Archives and ‘Active Learning’ in the history classroom

Shivangi Jaiswal

Introduction
“The relationship between archives and the school system, especially at the secondary and post-secondary levels, is immensely important and needs to be cultivated as the seedbed for deeper appreciation of the kinds of sources that will illuminate the past and the importance of preserving them.” Craig Heron.•

A variety of digitized archival materials has made it possible for school teachers to incorporate primary sources into their history lessons. However, the availability of the sources is only one part of the story. The question is: how should archives be included in a teacher’s lesson plan? This article engages with this question through an insight into the teaching practices and reflections on ‘pedagogical experiments’ that I undertook while using archival sources for high school children. Giving children a hands-on experience in critically evaluating primary sources allows them to actively engage in the learning process.* Furthermore, using primary sources for teaching children is not only a fruitful intellectual exercise but also an effective educational tool – a strategy that caters to the requirements of children with different levels of learning. This pedagogical approach also requires building a relationship between archivists and history educators, as underlined by Craig Heron in the above quote.

Using archival sources in the classroom
The use of primary sources is not merely a ‘strategy’, but a process that involves step-by-step guidance to drive a critical analysis of primary sources. It is only through the systematic and guided use of primary sources that children can be encouraged to ask probing questions. At the outset, it is crucial to set forth a working definition of primary sources for children and explain what differentiates them from secondary sources. Setting forth examples such as newspaper clippings, speeches, official documents, letters, political cartoons, memoirs, diaries, and other materials makes the children familiar with diverse kinds of primary sources. Designing a follow-up activity to indicate (with justification) whether a source is primary or secondary has proven to be effective. In order to demonstrate how using multiple sources can lead to different viewpoints, I begin with two simple questions: What happened in the school last week? What is the evidence you have to support what you are saying? Listening to various versions of the story about what happened just a week ago and how each student selected a topic to discuss that was unnoticed by the others introduces children to the fact that various viewpoints or explanations exist for events and processes that have occurred in the distant past. Yet, assessing historical perspectives and sources necessitates a rigorous methodology.

Archival sources cannot be used in their existing format for educational purposes. Before using a source in a lesson, one needs to ‘prepare’ it in a manner that is accessible to children of different age groups. For instance, giving extracts from the sources instead of the full document, breaking down the meanings of difficult words in brackets, adding a line or two as a caption to the source and/or the author, and briefly stating a common thread that ties the different sources together make archival sources more intelligible to children. Subsequently, it is crucial to provide children a source analysis worksheet with questions that encourage them to examine the source critically. For instance, what type of document is it? When and where was it produced? Who created or published it? Who is the intended audience? For what purpose was it created? Do you think this source will be valuable to a historian? Why/Why not? What is the subtext of the document? What are the limitations of the document?

The history curriculum in the International Baccalaureate programme, from which I draw my classroom teaching experience, is premised on critical reading and evaluation of primary sources. A key strategy for learning critical analysis of the sources is the OPCVL method which is an evaluation of the origin, purpose, content, values, and limitations of the sources. This is one of the fantastic methods for incorporating primary sources into a teaching strategy. In some of the source-based classes, children not only enjoyed analyzing sources, but they were also enthralled by the concept of preserving old documents. During our lessons on the Partition of British India, a few students expressed an interest in preserving the papers left by their grandparents or recording their memories.

Striking a balance between ‘content’ and ‘skills’
My experience using primary sources in the classroom taught me a valuable lesson: one’s lesson objective must be very clear while using sources in history classes. The objective may change depending on several factors, ranging from the topic of discussion to the specific skills that children need to learn in history to an argument or perspective that the teacher wants to float or the practical constraints of the curriculum and the lesson time. Nevertheless, a careful selection of the archival sources is essential to creating a history lesson plan.

For me, the nuances and perspectives of history I want my students to understand are more important than the topic I want to teach through the sources. My selection of sources is therefore driven by the different viewpoints that they demonstrate. However, there are also classes when it is teaching children the skill of reading subtext that affect my choice of the sources. Teachers must therefore consider: when should specific types of sources be introduced during a lesson?

The classes based on sources had a pattern that I noticed: without any prior knowledge of the context, children found it challenging to engage with the sources. As a result, it is crucial to design lesson plans that strike a balance between the knowledge of the content and the skills required to evaluate archival sources. Here, the term ‘content’ refers to the overarching concepts or the big ideas underlying a theme, the chronology, and the context of the topics of discussion. Some of the skills that facilitate a critical analysis of archival sources include critical thinking skills (reading sources against the grain or evaluating the values and limitations of a source), investigation skills (identifying credible sources and making connections across different viewpoints), and writing skills (paraphrasing the key arguments of the sources, etc.).

