Building Students' Historical Literacies: Learning to Read and Reason with Historical Texts and Evidence

How can teachers incorporate the richness of historical resources into classrooms in ways that are true to the discipline of history and are pedagogically sound? This book explores the notion of historical literacy, adopts a research-supported stance on literacy processes, and promotes the integration of content-area literacy instruction into history content teaching. It is unique in its focus on the discipline-specific literacies of historical inquiry. Addressing literacy from a historian’s rather than a a literacy specialist’s point of view, this book surveys a broad range of texts including those that historians and non-historians both use and produce in understanding history; and includes a wide variety of practical instructional strategies immediately available to teachers.
History teachers who read this book will receive the practical tools they need in order to help their students reach the national standards for history teaching. With the recent inclusion of a historical literacy component of the English Language Arts Common Core Standards Initiative, this book is also highly relevant to English, language arts, and reading teachers, who are expected, under the new guidelines, to engage their students in historical reading and writing.
Visit historicalliteracies.byu.edu for additional information and resources on teaching historical literacies.

Jeffery D. Nokes is Assistant Professor, Department of History, Brigham Young University, USA.