If you teach high school social studies, you’re probably familiar with the document-based question, or DBQ, in which students are asked to analyze a historical issue using primary and secondary sources as evidence.
In this lesson, Ileana Sherry, an English teacher, and Kate Foster, a history teacher, from the International School of the Americas in San Antonio, Texas, tell us how they used The New York Times to help students tackle the DBQ. Together, Ms. Sherry and Ms. Foster created an interdisciplinary curriculum that taught students how to form arguments and showed them how they can be active participants in shaping history.
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An Interdisciplinary Curriculum That Reflects the World and Our Students’ Lives
To show you how this project came to be, we’ll start with two moments that made us rethink the way we wanted to teach our respective subjects.
The English Perspective: Ileana Sherry
In my first year of teaching, as a culmination of a novel unit on cultural collision, our school took the sophomore class to New Mexico to examine the processes of assimilation and acculturation. The trip was experiential learning at its finest, I thought, allowing students to see the topics and history from our novels in real life.
However, when we returned to campus, two of my Indigenous students, Sewa and Greg, who are Yaqui Natives, had a conversation with me about the failings of the trip: “They teach about Native people like we are history,” Sewa said, “but we are right here.”
Our curriculum had ignored these students’ voices and the voices and concerns of living Indigenous people. Moving forward, I wanted to ensure that the topics we discussed in class weren’t just limited to historical texts or novels.
The History Perspective: Kate Foster
While on a class trip focused on civil rights, my students and I visited the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, Ala. One installation we saw depicted a timeline that showed different forms of racially-relevant legislation in the United States: The laws that were harmful to people of color were at the top of the timeline, and the laws that helped bring justice to people of color were at the bottom.
The students shared how seeing the evidence laid out so clearly made it easy for them to make connections to the past and inspired them to be more passionate about preventing the enactment of other harmful laws in the future.
Since then, I’ve made it a point in my instruction to help students connect the past to the present, and to help them recognize their roles as active participants in the creation of history.
A New Approach
Once we began working together as teachers, we realized we could combine current events, historical evidence, literary texts and argumentative writing to help students connect their lives to the past, the present and their hopes for the future. And The New York Times could provide the resources we needed to bring this ambitious, interdisciplinary unit to life.
One of the skills we hoped to develop in our students was the ability to form and defend arguments, particularly by gathering and evaluating evidence. Not only is this kind of persuasive writing a pivotal skill that helps young people make their way in the world, it’s also an important part of many English and A.P. history curriculums, the writing components of which require students to establish and defend arguments with evidence via the DBQ.
As such, we called this unit The DBQ Project. Using a constructivist thinking model, we asked students to create their own DBQs by compiling documents from different sources to respond to a given prompt, and then invited them to form arguments based on one another’s questions just as they would on the A.P. World History: Modern exam. While this project uses the format of the DBQ, it can be adjusted for other kinds of evidence-based writing.
Connecting Novels to History and Current Events
Introducing Major Themes Through Choice Books
Our first task in making the curriculum more authentic and relevant was to revamp the novel unit on cultural collisions.
We gave students the choice of reading one of three books that focused on characters who were caught between the expectations of multiple cultures: “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie; “The Book of the Unknown Americans” by Cristina Henríquez; and “Born a Crime” by Trevor Noah. These three texts represented the cultural diversity of the students we taught, giving them the chance to explore a new perspective or read about experiences similar to their own.
To assist students and their families in choosing the right book for them, we provided the New York Times reviews of each one and invited families to join us in the reading.
Examining What These Issues Look Like Today
Picking the right books was just part of the journey. We still had to show our students that the issues in them were relevant. Sewa’s words — “we are right here” — pushed us to search for resources that would highlight the connections between the novels, their historical roots and current events.
We searched The New York Times and selected current articles that covered relevant topics in each book: reservations in North America for “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” immigration in the United States for “The Book of Unknown Americans,” and the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa for “Born a Crime.”
