Sara's Blog!: Importance of Primary Resources

In my future, I believe would like to work as a general education teacher in an inclusion classroom. I am interested in both general education and special education, but I really enjoy the idea of having one group of students who have varying levels of needs. So far, I have enjoyed every grade I work with! Usually, in my practicums, I have been placed with third-grade students, but I really enjoy the younger grades as well. Personally, first and second grade were my favorite to work with, but I think I could enjoy any grade level.

Primary sources are the raw materials of history that were created during the time period of study. Primary sources are important to incorporate into our teaching because they are authentic. Authentic materials help students connect learning to the real world and their own lives. Primary sources are not interpreted by another, so students must engage in inquiry to work through their own understanding. Primary sources open the door to a student's own interpretations. When choosing what primary sources to incorporate in your lessons, you want to be sure that the primary sources fit your lesson rather than trying to fit your lesson around a primary source!

Primary sources include multiple perspectives as students are looking at documents through the lens of the creator. Students can put themselves in the creator's point of view or imagine who the audience may have been and what they may have felt when they saw it. For our advocacy lesson, we plan on introducing the students to José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican graphic artist who created political graphic art, through a read-aloud, and then we will share with them a real primary source of his artwork. Some of the questions we plan to ask are: What do you notice in the background of this photo? Does it make you have good or bad emotions? Why might the artist want you to feel that way? As a way to launch inquiry and have the students think from the perspectives of those around this primary source.

I think that the value of incorporating the Teaching with Primary Sources pedagogy (TPS pedagogy) in our teaching is expanding our knowledge of how to incorporate primary sources. Everyone has so many ideas to share that I think we can use other ideas and modify them to fit our plans.

Here are a few of our other primary sources we are including in our ELED 436 Social Studies Unit on Mexico:

Geography Lesson:

Old Map of Mexico (1846) Current Map of Mexico (1988)