Public+Records+Strategy

Public Records GRADE LEVELS V' 3-5 V' 6-8 I CuLture II Time, Continuity, and Change III PeopLe, PLaces, and Environments IV IndividuaL DeveLopment and Identity VII Production, Distribution, and Consumption The use of public records in research can be a crucial element in leading students to an awareness of events from the past. Students can work with information provided by public records to draw conclusions and make decisions as they learn more about people, places, and events. For example, students who examine public marriage records can begin to formulate questions regarding periods of frequent or few marriages in a particular community. When students use primary sources, they can examine events from materials recorded at the time the event occurred (Epstein, 1997). Students use their skills in problem solving and critical thinking to propose solutions to problems posed by the interpretation of historical documents. Younger students might read land plats to determine the relation of residences and industries to water before creating a model town based on their knowledge. Older students might read founding documents to locate their rights, both stated and unstated. As follow-up, they might create a document explaining citizenship responsibilities, deciding which responsibilities to state and which to leave unstated in the document. • Determine the objective, key concept, and content of the lesson. For example, is the intent to examine the Revolutionary War in Virginia, the Native American resettlement in the nineteenth century, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, or the annexation of Mexican territories by the United States? • Select primary sources that are congruent with the objective, concept, and content; these should be government and commercial documents. Browse the Internet for related newspaper articles and other public documents. The Library of Congress and the National Archives Web sites are good places to begin, because they hold hundreds of thousands of documents. • Set up a situation or problem that encourages students to use these primary documents. • Have students work in small, cooperative groups in examining the document. The cooperative learning strategy is known as JIGSAW (see Aronson, et al., 1978). In this strategy, students work in small cooperative groups to become experts on one topic, piece of information, or perspective. These new experts take their information into new groups comprised of one expert for each topic. • Use guiding questions to encourage students to discuss what they have learned through examining public records and to help them define their position through consensus or dissent. Encourage the development of multiple realistic solutions to the problem. • Bring the solutions to the whole group for furthe! deliberation. Third-grade students are given two different land plats showing lots on two rivers. Students compare the size and shape of the lots and their relation to the river and are given the task of determining which lot would be the best land to purchase. To do this, they look for other features such as water supplies, roads, towns, and islands that might make a difference in the value of their land. Students also examine other symbols on the maps such as the compass rose, surveyor marks, and boundary lines. Finally, students determine what the captions mean. The Virginia House of Burgesses 1775 session journal provides nine enlarged, mounted, and laminated entries from the closing days of the group, including the last one marked "Finis." Intermediate-grade students examine the road to the American Revolution using these materials and find th<U,rather than hearing sweeping radical talk and fiery oratory, the group dealt with day-to-day issues furthering the good of the commonwealth. Students create a time line to sequence these events and identifY the business matters conducted. Next, students discuss who did the work of government once the House of Burgesses dissolved, how those people were selected, and what new jobs the colonists needed to perform. Finally, students share results of their study with their peers using graphic organizers. Students in an eighth-grade class receive enlarged, mounted, and laminated eighteenth-century newspaper clippings from the Virginia Gazette to learn about daily life three centuries ago. Students compare and contrast daily life for the colonists with daily life in the twenty-first century. They also suggest ways the Revolutionary War might have influenced the content of the newspaper. In addition, they examine advertisements, discovering the following: • Advertisements for a horse, a house, land, outbuildings, furnishings, and slaves • Six notices of persons leaving the colony • An announcement about the opening a shop • Notices about five lost horses and a stolen horse • Two advertisements for military horses wanted • Postings about a horse, two cows, and two bulls found • Sheep for sale • Run-away slaves and run-away indentured servants • A William and Mary student notice • Want-ads for a butler, cobblers, metal workers, and weavers • A court of inquiry notice • A notice about an unclaimed parcel • Two estate notices • Two treasury office notices • A free black notice • An advertisement for printing supplies • A ship-for-sale ad • Letters with news Students conclude from their examination of this material that there was a need for skilled craftsmen accompanied by a shortage of labor; they also deduce that some loyalists fled from the colonies, that abandoned and seized property was sold, and that there was a pressing need for horses. Students learn that the revolution intervened in the daily lives of people in many more ways than they first imagined. Middle-school students find similar ideas in documents of the time as citizens attempted to formalize the new government. By codifYing their beliefs, the framers of these documents attempted to disseminate and preserve their values through law. D..sing reinforced and laminated copies of the Virginia Bill of Rights (1776), the Declaration ofIndependence (1776), the Northwest Ordinance (1787), and U.S. Constitution (1787), students locate ideas that are repeated across documents. They use a crayon or dry-erase marker to color code these ideas; when they are finished, they wipe off their marks so that materials can be reused. Students share with their peers what ideas seemed important enough to replicate in multiple documents. Students can make connections to our community today by looking at immigration records. These records can come from traditional ports of entry such as Angel and Ellis Islands, New Orleans, and Galveston or from naturalization ceremonies held in local courthouses. By looking at immigration records, students can plot the numbers of people coming from different countries. They can compare these numbers across decades to see if the country of origin changed over time. They can also compare common surnames to the contemporary phone directories to determine if families stayed in the area or moved to other locations. Aronson, E. et al. (1978). Interdependent interactions and Prosocia behavior. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 12(1), 16-27. Epstein, T. L. (1997). Social studies and the arts. In E. W. Ross (Ed.), The social studies curriculum: Purposes, problems, and possibilities (pp. 137-165). Albany: SUNY. Potter, L. A., & Schamel, W. (1998). Declaration of intention and petition for naturalization. Social Education, 62(7),469-474. Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov National Archives: http://www.nara.gov The Jigsaw Classroom: http://www.jigsaw.org/index.html