An essay review of Building Students Historical Literacies: Learning to Read and Reason with Historical Texts and Evidence. Vol 17 No. 9

Abstract

2017-2018. But individual history teachers are left very much in the lurch by the new Common Core requirements.Building Students' Historical Literacies, Jeffrey Nokes' new book, will help curriculum planners, teacher educators, teacher candidates, teachers, policy makers, and even parents think more clearly about the place of history teaching in the current literacy-focused world. Nokes synthesizes over twenty years of research about how historians encounter texts in writing a book focusing on student literacies that draw upon current concerns about building student understandings represented most prominently by the Common Core. This book will also provide social studies teacher certification candidates with plenty of research-based disciplinary literacy strategies and goals for deployment on the edTPA (discussed below). While up-to-date, the vision for a history classroom Nokes articulates is not new, but is instead in the tradition of longstanding arguments from scholars and educators in favor of social studies classes where students encounter historical scholarship driven by questions and examine evidence that provokes debates over multiple interpretations of the past (Engle, 1960;Holt, 1990).