Two experienced American history teachers, Karen L. Jorgensen and Cynthia Stokes Brown, developed a method for teaching history in the public school system that allows students to study history in a workshop environment where they can actually practice being historians. They believe that students have to actually ‘see and do something and figure out for themselves... ’ Teachers can’t just ‘stand there and tell them’.2 Their ideas apply to adult literacy programs as well as to the school system.
The idea is that history is not just facts. History, written by historians, is a series of stories told by people with different viewpoints. These people interpret the facts of the past according to their own beliefs. The historical writer ’s view of history is never objective. Jorgensen and Brown ’s history workshops expose students to a variety of first hand sources and encourage them to compare, analyze and think critically about what they see, hear and read, and then to produce a piece of historical writing themselves. They believe that students learn history better if they are ‘given a chance to make sense of the past, to create their own meaning, to write and construct their own beliefs about history ’ rather than to focus on learning a lot of facts.
People develop an understanding of history by making guesses, predictions or theories about historical artifacts, stories, photographs, diaries or films. As they discuss their ideas with others and learn more about a topic, they either confirm their predictions and theories or develop new ones, based on new information. This is the way professional historians work. History workshops give people the opportunity to work as historians rather than having to accept someone else’s theories and predictions.
Adults, just as profoundly, need to ‘see and do and figure out for themselves’. Adults bring many past experiences, opinions, beliefs and values to the literacy class, all of which help them interpret new information in personal ways.
The History Workshop Method could complement an adult or intergenerational oral history project. Use it when you want to make links to written histories. Use it when you want a more structured way to explore research sources. Use it to compare the words of historians, explorers, missionaries and traders with the oral stories you hear from the Elders. Use it to encourage critical thinking and analysis during the research phase of the project, to inspire excitement about history, and to help literacy group members make sense of their own lives from a historical perspective.
Learners can then express their understanding of historical themes and build their literacy skills through writing a piece of historical fiction. (See Historical Fictio.n or ‘Faction’ in the Writing Projects section)