The SCIM-C Strategy: Expert Historians, Historical Inquiry, and Multimedia.

Abstract

Understanding history is a challenge. In order to provide teachers with a tool that can help students acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to interpret primary sources and reconcile various historical accounts, we developed the SCIM-C strategy. Grounded in research on teaching and learning history (1) and building upon Riley's layers of inference model to support teaching evidential understanding, (2) the SCIM-C strategy focuses on five broad phases: Summarizing, Contextualizing, Inferring, Monitoring, and Corroborating. When students examine an individual source, they move through the first four phases (i.e., summarizing, contextualizing, inferring, and monitoring) and then, after analyzing several individual sources, they compare the sources collectively in the fifth phase (i.e., corroborating). The following sections explain each of the five phases of the SCIM-C strategy, including the four spiraling analyzing questions for each phase. Summarizing Summarizing is the first phase of the SCIMC strategy. In this phase, students quickly examine the documentary aspects of the text in order to find any information or evidence that is explicitly available from the source. Students should attempt to identify the type of source (e.g., letter, photograph, or cartoon) as well as its subject, author, purpose, and audience. In addition, students should look for key facts, dates, ideas, opinions, and perspectives. The four analyzing questions associated with the summarizing phase are as follows: 1. What type of document is the source? 2. What specific information, details and/or perspectives does the source provide? 3. What is the subject and/or purpose of the source? 4. Who was the author and/or audience of the source? Contextualizing When students begin contextualizing, they spend more time with the source in order to locate it within time and space. The teacher should emphasize that it is important to recognize and understand that a source may contain archaic words and/or images from the period. These words or images may no longer be used today or they may be used differently; these differences should be noted and defined. In addition, the meanings, values, habits, and customs of the period may be very different from those today. Ultimately, students and teachers must be careful to avoid treating the source as a contemporary product as they pursue their guiding historical question. Following are the four analyzing questions associated with the contextualizing phase: 1. when and where was the source produced? 2. Why was the source produced? 3. what was happening within the immediate and broader context at the time the source was produced? 4. What summarizing information can place the source in time and place? Inferring Inferring is designed to provide students with the opportunity to revisit initial facts gleaned from the source and to begin to read subtexts and make inferences based upon a developing understanding of the context. In answering an historical question and working with the primary source, sometimes the evidence is not explicitly stated or obvious but rather, the evidence is hinted at and needs to be drawn out. The inferring stage provides room for students to explore the source and examine the source's perspective in the light of the questions being asked. These are the four analyzing questions associated with the inferring phase: 1. What is suggested by the source? 2. What interpretations may be drawn? 3. What perspectives or points of view are indicated? 4. What inferences may be drawn from absences or omissions in the source? Monitoring Monitoring is the capstone stage in examining individual sources. Here students are expected to reflect upon their initial assumptions in terms of the overall focus on the historical questions being studied. …