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Why teach with documents?

When we ask students to work with and learn from primary sources, we transform them into historians. Rather than passively receiving information from a teacher or textbook, students engage in the activities of historians making sense of the stories, events and ideas of the past through document analysis. Primary sources motivate students and pique their curiosity about history. Seeing familiar document formats like letters or photographs encourages students, while unique document characteristics capture their attention and prompt them to investigate further. Documents involve students in the process of historical inquiry when they ask questions, discover evidence, and participate in debates over interpretation. Teaching with documents can engage students. They begin to see connections between past and present. Documents with signatures or notations personalize history. Primary sources give students opportunities to empathize with figures of the past and to understand history from varying perspectives. The varied nature of primary sources also provides students the opportunity to connect their historical understanding to other subject areas like geography or math, to a collective national heritage, and to their modern lives. Primary sources often inspire students because they provide new avenues for learning about the past. Documents can illustrate abstract concepts or help students make connections between seemingly unrelated information. Students can begin their historical studies through graphical materials that they may be more comfortable with photographs, maps, and posters. Through their analysis of a variety of documents, students learn to find multiple perspectives in history. Primary sources guide students to the realization that all accounts of past events are subjective. Following practice with primary sources, students begin to recognize bias and question where historical information comes from. Students learn not only to question the reliability of sources but to reference multiple sources for information while doing historical research. Primary sources encourage higher order thinking. As historians, students can link documents to see cause and effect relationships, fit historical pieces together to understand a whole story, understand historical events in context by relating primary sources to mathematical data or geographic locations, and assess primary sources as evidence to formulate interpretations about the past.

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