From the Archives to the Classroom

Con Diaz, CTL McDougal Teaching Fellow

 

            When I visit archives, I often find myself asking one question over and over again: What can I do with this document? I am a historian of technology with a special interest in the law, so this question is often the first step in thinking about how people, institutions, technologies, and legal systems have interacted with one another. In a broader sense, this question is a prompt to find new ways of thinking about historical phenomena, evidence to question my own hypotheses, or analytical structures to streamline my questions and answers.

This question is also central to how I teach my students the basics of historical work. For example, for one class meeting my students read a court decision from the 1970s, a critique by a legal scholar written in the same year, and a recent historical account of the decision itself. My goal for the class was to study legal scholarship and court decisions as historical documents. Our class began with a discussion of the content and structure of the decision and the critique. We then moved on to study the historical contexts for these documents and the scholarly intervention that the historian’s account was making. We ended by thinking about how we could use the students’ observations to illustrate or enrich the historian’s argument. 

            These students mined historical scholarship to find the language and structures they needed both to articulate their own observations, and to assess the scholarly significance of their claims. This lesson is central to two of my goals as an instructor:  I want to teach my students how to question narratives and arguments using historical documents, and I want them to mine the historiography for lessons on how to focus and articulate their own questions. In short, I hope to teach them that finding an answer to that simple question—what can I do with this document?—can lead them to a thrilling intellectual pursuit.

            The value of this question as a teaching tool transcends the historical classrooms into which I have brought it. In a gender studies or science and technology studies class, it would enable students to think about the relationships between theory and evidence. In disciplines such as English or literature, it will prompt them to think about what they can do with texts beyond summarizing plots and highlighting metaphors. In the end, thinking deeply and often about that question will teach them a valuable lesson: new ways of thinking are some of the most valuable things they can take with them from a humanities class.