History of Reading News. Vol.XXI No.1 (1997:Fall)
by JUDITH WALTER

Consider the Source: Historical Records in the Classroom, by the State Archives and Records Administration, State Education Department, Albany, N. Y. : University of the State of New York, 1995, reprinted in 1996. Pp. 146. Illustrations, appendices. $10.00.

This intriguing manual is preaching to the converted in the case of this reviewer, who still recalls after 25 years the dusty, but thrilling, experience of sitting in the Salem, Massachusetts town hall, gingerly scanning huge tomes of the town's seventeenth-century records--in search of apprentice indentures for a master's research project. Unfortunately my New York State elementary and high school instructors (even most in my undergraduate college) chose to teach me history through the tertiary sources of textbooks and the secondary sources of historical articles and monographs. Rare was the professor who even assigned readings in a compendium of historical documents.

Now the State Archives and Records Administration of the New York State Education Department wants to provide richer learning experiences in the state's classrooms through the use of historical records from the students' state and local communities. To say their 1995 manual, Consider the Source: Historical Records in the Classroom, offers a "treasure trove" of assistance to primary and secondary instructors in a variety of disciplines is more than a cliche--it is simply true. The audience for the book directly comprises teachers and "records custodians" who work with them--librarians, archivists and those in business and government whose job it is to oversee repositories of all kinds of historical records; indirectly, the students in New York State classrooms are the intended beneficiaries. However, the principles and guidelines offered here, as well as some of the very records used as models, transcend state and national borders and present pedagogical insights for instructors on all levels.

Consider the Source is divided into four sections: (1) a concise discussion of what constitutes historical records, along with a cogent rationale for their use to enhance learning and skills development; (2) clear, precise suggestions as to where instructors can find teachable historical records; (3) an eight-step practical guide for bringing historical records into the classroom, covering such topics as how to have students work with the records, how to adapt records to the class and the curriculum, and how to assess the outcomes of these learning experiences through exams with document-based questions; and (4) over 100 pages devoted to repro-ductions of various samples of historical records along with custom-designed lesson plans and worksheets for use on either the elementary or secondary level.

These last, constituting the strongest and most useful part of the manual, were created by two veteran, award-winning social studies teachers, Susan Puglia Owens and Thomas E. Gray; both evidently have substantial experience in and enthusiasm for the skillful use of historical records in the classroom. Employing New York State records, they have produced carefully-developed lessons to be used, without much modification and without regard for geo-graphy, by teachers who are perhaps unfamiliar or less comfortable with the use of historical documents. Some examples: the l860 Census of Mortality for two upstate towns, one including the notice of the deaths of John Brown and his family; an 1874 petition from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to the House of Representatives in pursuit of women's suffrage; a 1902 excerpt from a l6-year old girl's diary; a World War I letter home from the white officer in charge of a black regiment known as the "Harlem Hellfighters"; a school district's cafeteria menu for a week in the middle of World War II; a Civil War broadside; criminal dockets; and photographs.

Moreover, these examples provide fine models for the imaginative development of other lesson plans by instructors from a range of disciplines (not just social studies, but also mathematics, art, language arts, science and health) who use documents and resources from their own communities or areas of interest.

While much of the basic information on the "whys" and "wheres" and "hows" of historical documents, or primary sources, might appear obvious to the trained historian, the overall presentation, nonetheless, might well prove valuable to many educators. Graduate assistants in history and education and inexperienced college faculty will find direct assistance in using primary source materials in interesting, useful ways. The manual will also be of interest to remedial or developmental reading instructors in senior high school or first year college, especially those seeking to broaden the background information and promote the learning motivation of their multicultural classes, often comprised of various groups of nontraditional students. Even experienced teacher trainers, historians of reading or of education might exploit these thought-provoking models as they design lessons to enrich their basic "Foundations of Education" or "History of Education" courses in order to challenge their first or second-year college students with the critical analysis of historical documents.

A few minor weaknesses ought also be cited. The tone of the introductory materials at times sounds a bit too much like a civics text promoting "citizen development," perhaps reflecting the manual's state-bureaucratic origins. And scant, overly-sanguine attention is given to the (sometimes thorny) issue of gaining permissions to use resources that are not public nor readily able to be reproduced. Finally, the authors devote merely a paragraph or two to the use of new learning technologies as a means to infuse historical documents into coursework. For example, mention is made of the possibility of scanning onto floppy or CD-rom disks some of the documents which are discovered and perceived to be "teachable." What is mysteriously absent in this 1995/96 book is any reference to the Internet or the World Wide Web as a rich source of a myriad historical documents that are already available for classroom use or for supplementary research.

JUDITH WALTER, professor of developmental reading at New York City Technical College, CUNY, holds an M.A. in History and a Ph.D. in Educational Administration. She is author of Learning History, a study guide in American history published by Harcourt Brace.