Teaching the Source: Teaching Critical Engagement with Sources in a Undergraduate Methods Course

Teaching students how to identify and use primary sources for their own research project is challenging due to the breadth of resources and the range of formats available for use. The introduction to methods course, which I teach, is designed to both teach students core skills needed by history majors for their classes and also so they can successfully complete the history capstone project. The central learning outcomes of the course focus on the need for students to critically engage with primary and secondary sources. This outlines the key elements used in this class to teach these critical skills via a series of linked classes which divides the semester into halves. The first part of the semester provides hands-on introduction to find and use a variety of primary sources including newspapers, court records at local archives, using different genres of books as a source type and various collections within the Special Collections Research Center at Mason. Also, we focus on how to read different types of secondary sources effectively. The second half of the class allows students to apply what they learned on their own topics. Students explore the scholarly literature on their topic and then identifying potential gaps to explore their own questions. Students then identify the primary source pool needed to help answer their questions and then share their findings within a common Omeka site titled the “Legacies of George Mason.” In the end, students produce a mini research site and a research proposal which demonstrates that they learned the key skills needed for their capstone project and they are much better prepared to understand the strengths and weaknesses of specific types of primary sources when they complete their general history coursework.