How do we make sense of contradictory, incomplete, and competing stories and sources? How do we distinguish truth from falsehood? As the US prepares for the 2024 elections, questions like these loom large. And indeed, secondary history and humanities classes are an essential place to engage students about these questions. Making sense of the past and the varied types of sources necessary to do so means engaging history students in disciplinary literacy practices. Likewise, as digital platforms increasingly become primary public forums and spaces, students need to become wiser about the sources, information, and discussions shared there. Literacies are at the core of these connected endeavors and building students’ critical and disciplinary literacies is central to sustaining and extending our democratic project.
In this webinar, Martin will consider how interrogating sources is essential to understanding and engaging both the past and present and explain ways to teach this interrogation in coherent and effective ways. This will involve naming and illustrating core literacy practices, as well as identifying frameworks and tools for teaching those practices to students. Identifying methods and resources to embed these practices over an entire course will be part of the discussion and specific classroom examples will be shared.