We added scaffolding, including word banks and guiding questions (What does the text say? Why does this text matter?), to each article and then invited students to read and annotate the one aligned with their book. These articles laid the foundation for rich discussions in which students connected their books to history, current events and the author’s context.
Comparing the books and the articles also opened up our learning to the interdisciplinary discussion of primary and secondary sources. We taught our students how to differentiate primary and secondary documents, examining each text as a primary source document reflecting the concerns and context of the author. We emphasized that novels, memoirs and informative articles help historians tell the stories of the past.
The same process applied to our students: They were not just avid readers in our combined humanities course; they were historians. To develop the skills of a historian, we taught them how to identify the source of different documents and analyze sources to connect the author’s perspective, history and cultural context to the writing.
This is also a skill that is assessed on the A.P. exam in the DBQ essay. The College Board requires students to explain “how or why the document’s point of view, purpose, historical situation, and/or audience is relevant to an argument” for at least three sources.
To practice, we had students write sourcing statements for the books and the Times articles they read using the following template:
The next step in the curriculum was for students to take the foundational texts and their new understanding of how an author’s background and intent shape that person’s work to come up with and defend their own arguments. This would become The DBQ Project.
Forming the Argument
On the A.P. exam, the DBQ essay presents students with a prompt and several documents that they must use to support their argument. Our aim in the DBQ Project was to flip this process to help students understand how it works and give them larger responsibilities in constructing their own learning. Instead of presenting them with a prompt and documents, we presented them with just a prompt and they compiled the documents to create their own DBQ.
Each group was given a DBQ-style prompt based on the book they chose. For example, if a student read “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” their prompt was: Evaluate the extent to which reservations fostered change in the lives of Native Americans during the 20th and 21st centuries. All the prompts used similar wording and required students to focus on the same skill.
Next, students were tasked with brainstorming as many ways to answer the prompt as possible. We asked them to reference their books, the Times articles and their discussions to come up with answers. We encouraged students not to censor one another to promote the development of as many answers as possible. We met with individual groups to discuss how to determine whether answers were too broad or too narrow and how each may be easier or more difficult to defend.
Using a scaffolded thesis statement sentence stem, students acknowledged a counterargument (to build complexity), stated a claim and then chose three distinct reasons to support it.
Using Evidence to Support Claims
As historians, students needed to prove their claims with evidence. The DBQ Project asked students to find at least two documents that could be used as evidence to support each of the three parts of their claim. We required them to use their books and the New York Times articles as two of their documents. We also discussed diversity in evidence and encouraged students to compile documents from different kinds of reputable sources that represented different points of view and that served different purposes.
One of the parameters we gave students for finding their sources was that they needed to narrow a source document down to its most relevant parts. It wasn’t enough to find an article with a title that vaguely supported their stance; instead, they needed to read through the piece to find the most relevant sentences. Not only did this approach mirror documents on a real DBQ essay, but it also encouraged students to dig deeper and practice uncovering and evaluating sources for useful information.
We asked students to compile their documents and citations in Google Slides. We provided a teacher’s example and a template that included a rubric and instructions in the notes section on each slide. You can see a partial student example at the top of this section.
The End Results
Students presented their slide shows and invited their peers to respond to their document-based question with a claim. This process mimicked the A.P. exam, where students would see a DBQ with fresh eyes and varying levels of background knowledge.
The results varied greatly: Sometimes the student audience created claims that aligned with the presenters’ intentions; other times, the audience crafted entirely unique claims that were also supported by the documents. After creating their own DBQs, students had a better understanding of how documents might connect. This project created a foundation for the rest of the year by showing students both how to find evidence to support their claims and how to create arguments based on the evidence provided.
As students read the selected books and the current events articles in The New York Times, they were able to see their lives reflected and make connections between current issues, history and their own experiences. Students learned that their experiences were also evidence in understanding the trends and patterns in history and present day.
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