in the project, the original curriculum did not prescribe the extent to which timelines are now used in BHH classrooms. Results from pilot classrooms and teacher innovations led to the emphasis on continually displaying and developing classroom timelines over the course of the school year. They also led to the incorporation of timelines in varied formats and for purposes not included in our original lessons.

Interpreting Sources

In an age when the expression "primary sources" is often uttered with de-contextualized reverence by educators, Barton performed a great service for the history education community when he succinctly inventoried seven ubiquitous misconceptions and misbegotten uses regarding primary sources in history teaching. He did not throw the baby out with the bathwater, however; he also identified four ways primary sources can be used effectively to enhance learning. These were to:

Motivate historical inquiry,

Supply evidence for historical accounts,

Convey information about the past, and

Provide insight into the thoughts and experiences of people in the past.¹¹

While the BHH design predates Barton's article, our goals for including primary sources in the program's activities closely align with the approaches he advocates. In addition, we included primary source explorations to help students to develop abilities to learn from various types of evidence and to develop inference and questioning skills.

In his list of misconceptions, Barton refutes that "Students can build up an understanding of the past through primary sources" and says instead that "students' abilities to make sense of primary sources depends directly on their understanding of the contexts in which the documents were produced."¹² Especially during the years when students are forming in their minds a general chronology of pivotal historic events and eras, close attention to context is always an essential component of primary source use. However, this should not preclude using a primary source at the beginning of a unit or lesson to pique students' interest in the unknown. The BHH curriculum uses sources in various ways to motivate and inspire students, to immerse them in events that do not appear in their books, and to engage their empathy for the people depicted and for the people affected by what is depicted in images and written documents. It also considers source analysis as just one piece of a whole, one process out of at least five that help students build understanding.

Identifying appropriate documents is difficult in any grade, and can be especially challenging in K-5. Classroom teachers that participated in the BHH pilot provided feedback on their students' understanding (or lack of understanding) of specific documents and types of documents. In response, we focused lessons on visual images, letters and diary entries, and a handful of laws and amendments written in just one or two sentences.

In addition to the challenge of identifying appropriate primary sources, we also struggled to create or adapt a simple analysis strategy guide for students in middle and lower elementary grades. While 5^th grade teachers preferred guides such as those provided by the National Archives and Records Administration, the lower grade levels needed a simpler format. Again, a pilot teacher transformed the program. Adapting a reading strategy graphic organizer, she used KWL charts to analyze historic images and sources. Because so many elementary classrooms routinely use the KWL process to activate and guide student knowledge, this innovation greatly increased both student and teacher comfort levels with tackling primary source analysis.¹³

Mapping Geographic Historic Information

Maps can play various roles in history explorations. They may be primary sources, secondary sources, or visual organizers. As a BHH strategy, they are constructed to engage students in the geographic context of history. While calling the maps in these activities visual organizers may seem too pedestrian, the terminology conveys a good deal of the student-constructed nature of the mapping activities and the subsequent use of the maps to visualize geographic distributions, migrations, and other historic elements. Like timelines, maps are introduced to kindergarteners by mapping students' own birthplaces and usage is continued in 1^st grade by having students map their classroom and other parts of the school or playground.

In all the mapping activities, learning begins with the topics being mapped. The map itself is not a learning goal in a vacuum, but rather is part of a history exploration that is better understood when its geographic context is considered. Like all the BHH elements, mapping does not stand alone, but is informed by and informs the other student explorations to develop knowledge. The curriculum prescribes the classroom use of a large, laminated, blank U.S. map. Students construct their maps during history units, designing symbolic representations of historic events, biomes, and populations. As they are constructed, the maps represent the intersection of children themselves with the topics they study.¹⁴

Synthesizing Learning to Design a Historical Account

This process may also be described as a unit culminating activity, but it is most effectively interwoven into instruction as a daily process. As a unit progresses, students' understanding of topics develops as they contextualize new sources with previously explored sources and understandings. Teachers typically use the final synthesis as one summative evaluation of student learning. We encourage the choice of various forms by which students can represent learning, such as art, poetry, or a mass communication format. Our rationale for this is student-centered; a culminating activity should motivate student participation, and allowing students to engage in their favorite learning style can be an effective means to that end.

