By Carly Muetterties
He sounds like he’s nervous.
Why is he yelling?
Why does he keep repeating himself?
My students asked these questions, but lots of times I just can’t get them to engage in history. Why do students have a hard time getting interested enough to ask questions?
I know that my students want to know about some aspects of history, but motivating them to dig into stories from the past often makes me feel like a performer with an audience falling asleep. What do I do to wake them up? How do I turn on the lights? How can I open their eyes?
Inquiry is one way to get students involved. However, I’ve learned that if you just ask students to write an essay on a topic, you will receive a report, an encyclopedia article, or more likely a rehash of Wikipedia. Instead, the C3 Framework wants teachers and students to ask questions, develops claims, and make arguments. So, what’s a teacher to do?
I applied the C3 active approach to inquiry in a lesson about World War II, specifically on Americans’ reactions to Pearl Harbor. The lesson is part of the C3 Teachers project to develop instructional materials for using historical sources from the Library of Congress.
We began the lesson by comparing the shock of Pearl Harbor to more recent events such as 9/11 as well as to more personal events that my students had experienced. We talked about how we each reacted to those events differently. I told my students about my experiences during 9/11. As a high school senior, my friends all assumed we were going to war. Convinced that they would be drafted, we were feared that the worst was to come.
With this opening, we shifted gears. I knew many of my students had taken a criminal justice course focused on the judicial process and the limitations of witness testimony.
My stage was set, lights fading in…
“So, do we think we can write a whole essay about reactions to Pearl Harbor?”
I received an emphatic “NO!” from a few students.
At best, their reaction was “I could maybe write a couple sentences.”
But, I was undeterred.
“Don’t worry guys – I’ve got your back. You’ll be able to soon!”
So, we proceed to launch the inquiry. But, instead of just giving students a summary of how Americans reacted to Pearl Harbor, I set them up with three guiding questions and a collection of interviews with everyday people talking about the Pearl Harbor attack. The interviews were conducted in the days and weeks after Pearl Harbor and are part of the Library of Congress collection After the Day of Infamy: “Man-on-the-Street” Interviews Following the Attack on Pearl Harbor at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afcphhtml/afcphhome.html
Despite my reputation for showmanship (“why yes, I will reenact that event for you!”), students listened to these recording of an ‘actual’ person.
So, how did the students respond?
“He sounds like he’s nervous.”
“Why is he yelling?”
“Why does he keep repeating himself?”
They were hooked. My students didn’t just listen they started asking questions!
“Wait…so these were just normal people? On the street?”
“He sounds like he’s being recorded.”
“No, I mean, like he knows that he’s being recorded and wants to sound a certain way.”
Sometimes our discussions got off-course, but we rarely strayed far from our topic. I encouraged students to ask additional questions of the interviews and to begin forming opinions. Forming opinions constitutes the foundations for the scholarly arguments that the C3 Framework encourages.
It’s not the “required” content that makes history interesting. It’s our approaches history that gets students interested. That’s the way it should be – fostering student questions to better understand how and why things happened in the past.