Eyewitness to the Past: Strategies for Teaching American History in Grades 5-12

By Joan Brodsky Schur

Throughout history, people have often expressed controversial and conflicting interpretations of current events. In this unique resource, Joan Brodsky Schur reveals how compelling and engaging the study of history becomes when students use documents to imagine living through events in American history. Eyewitness to the Past examines six types of primary sources: diaries, travelogues, letters, news articles, speeches, and scrapbooks. Teachers will find interactive strategies to help students analyze the unique properties of each, and apply to them their own written work and oral argument. Students learn to express opposing viewpoints in documents, classroom interactions, and simulations such as staging congressional hearings, elections, or protests. They build crucial analytical thinking and presentation skills. Used together, the six strategies offer a varied and cohesive structure for studying the American past that reinforces material in the textbook, encourages creativity, activates different learning styles, and strengthens cognitive skills. Each chapter provides detailed instructions for implementing an eyewitness strategy set in a specific era of American history, and includes extensions for adapting the strategy to other time periods. In addition to the primary sources included in the book, examples of student work are presented throughout to aid teachers in evaluating the work of their own students. Rubrics and a list of resources are offered for each eyewitness strategy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1571104976
• ISBN13: 9781571104977
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Stenhouse Publishers
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Recommended rubrics and supplementary resources round out this useful supplement.

Written by Joan Brodsky Schur, an American History and English teacher of over twenty-five years' experience, Eyewitness to the Past: Strategies for Teaching American History in Grades 5-12 is an aid for middle, junior high, and high school history teachers. Chapters examine six types of primary sources: diaries, travelogues, letters, news articles, election speeches, and scrapbooks. Interactive strategies for teachers to help students compare and contrast the innate properties of each, as well as create their own works and written arguments, distinguish Eyewitness to the Past. Recommended rubrics and supplementary resources round out this useful supplement. "Another way to help students sort out fact from its embellishment is to carefully watch a PBS or History Channel documentary. We might be looking at a photograph of Frederick Douglass and then a slave cabin like the one he grew up in, but not his actual cabin. Documentaries rarely clarify this issue. When do these substitutions further our understanding of history, and when do they distort history? This is a question worthy of discussion as students bring creativity to their scrapbooks."