Process Goal Limits

While it is intended to develop student competence in building understanding of historic events and periods from various sources, the program does not explicitly engage students in advanced sourcing heuristics.¹⁵ That is, the lessons do not ask children to compare and evaluate the validity of sources. This limitation was built into the BHH curriculum for two reasons. One of the considerations was teacher-centered. In-service elementary teachers have little time and energy to spare for history professional development, and usually even less formal education of their own specifically in history. It is consequently unrealistic to expect to develop in every elementary teacher the expertise necessary to teach advanced sourcing. More realistically, teachers may be immersed in a history paradigm that aligns with constructivist learning activities already prevalent in elementary classrooms.

Another consideration was student-centered. BHH centers on the premise that student abilities to conduct inquiry must be developed systematically, in a context that from the beginning immerses children in history as narrative that emerges from the exploration of many sources. Consequently, the program activities are designed to help children learn to analyze individual sources for the information they contain, and then combine understanding of varied sources into understanding of a narrative whole. As they master the skills that give them success in this, they learn that history is constructed from various and varied sources, and they develop the intellectual acuity to assess historic accounts based on "the relationship between the kinds of claims made and the types of evidence used."¹⁶

VanSledright's 2002 analysis of historical investigations with 5^th graders informs a discussion of the BHH paradigm by delineating a four-level continuum of student abilities to conduct historical investigation. The first three continuum levels align closely with the underlying skill progression in the BHH activities. In BHH, students first learn to make sense of individual sources by examining and questioning them closely and describing what they see—on VanSledright's continuum, this is intratextual analysis. The next BHH step, in which students emotionally and intellectually respond to the text, corresponds with VanSledright's intratextual evaluation. And as BHH students use knowledge from multiple sources to construct understanding of an historic event or development, they move into what VanSledright calls intertextual analysis. The fourth level on the continuum illustrates the territory into which BHH does not extend; intertextual critical evaluation is the level at which students evaluate source validity, reliability, subtext, and agent intention in order to construct refined interpretations of historic events.¹⁷

While VanSledright's history practices continuum is an insightful description, his categorization of the nature of the levels may be somewhat artificial. He differentiates between the first two levels and the third and fourth levels, labeling the first two as general reading practices and the third and fourth levels as history-specific strategic expertise. VanSledright's suggestion that the processes involved in intratextual analysis and evaluation (or individual source analysis) are not history-specific may not take into account that for children to date, summarize, and predict developments in even a single source, they must possess contextual knowledge related to the source.

This leads to a constructivist history problem along the lines of the chicken and the egg. As Twyman asserts in a study of concept-based education, "Without proper background knowledge, students have difficulty developing the contexts for historical thinking."¹⁸ To teach history authentically, there is a tension between teaching basic narrative stories through which students can make sense of historic evidence, and teaching that history is a process of building narratives from evidence. The BHH curriculum designers originally broached the problem by interweaving activities based on the five history learning strategies in each unit. As students progress through the processes, they alternatively build narrative and concept knowledge, and apply that knowledge to interpret and contextualize original photos and documents.

Teachers implementing the BHH units continued that original pursuit of an effective balance between guiding students to explore pre-existing narratives and to analyze documentary sources. By incorporating literacy, empathy, and inquiry activities of their own design or which they previously used, teachers have developed scaffolding processes that in a number of cases greatly help students understand and bind together various history sources into coherent narrative understandings. In so doing, the teachers bring to the curriculum the role Vygotsky identified as the More Knowledgeable Other.¹⁹ They assess where their students are on a continuum of learning and devise supplemental activities that will increase their prior knowledge and advance their zone of proximal learning.

Knight summarizes a succinct list of effective history instruction components: 1) Engaging content, 2) Emphasis on big understandings, 3) Development of intellectual inquiry skills, and 4) Moral inquiry into human activities.²⁰ When used thoughtfully, the components are interconnected and mutually sustaining. Moral issues, stories of unjust suffering and acts of courage in the service of justice, are often the most compelling subject matter for students, and prepare students to deliberate for the common good.²¹ In a circular fashion, such topics often generate student empathy for historic figures and interest in historic events. Empathy and interest motivate students to participate in intellectual inquiry. Inquiry, when well-directed, helps students develop understandings of big themes. Completing the circle, big understandings often center on moral aspects of human activity, on political, economic, and social developments that impact the common good.

