“Several students expressed that a spatial perspective on history revealed weaknesses in the secondary scholarship with which they worked.” (Saladin and Crosson, p. 7)
I thought a noteworthy claim this article made was the potential for Story Maps and other similar resources to allow students to find gaps in the existing literature, or even just in their own perceptions of the scholarship. As I am learning, secondary source research is vital to our understanding of and ability to properly analyze primary sources, and using tools like Story Maps to have our students identify complexities and weaknesses in their knowledge base on a subject can be beneficial in the process of collecting and analyzing evidence. A spatial perspective is only one of many perspectives that can give students a new lens through which to view a particular historical topic, and the author’s use of the many different ways Story Maps enhanced students’ understanding of the material proves it to be a perspective rich in educational potential!
“… the students recognized the public potential of Story Maps. Whereas they may never look at a paper again after turning it in, a story map felt like a finished product that could be shared to a wider audience.” (Saladin and Crosson, p. 8)
This claim makes a great point for the potential of a tool like Story Maps to get students thinking about presenting a subject to a wider, public audience, but it has me wondering what we can do in the classroom to foster intrinsic motivation in our students to explore a topic, whether for a high-stakes assignment like the Story Maps one or not, on a more publicly applicable scale. Of course, an assignment like the ones focused on in this article can produce student work that elicits pride in the thoroughness and universality of the wok, but I’d like to know more about how we can get students thinking this way on lower stakes, everyday classroom tasks in history. Do assignments like this one produce this kind of complex thinking, spatial or otherwise, across the curriculum, or do they just produce it within the assignment?
“Whether an intentional goal of the instructor or not, the spatial lens brought by the mapping process was central to how students rethought their approach to historical research and writing.” (Saladin and Crosson, pp. 21-22)
This is a point made by the author that’s worth exploring further! Even if it wasn’t a main goal of the instructor, it’s important to take note of the benefits the students got from employing just one new perspective. Using maps yielded more thorough, complex work, and according to the author, assisted students in rethinking and expanding their historical research and writing skills. I’d be interested to explore what other kinds of tools and resources we could use to get students thinking about new ways to approach historical questions!
