HIST 10613-080
Kerstetter

Workshop assignment #2: Questioning and connecting

Skim the documents for the week of January 28--try to get a sense of each of the documents and how they might relate to each other.

1. Draft two questions that would NOT make good historical questions. Explain in a sentence why each is not a good question. Try to draft questions that have different weaknesses.

2. Draft two questions that would make good historical questions. Here, too, try to draft different types of questions. After you take some time to consider each, explain in a sentence or two why you would prefer to answer that one rather than the other. What makes that question preferable?

3. With your preferred question in mind, read the documents for detail and create a concept map (click on the link for examples and a brief explanation) that shows connections between the various documents and your question. You can draw your concept map by hand according to your own design.

Submit your questions and document map at the beginning of class.

This assignment adapted from material developed by Lendol Calder and presented in "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey," Journal of American History 92(March 2006): 1358-1870 and on a related Web site http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/textbooks/2006/calder/index.html.