Like Knight, Barton and Levstik emphasize the importance of empathy (or caring) and inquiry in history study. They also identify narrative as a powerful student history "tool," a tool through which students encounter Knight's "engaging content." While these three components—empathy, inquiry, and narrative—may be considered in mutual exclusion, they hold considerable promise to advance student learning when incorporated as the parts of a whole approach to teaching and learning history.²² Just as Knight's components of effective history instruction may be interdependent, so may Barton and Levstik's tools. Narratives may generate student empathy, which in turn motivates students to systematically investigate, or inquire, more about a topic, which eventually expands students' original narrative understanding.

In considering the relative power of the three tools, the guided inquiry activities students use to explore history may be less intrinsically engaging than the emotional response elicited by narratives of history. That is, caring about the topic they study may be a more powerful motivator for students than doing multiple source investigations.²³ On the other hand, investigation can create its own momentum, with student engagement in mystery-solving providing the motivator that makes students care about their study.²⁴ Inquiry and empathy are not mutually exclusive; they may, in fact, be mutually dependent as iterative facets of process and motivation. Mucher uses the phrase "problem framing" to describe the process of creating lessons that incorporate inquiry and empathy. He concludes that "teachers should understand the need to frame the past creatively by proposing engaging, contested, and contextualized problems."²⁵ Such problem framing brings us to the intersection of what to teach and how to teach it.

Because they are transferable, we are sometimes tempted to conclude that historical interpretation skills are more important for children to learn than history events, eras, or developments, but the nature of history is such that its primary elements—content and process—are inextricably bound together. They can be articulated separately, but historical thinking processes are essentially ineffective and their outcomes inaccurate unless they are employed in combination with prior knowledge of historic context. Similarly, understanding the story content of history is contingent on the source from which it is extracted and the skill with which the information is interpreted. Process and content are part and parcel of one another in historical inquiry.²⁶

A 1999 study of student responses to historical photos illustrates this point. The authors asked 3^rd, 6^th, and 9^th graders to interpret a collection of nine historic photographs depicting scenes of segregation and civil rights. The photos were not aligned with any history the children in the younger grades had studied in school. When the children almost universally consistently failed to infer any accurate information about the photos, the authors concluded:

The ability to date photographs progressed with age ... similar results occurred in regard to students' inferences about why a photograph was taken. Age and race related differences were noted, however, in students' ability to draw inferences about the lives of people shown in the photographs.²⁷

While it made little sense for the study's authors to draw conclusions about children's age-related abilities to make inferences about historic photos depicting topics the students had never formally studied, the study inadvertently provides evidence for the interdependent nature of historic narrative knowledge and historic interpretive processes. Asking students to infer information from photos about history topics in which they have no background knowledge is not an exercise in determining age-related historical thinking skills. It is merely an exercise in determining how students use their imaginations to interact with a random picture. Authentic historical inference skills, by contrast, are not used in a vacuum; the degree to which a student can draw accurate and sophisticated inferences is largely determined by the student's knowledge of historic context and detail. When 3^rd graders have studied Segregation and Civil Rights history topics, their ability to accurately infer information from photos related to those topics is incomparably more accurate and sophisticated than 3rd graders with no background knowledge of them.²⁸ In the interpretation of historic evidence, process (the ability to accurately interpret and infer historic information about an image from the past) is inextricable from content (knowledge of the historic context of the image.)

Perhaps counter-intuitively then, a strong case can be made that an artificial delineation of process and content learning goals in history classes is useful, even necessary, to expand the teaching and learning of history as interpretive and evidence-based. History has too often been taught as a static, singular account of the past, devoid of human perspective. In such a paradigm, history is rote memorization of textbook accounts or similarly rote memorization of lecture-delivered accounts. Classroom activities convey nothing of the contingent nature of history, convey none of history's emergence from human interactions with evidence, convey no sign that those pieces of evidence themselves emerge from singular human witness and motivation. In short, traditional lecture- and textbook-centered history does not engage students in the complex processes in which interpretation emerges from individual encounters with evidence. The rote memorization paradigm of history is not perpetuated because teachers choose so, but because it is the only one with which most teachers are familiar. In this context, history curricular materials take on additional importance. Curricular materials that incorporate and make transparent interpretive historical processes have the potential to introduce a paradigm to in-service teachers who would otherwise never encounter history as evidence-based interpretation.

