How do you incorporate primary sources and historical evidence into comparison activities? What sources have worked well for encouraging deeper analysis?
How do you incorporate primary sources and historical evidence into comparison activities? What sources have worked well for encouraging deeper analysis?
I feel that before using primary sources to compare it is important to have students practice with less difficult sources and have a good understanding of what we want in their comparisons. The first time…
For my Compare and Contrast activity, I am having the kiddos analyze four different propaganda posters from World War I. I provide guiding questions to help them understand what they read, what they see, what it means, and what the impacts are of each poster/example. Afterwards, they select their two favorites and complete a chart comparing and contrasting them. This will provide for a variety of answers and allow for meaningful discussion at their table groups since, theoretically, each student selects different propaganda to compare and contrast.
I haven't created it yet, but I can repurpose this activity for World War II and then do it again across the two wars and across different countries and their perspectives.
I am in an IB school so on the IB exam the students have to compare and contrast the content of two sources. Throughout their freshmen year, we practice compare and contrast so that they will be prepared for their junior and senior year classes. My favorite compare and contrast that we do is for WWI as it is comparing and contrasting two poems. The first poem is from the beginning of the war and the second poem is at the end of the war. I intentionally do not tell the students about the authors in advance as they often begin to compare the authors (both are men, both are British) rather than the content. By comparing the poems at different time frames of the war, the students are able to see how the views of the war changed and why. I then give the students the authors backgrounds and it makes it clear to the students why the thoughts have changed.
One thing I have found that makes compare and contrast difficult for my IB students is that oftentimes they resort to just summarizing the sources. To prevent this we really focus on the importance of linkage. There is no point quoting two sources if there is nothing that clearly links them together. Another strategy we use is focusing on sentence stems like, "Both Source A and Source B….” or "“Source A claims...as opposed to Source B which asserts….”. I think if students have these ideas in the back of their heads they are more likely to be successful for the test.
First, I start by selecting primary sources with reading level near my students' abilities. Then, I preteach any unique vocabulary. Afterwards, students read the documents with guiding questions and a graphic organizer.
I do not often do this, but I'm trying to incorporate it more. I'm doing a lesson this week where I compare Tsar Nicholas II’s Abdication Manifesto (1917) to Louis XVI’s Execution Speech (1793) . I'm doing this so that students can assess how both leaders justified their rule. I'm hoping to build the bridge on how similar it was.
I have found that charts work better than venn diagrams for this situation, when incorporating primary sources into lessons focused on comparison. The nice thing about charts/graphic organizers is that you can pose the same question but then provide documents that have conflicting views on an issue/topic. It also allows you to be more specific and helps guide student inquiry on topics. We recently used an activity like this for WWI with two different documents/perspectives on support for the war with Germany. It definitely helped students realize that there's not a homogenous sentiment even on such large historical topics/events such as American involvement during WWI.
I go back to Read Like a Historian for comparison of primary sources, they make the sources accessible and they have done the hard part for me. The sourcing information for each document is so helpful and really pushes the student to look at who created the source, and why was the source created. Not all primary sources give this excellent background, or you have to search for that information and it can take a while.
Current sources work better for deeper analysis because students have to have some background knowledge to understand the deeper meaning. For example, when I worked with Imperialism and visual sources, they could understand the French political carton of cutting up China, because they could figure out what countries the people represented. However, using the Cecil Rhodes political cartoon with him standing in Africa with the puppet strings, they struggle because they do not have background knowledge.
What I want to get better at is moving away from such a heavy focus on text sources, because I want to develop their skills with visual sources. I believe if students can get better with visual sources it will serve them better in the future.
This sounds like a great activity!
As with others, I used propaganda posters as a more digestible foray into comparing WWI and WWII. I think it has worked well to this point, especially as students have built content context for comparing these two wars. Given the lack of wordiness, students can focus on symbols and for freshman this has tended to work into being able to elaborate a bit more about the posters and comparing the two wars. I think quotes could be a good next step as well for comparing certain aspects of the war, as the bite-sized nature can allow students to key in on certain words and work to build their analytical skills.
Sources:
Digital Inquiry Group (formerly SHEG) has some good collections of sources, which sometimes include visual sources. The DBQ Project also has some useful collections that go beyond DIG's sources. For visual sources, sometimes I find universities or museums that have relevant collections curated. For example, MIT has a collection of visual images that I use for Commodore Perry and the opening of Japan: https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/black_ships_and_samurai/index.html.