Reading History: Literacy Strategies Supporting Historical Thinking
Summary Remarks for TAH Summer Institute, August 2009
Peter Thacker and Rich Christen, University of Portland
The mastery of any discipline demands both content knowledge and the ability to do
something with that knowledge—to use it in productive ways. In the case of history,
a skilled professional goes beyond memorization of discrete pieces of information
and constructed narratives. They view past events, people, and issues within their
unique contexts and use these perspectives to analyze and interpret evidence, to
construct cause and effect relationships, and to develop sound historical arguments
that can serve as the basis for real-life decisions. In short, they think historically.
The historians teaching in the TAH Summer Institute will use primary source
documents to increase your knowledge of the causes of the Civil War and to
stimulate your historical thinking about this conflict. History educator Bruce Van
Sledright insists that students at levels are also capable of doing this type of
reasoning, and, in fact the current Washington Social Studies CBA tasks demand that
they do it. But as psychologist Sam Wineburg points out, historical thinking is an
“unnatural act”—one that must be taught.
This is where the Reading History sessions of the TAH Summer Institute fit in. Their
purpose will be to provide you with a toolbox of strategies for teaching your
students to think historically and for developing skills required by the Social Studies
CBA’s. Built on the assumption that effective reading essential to historical
understanding and reasoning, the sessions will combine general literacy strategies
with methods for building specific historical thinking skills. Reading History
activities will include:
• strategies for placing historical documents within their historical contexts
• literacy strategies for increasing comprehension of historical documents
• strategies for drawing inferences and conclusions from historical
documents
• strategies for developing historical questions and arguments from both an
individual document and groups of documents
• collaboration with other teachers to develop a classroom lesson.