The National Standards for History provides a detailed example of transferable skills for history learning. The Standards, published by the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California at Los Angeles, include 37 historical thinking skills in five categories:

[T]hese five sets of skills, developed in the following pages as the five Standards in Historical Thinking, are statements of the outcomes that students need to achieve. They are not mutually exclusive when put into practice, nor do they prescribe a particular teaching sequence to be followed. Teachers will draw upon all these Thinking Standards, as appropriate, to develop their teaching plans and to guide students through challenging programs of study in history ... It is essential to understand, however, that these skills do not develop, nor can they be practiced, in a vacuum. Every one of these skills requires specific historical content in order to function.²⁹

While the Historical Thinking Skills standards are not explicitly proffered as an instrument for introducing teachers to an interpretive paradigm of history, they may serve this purpose in addition to the stated intent of providing teachers with a resource for lesson and course design.

Conclusions

This discussion of the Bringing History Home curriculum is the natural starting point for describing the project. It is, however, only the starting point. Evidence from the BHH professional development workshops, classroom implementations, and resulting student learning outcomes suggests the program bridges a gap between academic theory and widespread practice in public schools. Viewed through the lens of the quote at the beginning of this essay, Iowa districts that have adopted BHH moved history from the margins to the center of their curriculum. They chose to have things differently.

Notes

^1.� B. VanSledright, In Search of America's Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School (New York and London: Teachers College Press, 2002).

^2.� J. Kearney, E. Lai, and D. Yarbrough, Evaluation of the Teaching American History Project: Bringing History Home II (Iowa City: University of Iowa Center for Evaluation and Assessment, 2007), <http://www.education.uiowa.edu/cea/tah/documents/FINAL.12-20-07.pdf>.

^3.� A cross-section of relevant studies includes M. Downey and L. Levstik, "Teaching and Learning History," in Handbook of Research on Social Studies Teaching and Learning: A Project of the National Council for the Social Studies, ed. J. P. Shaver (New York: Macmillan, 1991); L. Shulman, "Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching," Educational Researcher 15 (1986): 4–14; E. Yeager and O. Davis, "Understanding the 'Knowing How' of History: Elementary Student Teachers' Thinking about Historical Texts," Journal of Social Studies Research 18 (1994): 2–9; S. Greene, "The Problems of Learning to Think Like an Historian: Writing History in the Culture of the Classroom," Educational Psychologist 29 (1994): 89–96; B. VanSledright, "The Teaching-Learning Interaction in American History: A Study of Two Teachers and their Fifth Graders," Journal of Social Studies Research 19 (1995): 3–23; and K. Barton and L. Levstik, Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000).

^4.� K. Barton and L. Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 39.

^5.� Ibid.; P. Knight, "Research and the Improvement of School History," in Advances in Research on Teaching, vol. 6, ed. J. Brophy (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1996), 19–50; P. Lee and R. Ashby, "Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7–14," in Knowing, Teaching and Learning History, ed. P. Stearns, et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2000); J. Brophy, "Introduction," in Advances in Research on Teaching, vol. 6, ed. J. Brophy (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1996),1–18; and K. Roth, "Making Learners and Concepts Central: A Conceptual Change Approach to Learner-Centered, Fifth-Grade American History Planning and Teaching," in Advances in Research on Teaching, vol. 6, ed. J. Brophy (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1996), 115–182.

^6.� Barton and Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good.

