Shaping Historians through Active Engagement with Primary Sources
Inside Saint David’ s Collaboration with The New York Historical
By Drew Burton
Often, we associate the studying of history with the accumulation of factual knowledge. To be good at history, you just need to know a lot, right?
But the real value of studying history doesn’ t lie in the memorization of names, dates, or other factoids. Sure, it’ s interesting to know that Napoleon was once attacked by a swarm of bunnies, or that President Andrew Jackson had a pet parrot who cursed like a sailor. But in a history classroom, that’ s not exactly the kind of learning we care about.
Rather, the value of studying history lies in the thinking— in what educator Sam Wineburg calls a“ historical approach.” In this approach, we teach students a way of thinking about the past that emphasizes critical inquiry and shared understanding.
It can be helpful to think about a historian as a detective. Like a detective who uses clues to solve a crime, historians use evidence from sources to answer questions. They must sort through the evidence, ask questions along the way, choose what is important and trustworthy, and ultimately determine what this evidence tells us about the past.
A cornerstone of this historical approach is active engagement with primary source material,“ original documents and objects which were created at the time under study.” Primary sources serve as an invitation to a particular subject or time period. In order for students to be doing the“ real work” of historians, they need to engage with primary source material. As such, interaction with historical material is a linchpin of Saint David’ s history curriculum, though it really kicks off in earnest with Grades One, Two, and Three.
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