Challenges of Critical Literacies in Historical Reasoning

• In Event: Critical Literacies: Investigating Textual Linguistic Representations to Engage Productive Identity Wrestling and Civic Reasoning

Abstract

K-12 public education plays a crucial role in preparing young learners in developing skills, knowledge, epistemologies and dispositions to interrogate civic conundrums; understanding historical examples with which the country has wrestled and how to understand current complexities. Texts (print, digital, visual) provide primary medium for engaging in such investigations.

Critical literacies with historical texts require examination of the rhetorical and linguistic practices and forms of representation conveying point of view and structures of argumentation. While there is substantive attention to tasks students need to evaluate such texts, there is insufficient attention to knowledge, skills, and dispositions required to engage the technical linguistic and rhetorical representations across such texts to comprehend them, as a requisite for evaluation.

This paper presents the design of a digital authoring tool to support close reading and argumentation in history: creation of hyperlinks for background knowledge, notecards for annotation with tags that signal metacognitive attention to why the reader annotates, close reading questions and heuristic organizers that guide students in attending to the kinds of questions historians ask. These heuristic organizers include not only the standard evaluation questions (context, corroboration, etc.), but also questions highlighting how to identify concepts, biases, and events in meaningful ways. Teachers can input their own content, making it adaptable for any history class. The paper outlines the underlying pedagogical model for integrating the tool in instruction, including the logic of organizing text sets and examining sources of text complexity. The history modules focus on complex historical questions around race, class and on-going struggles for equality in the U.S., with the goal of supporting students in wrestling with the complex recurring questions and dilemmas that we face.

Data includes features of the tool, how the tool was taken up in middle and high school classrooms with diverse student populations, and findings from talk-aloud protocols with high school freshmen examining a text set on the fight for women’s rights, given to assess comprehension skills and challenges students face to inform design and supports in the digital tool.

Findings:

• Essentially students do not approach reading historical documents with a historical thinking orientation. They paraphrase and elaborate content to make sense of it ,but rarely address disciplinary focused questions whether reading at/above grade level. The APPARTS1 tool basically introduced students to historical types of evaluative questions, but had limited impact on a small number of students. Results of single reading with the APPARTS heuristic revealed importance of hyperlinks for prior knowledge assumed but not explicitly stated in texts.
• Findings led to expanding heuristic organizers available in the SMD tool to guide attention to rhetorical indicators of point of view, features of concepts and structures of argumentation.

The range of features of the tool students used during implementation were associated with teachers’ conceptions of pedagogical goals (e.g. digital workbook versus springboard for discussion/argumentation).

Significance:

Reading like a historian is essential to critically examine critical civic issues, but requires instruction focusing on structural and rhetorical features of historical texts of the past and the present.

Authors

• Adria Carrington, DuSable Leadership Academy, Betty Shabazz International Charter School

• Susan R. Goldman, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Allison H. Hall, University of Illinois at Chicago