^7.� Teachers in BHH pilot schools have aligned history activities with their pre-existing literacy programs. Two of the most high-profile of these programs are the Picture Word Induction Model (PWIM) and Creating Independence through Student-Owned Strategies (CRISS^™). PWIM uses image analysis to engage children in vocabulary acquisition, inductive reasoning activities, and writing. While some researchers consider it a program best-suited to the needs of English Language Learners, BHH teachers in a PWIM school have aligned the model with history resources. Because BHH extensively utilizes analysis of historic images, this was a natural fit. For a description of the PWIM framework, see E. Calhoun, "Designing Multidimensional Reading and Writing Instruction," Teaching Beginning Reading and Writing with the Picture Word Inductive Model (Alexandria, VA: The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1999), <http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/template.chapter/menuitem.ccf6e1bf6046da7cdeb3ffdb62108a0c/?chapterMgmtId=6f95177a55f9ff00VgnVCM1000003d01a8c0RCRD>. The CRISS project centers on metacognition strategies. Because it emphasizes the activation of prior knowledge, the program activities also naturally align with BHH. The Project Criss Principles and Philosophy are available online at <http://www.projectcriss.org/prc/pages/general_info/principles.html>.

^8.� The Project Criss Principles and Philosophy, <http://www.projectcriss.org/prc/pages/general_info/principles.html>. BHH pilot teachers in Washington Community Schools in Washington, Iowa aligned their district literacy strategies with BHH. These alignments are available on the Bringing History Home website K-3 unit views at <http://www.bringinghistoryhome.org>.

^9.� J. Alleman and J. Brophy, "History Is Alive: Teaching Young Children about Changes over Time," Social Studies 94, no. 3 (2003): 107–110.

^10.� L. S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). See S. G. Grant and B. VanSledright, Elementary Social Studies: Constructing a Powerful Approach to Teaching and Learning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) for a discussion of the alignment between Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal development and history education practice.

^11.� K. Barton, "Primary Sources in History: Breaking Through the Myths," Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 86 issue 10 (June 2005), p. 745–753.

^12.� Ibid.

^13.� The KWL chart is a metacognition strategy in a chart format that was designed by Donna Ogle in 1986. The inventories encourage students to activate prior knowledge, generate questions that shape and motivate study, and then connect new knowledge with prior knowledge. The acronym stands for:
��K: students recall what they KNOW about the subject.
��W: students determine what they WANT to learn.
��L: students identify what they LEARN as they read.
��There are many uses of KWL. The above acronym breakout is found on ESOL online, available at <http://www.tki.org.nz/r/esol/esolonline/classroom/teach_strats/kwl_e.php>.

^14.� R. J. Marzano, et al., "Nonlinguistic Representations," in Classroom Instruction that Works, ed. R. J. Marzano, et al. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2001). This chapter inventories research on the efficacy of graphic organizers and aligns it with practical classroom uses.

^15.� VanSledright's In Search of America's Past offers a book-length exploration of engaging students in sourcing articulates an important challenge in teaching history.

^16.� Barton, "Primary Sources."

^17.� VanSledright, In Search of America's Past.

^18.� T. Twyman, et al., "Using Concepts to Frame History Content," Journal of Experimental Education 74, no 4 (2006): 333. Ten years earlier, Brophy observed that several contributors to his edited volume on history education identified the same issue. Student abilities to engage in historical inquiry are "often hampered by students' limited background knowledge." Brophy, Advances in Research on Teaching, 324.

^19.�Simply Psychology online provides an introduction to various facets of Vygotsky's Theory of Social Development at <http://www.simplypsychology.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/vygotsky.html>.

^20.� Knight, "Research and the Improvement of School History."

^21.� Barton and Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good.

^22.� Ibid.

^23.� E. Fillpot, Unpublished results from student interviews in an Iowa 3^rd grade classroom (2007).

^24.� D. Gerwin and J. Zevin, Teaching U.S. History as Mystery, (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).

^25.� S. Mucher, "Building a Culture of Evidence through Professional Development," The History Teacher 40, no. 2 (February 2007): <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/40.2/mucher.html>.

^26.� See S. Wineburg for a brilliant meditation on the inherent complexity and messiness of parsing out the chicken and egg when studying/teaching history, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

^27.� Foster, et al., "Thinking Aloud about History: Children's and Adolescents' Responses to Historical Photographs," Theory and Research in Social Education 27, no. 2 (Spring 1999).

^28.� Fillpot, Student interviews.

^29.� The National Center for History in the Schools, National Standards for History (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1996): <http://nchs.ucla.edu/standards/thinking5-12.html>.

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