The Persistent Issues in History Network: Using Technology to Support Historical Inquiry and Civic Reasoning

TEACHERS WHO HAVE TRIED problem-based historical inquiry have often found its demands overwhelming. Both teachers and students need a support structure to assist them with the inquiry process. The Persistent Issues in History (PIH) Network seeks to nurture and support a national community of teachers who engage their students in problem-based historical study that promotes competent citizenship. With our partner teachers, we have developed a set of criteria for designing PIH curriculum that supports inquiry into historical instances of fundamental societal questions. Any educator can become a member of the PIH network at no cost by agreeing to the usage/participation requirements listed on the enrollment page. DP Civil Rights In our model Decision Point! (DP) Civil Rights unit, we ask students to visit the United States of the 1950s and 1960s and examine phenomena associated with the civil rights movement to address the persistent problem: What actions are justified to bring about social change? The interactive technologies offered by the PIH Network allow teachers to build conceptual and strategic thinking support into the learning environment to guide students toward deeper inquiry as they explore a problem. Expert problem solvers studying our civil rights question might consider foundational knowledge related to such concepts as equality, property rights, and civil disobedience, as they wrestle with issues and conflicting views surrounding the movement. They might also reflect upon related events such as the desegregation of the military during World War II. The PIH interactive technologies provide students the opportunity to learn to deal with the problem in a way that more closely resembles the thinking of experts. The DP Civil Rights database contains more than 1,400 multimedia artifacts that include newspaper accounts, eyewitness recollections, documents, photographs, and news footage from the civil rights era. To assist learners in situating this mass of evidence within larger historical contexts, we organized the database conceptually and chronologically into three strands that represent the principal change strategies employed by the civil rights movement: legal challenges, non-violent protest, and black power/separatism. Each strand contains seven to eight events associated with that strategy. Each event features an introductory essay, a timeline, and primary documents associated with that event. Within events, we grouped evidence by document type (such as "newspaper accounts") to prompt students to consider the source of the evidence. For example, the legal strand includes milestones such as Brown v. Board of Education, the integration of Little Rock schools, James Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi, and the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965). The non-violent protest strand includes events such as the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins in department stores, the 1963 March on Washington, and the Selma March of 1965. The black power/separatism strand includes information on Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, as well as developments affecting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s, from its early desegregation efforts through its voter registration efforts in Mississippi and Alabama, and its ultimate abandonment of the objective of integration. Concise and easily readable presentations of each development, combined with connections to documents and related events and issues, allow students to obtain information and examine different dimensions of the issue. Hyperlinks connect terms in introductory essays for each event to pertinent primary documents, video clips, glossary terms, or the introductory essays for other events. Such links allow students to encounter primary documents within the sort of framing context that a more expert researcher might possess and lead them to make connections that they might otherwise not consider (Figure 1). …