Therefore, planning assessments with clear instructions that encourage children to think critically, formulate arguments, and support them with relevant evidence is important. The journey to creating such assessments was indeed long. One of the assignments that was successful was the one requiring children to maintain a research journal with detailed directions for conducting a historical investigation – identifying relevant sources (digital archives), evaluating, comparing, or contrasting them, and writing a report based on their reading of the sources.

Possibilities and challenges
The use of archives in history lessons provides students with a variety of learning experiences. That is, diverse learners have the opportunity to actively participate in class by interacting with various types of archives (visual, written, and audio). For instance, when teaching high school students about the critique of capitalism, political cartoons were significantly more effective than lecture-based methods. Not only did I find it fascinating to observe how children responded to various sources, but I also found it interesting to see how they learned. Although there were students who preferred reading written sources, for many students, visual sources made more sense. Through group projects involving the analysis of primary sources, students not only learn to actively engage in historical inquiry but also collaborate with their peers. Furthermore, such tasks enable children to be receptive to different viewpoints and recognize that there are various approaches to studying ‘our pasts’. The skills children develop in their history lessons for analyzing primary sources also prepare them to critically navigate information across multiple media in the real world.

Although using archives offers many opportunities for active learning, there are still some challenges associated with this pedagogical strategy. The difficulties of finding and identifying relevant sources with a time constraint for lesson planning have been a persistent problem. Although schoolteachers (with access to good internet connectivity) have easy access to virtual library collections, these resources are restricted to histories of specific nations (such as the U.S. and Western European nations) and historical themes (for instance, the Industrial Revolution, World Wars, etc.).

It has been difficult to teach Indian history lessons using available (online) archival sources. Although my research experience in modern history made the process of identifying primary sources relatively handy, finding relevant sources across themes and time periods for teaching Indian history has been challenging. These difficulties were clearly visible in some of the pedagogy workshops, where teachers complained that several digital archives on Indian history are either scattered or beyond the scope of their knowledge and accessibility as school teachers. Therefore, a pedagogical shift in history teaching also requires a changing role for the institution of archives in reaching out to a wider audience, as underlined by Craig Heron in the opening quote of the article.

Another major challenge shared by fellow teachers has been identifying primary sources that ‘fit’ the curriculum. One needs to remember that ‘primary sources can’t just be “tacked on” to an existing curriculum; they must be seamlessly integrated into the curriculum.’• Often, demands of the assessment methods and curriculum limit one’s experimentation with archival sources. Designing research-based projects for children using archival sources could be one way to work around these constraints. During the pedagogy workshops, educators also shared the need for professional training to be able to use primary sources in their history classes. These challenges necessitate bringing teachers together on a common platform to collaborate on building a library of published archival sources that history teachers in various schools can use.

Conclusion
The ‘experiments’ with using archives, as discussed in this article, echo my pedagogical progression from ‘explaining’ a historical narrative to ‘listening’ to children’s interpretation of primary sources and ‘crafting’ a narrative with them in the history classroom. A parallel and more subtle change occurred from ‘researching’ based on primary sources to ‘teaching’ with primary sources. My interaction with primary sources as a historian was limited to studying them for my own research. Using archives for teaching was indeed an experiment! Unlike research, when one is critically engaging with archival sources at an individual level, teaching requires one to devise strategies for a collective engagement with the sources.

Although there are no set guidelines for using archival materials to teach history in schools, this article brings together some approaches that have proven to be efficient with different groups of children. In a nutshell, the practices suggested in this article aim at facilitating the students to independently navigate through the process of historical inquiry and arrive at multiple interpretations of historical events and processes rather than being ‘taught’ a narrative by the teacher.

• Craig Heron, ‘Archives: Public Awareness and Engagement’, Archivaria, no. 78, Fall 2014, p.149.
  * For a discussion on active learning methods and techniques, see ‘Active Learning’, Center for Teaching Innovation, n.d., https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/active-collaborative-learning/active-learning. (accessed on 4 March, 2023).
• Susan H. Veccia, ‘Primary Sources: Magical Moments of Insight’, in Veccia ed., Uncovering Our History: Teaching With Primary Sources (Chicago: American Library Association, 2004), p. 12.

The author holds a PhD in Modern Indian History from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She teaches History and Theory of Knowledge in the International Baccalaureate Programme at Pathways School, Noida. She also conducts pedagogy workshops for school teachers in collaboration with History for Peace. She has previously worked with the Integrated Labour History Research Programme of the Association of Indian Labour Historians and the V. V. Giri National Labour Institute, Noida. She can be reached at shivangi.jswl@gmail.com.