Secondary Sources: Providing Opportunities to Engage in Building Historical Scholarship
Secondary sources provide historians and other learners with the intellectual capital of scholarship that exists about a topic up to that moment. These sources are the product of primary source and/or secondary source analysis, and often a synthesis of both. Sam Wineberg makes it clear throughout chapter 3 in Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) that even as historiography (the study of historical thinking about a topic) shifts, and different narratives or positions in the history of history ebb and flow, it is critical to encourage anyone engaged in historical inquiry to consult a diverse set of historians’ work. A complete historiological picture of a topic or event is extremely difficult to attain, but it comes closer only after consulting a variety of secondary sources especially if those sources are allowed to contradict or challenge each other. Historians develop new knowledge and scholarship about the past when they allow for synthesis between diverse sources.
Examples of my use of secondary sources placed in context include a culminating experience from a course about Pirates of the Atlantic world in which I offer comparative analysis of two historians’ portrayals of life as pirate in the 1720s-1730s, a series of monthly reviews about different topics and periods prior to, during, and after the American Revolution, and an assignment using one secondary source as the contextual backdrop for another to identify colonial typologies in North America. In each artifact, placing the secondary sources in historical context is an important initial task, so significant space is dedicated to establishing contextual bases. For example, in the comparative analysis of pirate social structure, a baseline of contextual information is included prior to addressing the thesis and subsequent comparison. In each review from the second artifact, the introduction serves to establish the contextual framework from which the review proceeds. The third artifact directly employs a secondary source as a context for analysis and comparison of the New France and Chesapeake Bay colonies. For students in a secondary classroom, secondary sources must be deliberately and effectively framed in context. Providing a narrative will help students analyze and evaluate the writers’ positions. Furthermore, teachers may offer important intellectual context by providing a diverse set of secondary sources on the same topic; each source will reveal unique impressions about the same topic.
Each one of these artifacts has the potential to be seamlessly and successfully integrated into a secondary classroom. Comparative analysis between secondary sources is an important skill that has the potential to reveal historiological shifts in scholarship on any given topic. Allowing students to consult more than one historian’s work on a topic will reveal how scholarship changes over time, and how two people may disagree about historical conditions. Additionally, providing students with the opportunity to review a secondary source against their own beliefs about a historical topic elevates students into higher taxonomies of learning, by providing an opportunity to evaluate information against the knowledge built over time. While analyzing and fully appreciating secondary sources takes practice in order to perfect, a secondary classroom is an ideal environment to provide the scaffolds to begin the learning process. Challenges to successful integration of these and other secondary sources are inevitable, as the skill of discerning all of the factors that may influence a writer’s position develops slowly even with much practice. Nevertheless, as assessing these factors may sometimes challenge even those individuals with much experience in historical inquiry, providing opportunities early in a student’s education will equip that individual for the task in the future.
Secondary sources have immense educational value for historians as they invite critique and opportunities to build on the knowledge of others. For secondary students, sources demonstrate the work that historians actually do: analyzing primary sources as well as the work of other historians in order to produce new knowledge about a topic. Philosophically, secondary sources also require students to evaluate information for its validity, ask questions of the information like its origins or potential biases, and to consider how primary sources support or refute a historian’s positions. When educators ask students to evaluate the thinking of someone else, it helps them to better understand their own learning processes. The value of secondary sources as teaching tools is clear in these ways.
Examples of my use of secondary sources placed in context include a culminating experience from a course about Pirates of the Atlantic world in which I offer comparative analysis of two historians’ portrayals of life as pirate in the 1720s-1730s, a series of monthly reviews about different topics and periods prior to, during, and after the American Revolution, and an assignment using one secondary source as the contextual backdrop for another to identify colonial typologies in North America. In each artifact, placing the secondary sources in historical context is an important initial task, so significant space is dedicated to establishing contextual bases. For example, in the comparative analysis of pirate social structure, a baseline of contextual information is included prior to addressing the thesis and subsequent comparison. In each review from the second artifact, the introduction serves to establish the contextual framework from which the review proceeds. The third artifact directly employs a secondary source as a context for analysis and comparison of the New France and Chesapeake Bay colonies. For students in a secondary classroom, secondary sources must be deliberately and effectively framed in context. Providing a narrative will help students analyze and evaluate the writers’ positions. Furthermore, teachers may offer important intellectual context by providing a diverse set of secondary sources on the same topic; each source will reveal unique impressions about the same topic.
Each one of these artifacts has the potential to be seamlessly and successfully integrated into a secondary classroom. Comparative analysis between secondary sources is an important skill that has the potential to reveal historiological shifts in scholarship on any given topic. Allowing students to consult more than one historian’s work on a topic will reveal how scholarship changes over time, and how two people may disagree about historical conditions. Additionally, providing students with the opportunity to review a secondary source against their own beliefs about a historical topic elevates students into higher taxonomies of learning, by providing an opportunity to evaluate information against the knowledge built over time. While analyzing and fully appreciating secondary sources takes practice in order to perfect, a secondary classroom is an ideal environment to provide the scaffolds to begin the learning process. Challenges to successful integration of these and other secondary sources are inevitable, as the skill of discerning all of the factors that may influence a writer’s position develops slowly even with much practice. Nevertheless, as assessing these factors may sometimes challenge even those individuals with much experience in historical inquiry, providing opportunities early in a student’s education will equip that individual for the task in the future.
Secondary sources have immense educational value for historians as they invite critique and opportunities to build on the knowledge of others. For secondary students, sources demonstrate the work that historians actually do: analyzing primary sources as well as the work of other historians in order to produce new knowledge about a topic. Philosophically, secondary sources also require students to evaluate information for its validity, ask questions of the information like its origins or potential biases, and to consider how primary sources support or refute a historian’s positions. When educators ask students to evaluate the thinking of someone else, it helps them to better understand their own learning processes. The value of secondary sources as teaching tools is clear in these ways.