History Workshop: Reconstructing the Past with Elementary Students

Children are natural historians. They like to read about old-fashioned times, predict the function of historical artifacts, examine turn-of-the-century photographs, and write stories about people who lived in other times and places. Eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds enjoy the challenge of creating their own historical theories. History Workshop is the first book to describe a process approach to history teaching that builds on children's natural curiosity about the past. Karen Jorgensen bases her work on the sociopsycholinguistic premise that learning history is a language-thinking process in which children create historical meaning as they interact with others. In her book, she describes how children understand history and how she adapts the writing workshop approach to create a studio environment that encourages students to discover and rethink theories as they talk, read, write, and draw. The principles that underlie a studio approach to teaching history are described in the first part of the book. In Part 2, Jorgensen uses dialogue transcriptions and examples of student work to illustrate how she discusses historical fiction to examine issues related to history writing, encourages students to theorize about the meaning of firsthand historical sources, conducts conferences on history writing and history drawing, and develops minilessons to support student writing. The final section provides a detailed and engrossing account of how the author and her colleagues worked with two third graders and two fifth graders to help them discover, clarify, and communicate their historical ideas. History Workshop is an excellent text for preservice teacher education classes in history, socialstudies, and multicultural education. It's also useful as a reference for "content area" reading and writing in general teacher training classes. The book breaks new ground for teachers of history: a rich and readable blend of theory and practice, filled with insights about how children develop historical literacy and how teachers can support this process in the classroom. A bibliography of historical photographs is included.