I think there are advantages in looking at the work of content experts as an outsider. It can be advantageous to distance oneself and use observations from other disciplines to see opportunities and pitfalls. Providing K-12 students to function as historians and use primary sources is a common theme at the history conference I am attending. My science education background encourages me to interpret this charge as a way for history educators to engage students in a ???history lab.??? I asked a presenter about this comparison and my question generated a kind of blank look. I guess thinking in this way assumes others also look at such issues as outsiders.
While I am convinced that primary sources and labs represent a useful way to identify commonalities among certain disciplines, I would not attempt to convince history educators to spend class time having their students working with primary sources based on the success of science labs. Evidence from research on the value of science labs is not impressive. What goes wrong and what are the opportunities for a discipline (history)? I think the problem with science labs is that these experiences are too scripted? The labs become a type of recipe-guided, worksheet-completing, task. There is not enough cognitive engagement. Perhaps there are reasons this happens in science labs that may not apply to history investigations. There can be danger in science labs. There is typically an expected outcome that should be achieved. There can be expense and a desire to contain the cost of repeating failed experiments.
The presenter talked about the value of maintaining the adventure in working with primary sources. This may be a way of differentiating the level of structuring that provides guidance from that which restricts thinking.
Image from Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia collection. “Drumming out a soldier”
