All of the assignments posted thus far have a common thread: they ask students to read primary sources in sophisticated ways. Each requires students to move beyond mere reading comprehension and toward the more difficult skill of historical interpretation, with attention to author, audience, purpose, and perspective. They push students toward historical argumentation and writing and serve as a model for research. In Westhoff’s, Moravec’s, and Davis’s assignments, we see particular attention to reading and crafting an argument from the document projects. Gamber, Lasser, and Rosen have all developed assignments that ask students to take these historical skills a bit farther as a model for research (Gamber and Lasser) and as a stepping stone for considering historiographical issues (Rosen’s second assignment).

What do we take away from these assignments for using WASM? How do the document projects foster critical reading and historical interpretation of primary sources? What difficulties and challenges do you encounter as you teach students to move beyond reading comprehension to critical reading, and toward research and argumentation? How do you overcome these?

From Wendy Gamber:

My syllabi for the two versions of Women and American Politics I taught recently are attached. My students used WASM to locate primary sources and for their research papers. They made greater use of WASM in the Spring 2007 version of the course, which ended in 1920. The Fall 2008 version, given the timeliness of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, spanned the period between the late 18th century and the present. I had a more difficult time steering students toward high quality sources because so much was instantly available to them via Google (not that all such materials are necessarily of low quality). That’s certainly a problem I experience in all my classes–and I suspect I’m not alone. Our library pays millions for excellent electronic databases, including WASM, but students can be reluctant to make the best use of the resources for which their tuition pays.

Wendy Gamber
Indiana University

Gamber – Women, Activism, and Politics in the United States, c. 1789-1920

Gamber – Women and American Politics syllabus-1

Attached is a document I put together for the students in a class I
teach called “Oberlin History as American History.” Each year I teach
the class, we have a new focus for our local history projects. This
year we are looking into women and activism in Oberlin, 1960-1980. We
are interested in exploring both the campus and the town. I have
suggested that my students use the introductions to three “Women and
Social Movements” projects to get a better sense of the social and
legal conditions of the period, and the struggles around which women
organized. These introductions are excellent scholarly essays on
their own. Moreover, in a class where I hope to help my students
learn how to collect and use primary materials to create their own
essays, the introductions model a particularly important kind of
writing.

Carol Lasser
Oberlin College

Lasser Assignment