Written by:
Dr. Janet Bixby, Assistant Professor of Education, Lewis and Clark College
Dr. Cara Ungar, Director of Education, Oregon Historical Society
District and statewide curriculum expectations in the Social Sciences are ambitious. Secondary sources, such as textbooks, are easily accessible and allow classes to cover topics efficiently but they are often bland and impersonal. While primary source documents (such as those available on-line at the Oregon Historical Society) can certainly add intrigue and color to textbook approaches to history, incorporating them into one’s teaching may seem like a daunting challenge.
The Oregon History Project (OHP) Learning Center offers strategies that can be easily adapted by K-12 teachers. The unique benefit of the OHP Learning Center pages is that they offer approaches to primary source documents that can breathe life into the study of history. In addition, the OHP Learning Center references OHP historical records that can help students transcend many prevalent and deep-seated misconceptions about historical events by using primary source documents in their classrooms. For example, students can examine a nineteenth-century letter written from the perspective of settlers who wanted Siletz Indians removed from “their” land. After reading this letter, the Indian removal movementbecomes, for students, no longer an anonymous historical movement, but a “personal” story with real people speaking. This viewpoint, can lead to research into other perspectives: questions about whether or not the letter was biased, why it was written, how effective it was, how accurate, what responses it would elicit, etc. This line of questioning makes it clear that there is not one “true history” from one “true perspective” and opens up the possibility for students to discover their own capacity for critical engagement. This goes to the very heart of what history is all about.
Bringing together the work of teachers, scholars, and museum educators, the OHP Learning Center offers pathways into critical engagement. For example, students can read a late nineteenth-century newspaper editorial in support of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Then they can link to secondary source materials which offers context for the newspaper editorial, in addition to related primary sources suggesting alternative points of view such as a photograph of Chinese Workers Preparing Salmon for Canning at a cannery near Astoria or a Telegram to Governor Sylvester Pennoyer requesting the protection of Chinese immigrants against violence. Discovering and reading provide students with a sense of how historic belief systems influenced how people acted in a time different from their own. Extending the knowledge gained in the examination of viewpoints in historical context, allows for an assessment of how current day beliefs may shape their own actions and interpretations.
The Learning Center encourages students at all levels to ask questions. Students could be asked, for example, to examine an 1851 map of Southern Oregon and Northern California Gold Regions. Rather than just “looking at” the map, students are asked to imagine about who were the mapmakers? What were the social conditions within which they lived? How did their maps function? How did they represent land, people, transportation, and belief systems? Whose perspectives did the maps portray and how might they have validated or invalidated the perspectives of others? (This particular map was created by a California civil engineer to show gold seekers where gold had already been found.) It then becomes possible to have students think about how the map might have been different if it were created by different people for different purposes. What if it were created by farmers? Ranchers? Native Americans? In other words, students are asked to recognize that history is a human construction and that historical interpretation is not only tentative, but also intentioned: that one needs to bring persistence and imagination to historical inquiry.
The OHP Learning Center was created to enable teachers and students of Oregon history to develop a meaningful connection to the past. It is an effort to help users build their own understanding of their relationships to Oregon history. We hope that you use these pages to engage more deeply in the fascinating story that is Oregon. To do so is to gain a more accurate sense of the nature of history itself.