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Course, Subject

English Regents, Social Studies, English Language Arts (NYS P-12 Common Core), Literacy in History/Social Studies (NYS 5-12 Common Core)

Document-Based Lesson

Click on the links below to access the support materials:

• Student Worksheets
• Documents - 5th grade reading level
• Documents - 8th grade reading level

Description

These series of activities improve content reading comprehension and critical thinking skills with an engaging array of source documents – including journal entries, letters, maps, and illustrations. It examines European views of Native American and the New World in the Age of Exploration. While it is a rather one-sided account, the documents also reveal a great deal about the cultural "lenses" that the Europeans "looked though."

I developed these activities to assist high school history teachers working with struggling readers. I wanted to show them how they could scaffold learning so that all students could participate in doing the work of historians.

I built the activities around a theme which was central to their curriculum. It was designed as an essential question that would engage students in reflection about how they allowed prejudice to color their perceptions. I selected images which could be “decoded” by students with a minimum of background knowledge.

The source material contains twenty-five documents in text and image formats. I modernized historic accounts at two reading levels – 5th and 8th grade. Each contains the same twenty-five documents. A series of six exercises accompanies the lesson to guide students through the process of extracting information from the documents and constructing their own answers to the essential question.
-Peter Pappas

Essential Question:
What did the Europeans see when they looked at the New World and the Native Americans?

Credits

Provided courtesy of Peter Pappas www.peterpappas.com
For more instructional resources, visit his project showcase at: www.edteck.com
For Document Based Question ideas, visit his website “Teaching with Documents” www.edteck.com/dbq

Related Academic Standards

New York State

RI.11-12.8 Delineate and evaluate the reasoning in seminal U.S. texts, including the application of constitutional principles and use of legal reasoning (e.g., in U.S. Supreme Court majority opinions and dissents) and the premises, purposes, and arguments in works of public advocacy (e.g., The Federalist, presidential addresses).

RI.11-12.9 Analyze seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century foundational U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (including The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address) for their themes, purposes, and rhetorical features.

RH.9-10.3 Analyze in detail a series of events described in a text; determine whether earlier events caused later ones or simply preceded them.

RH.9-10.6 Compare the point of view of two or more authors for how they treat the same or similar topics, including which details they include and emphasize in their respective accounts.

RH.9-10.7 Integrate quantitative or technical analysis (e.g., charts, research data) with qualitative analysis in print or digital text.

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