An approach to teaching with historical digital images

Images have long played an important role in social studies. Textbooks devote significant space to images and social studies teachers commonly display visual representations of content on the walls of their rooms and in the halls outside. Today, digital historical images are available in massive quantities. The World Wide Web, digital cameras, and movie and video making software have facilitated a virtual explosion of visual imagery and these new forms of imagery and supporting digital tools allow for the creation and sharing of all sorts of new content in social studies.

A method for teachers to inquiry and plan instruction using digital historical images is presented below. This six step method is presented as a scaffold to support both authentic historical inquiry and pedagogical thinking about historical images and inquiry.

Step 1: QUESTION: Developing a visually relevant historical inquiry question - This part of the process involves you thinking about digital historical images and developing an idea for an inquiry. All historical inquiry begins with an interesting question. For teachers, these questions often emerge from curriculum content, so you will need to keep your curriculum in mind as you develop a question. Your question should be one that emerges given some expectation that visual information might be useful in developing an answer or response to the question.

An example question might be: How did Lewis Hine’s photographs of children influence the national debate over child labor in the early 20th century? An investigation of this question would involve using photos from Lewis Hine –one source is online at the Library of Congress


Step 2 LOCATE: Locating digital visual materials - One way to think about locating digital visual material is to consider how images are made available and the extent to which they are reviewed and organized. More heavily reviewed and organized visual materials tend to be more relevant and trustworthy with regard to historical inquiry.

In this activity, you should use images from heavily reviewed and organized websites.

Given our example question from Step 1, we might use photos from Lewis Hine available online at the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html (search “Lewis Hine”)


Step 3: ANALYZE: Developing an understanding with images as content - After you have decided on an inquiry question and located relevant images for addressing your question, the real work of inquiry can begin. Specifically, you will need to begin developing some understanding related to answering your question. This understanding should emerge from your analyses of the images you have selected. In this step, you will want to use disciplinary structures to develop your understanding. For example, you can use the SCIM-C model to systematically work through images and begin to put together an “answer” to your question.


Step 4: INTERPRET: Developing an interpretive account of your understanding - The process of inquiry at some point involves sharing with others what you have learned. Making public your understanding requires that you clarify the ideas that are emerging from your analyses in such a way as to help others understand something they may know very little about. The presentation of your constructed understanding is a very important part of the process. When working with visual information, we have to incorporate visuals as evidence in the presentation of your understanding. In much the same way that you might use quotes from an historical document in a written report on an historical inquiry, you should use images to support whatever you are saying in your work on this project. There are a number of technologies you can use to enable your work with images. The simplest and most straightforward technology might be word processing. Presentation software such as PowerPoint or Keynote might also work. Tools for making videos such as iMovie, Moviemaker or Jumpcut are another approach. Another set of tools that are more closely focused on images include VoiceThread and Footnote.

(See Appendix 1 for an example of an analysis using word processing)


Step 5: ADAPT: Selecting, adapting, manipulating, and/or tailoring images for use in teaching – No matter what resources you are using, they all need some modification for use in a K-12 classroom. This is particularly true for historical images. Most of the historical images you will find online were not created with the specific needs of learners in mind. This lack of learner-centered focus can involve technical issues such as the image format or to subject matter issues related to the background or contextual knowledge needed to understand the image. These issues mean that the teacher has to carefully select, adapt, manipulate, and/or tailor specific images for use in the classroom. In this part of the process, you will select and then adapt, manipulate and/or tailor the selected images for use in the classroom.

Back to the example of Lewis Hine images, you might select 10 or 15 images that specifically represent some content idea, perhaps the idea that in the early 20th century children worked in dangerous conditions. These images would need to be prepared for presentation to students. This might involve putting the images in a Powerpoint presentation, making a Voice Thread, or even printing them and making copies. These actions involve selecting, adapting, manipulating, and tailoring. The process of adapting is similar to what occurs in Step 4 when you construct your knowledge. The difference in Step 5 is the audience. When you are constructing a representation of your knowledge for an academic audience you have to make decisions that are in some ways pedagogical, but at a different level than you would do for K-12 students. In both Steps 4 and 5, you are ultimately trying to explain something through your work.

Step 6: PLAN: The ultimate goal of this activity is to teach or plan to teach with the images. Although, some of your planning will be completed after you finish Step 5, you will still need to work out the details of a lesson for using the images. This teaching idea should revolve around the inquiry question you developed in Step 1 and should be tightly focused on some curricular material.