argumentation based on evidence. People have a right to their own opinions,
but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions
not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight. Students who research
both sides will discover which issues and questions facts will resolve, and
which differences involve basic values and assumptions. The students’
positions must then be respected. This does not imply that teachers should
concede the floor or accede to the now fashionable opinion that all points of
view are equally appropriate and none is to be “privileged” with the label
“true.”^12
Teachers do not have to know everything to facilitate independent student
learning. They can act as informed reference librarians, directing children to
books, maps, and people who can answer their questions about history.
Resources already exist that can help teachers teach history creatively, using
primary materials.^13
Perhaps the best resources are right at hand. Students can interview their
own family members, diverse people in the community, leaders of local
institutions, and older citizens.^14 Some history classes have compiled oral
histories of how the depression affected their town or how desegregation
affected their school. Students in a Mississippi high school published a book,
Minds Stayed on Freedom, about the civil rights movement in their
community.^15 Students in a Massachusetts school “became” historical figures
and published their work.^16 For students to create knowledge is exciting and
empowering, even if the product merely gets placed in the school library.
Students might also suggest a new historical marker for their school or
community. Often the most important events go unrecorded on the landscape,
while markers commemorate the nineteenth-century site of the First
Presbyterian Church. What events at a high school were important enough to be
noted on a marker? Which graduates “should” be commemorated? Which made
history, and is a broader definition of “making history” needed? Do the names
of local streets or buildings honor people whose acts we are now trying to
rectify? Mississippi’s Ross Barnett Reservoir, for example, pays tribute to the
racist governor who tried to keep African Americans out of the University of
Mississippi. Who should be honored? Why? How? Raising these questions
leads students to important issues; if their answers are controversial, so much
the better.
Teaching history backward from the present also grips students’ attention.