Christopher Saladin and Shana Crosson “Spatial Approaches to the Past: Story Maps in the History Classroom”
I think it is interesting how something as simple as looking at, making, and trying to follow maps could be such a challenge at times for these students. This honestly has made me look back at myself and how I would be in these situations or challenges and I could relate to some of the struggles they were having with reading the maps the correct way.
“The digital nature of the platform encouraged them to dedicate more time to a new style of writing and to build projects with the potential for public communication.” (42)
“The mapping process led students to engage more closely with primary sources, as was the goal of the assignment.” (47)
“It became clear that the difficulty of tracing provenance was not shared equally by all objects. Instead, students found that everyday objects were much harder to locate than exceptional items owned by elite historical actors.” (52)
(Q1) For the first quote that I used I thought this was important because it really lays out the basics and tells the reader what they are trying to do and in this example, it explains that the process they are using and the challenges the students are facing are there for a good reason. The reason being that these challenges are supposed to build on more fundamental areas of learning that will help these students in the long run. I also think that this quote can explain a lot of what is happening in the rest of the article with how the challenges are helping the students.
(Q2) I think that the second quote that I used is helpful to the article because it flat-out says that one of the goals for the students and the instructors is to use these processes to help the students end engage them enough so that they can understand primary sources better in the end, and the way that this article talks about this makes it seem like the students are learning to work with primary sources better and they do not even realize it, which I thought was pretty cool.
(Q3) I added this last quote just because I thought it was an interesting point that they made in the lesson about the students having difficulty with things that did not seem all that difficult and in the quote above it mentions that the students were having a hard time finding “everyday objects were much harder to locate than exceptional items owned by elite historical actors.” I just thought this was interesting because this example made me re-read that study in the article about what they had the students doing and it seemed like an easy thing when you are just reading about it but when put into action I could see where some of the students would have trouble with this activity, but in the end this did prove as a challenge for the students so I think that the main points of the article are hit in this activity.
