Engaging Students with Primary Sources transcript

You could spend an entire period or two just walking through the images, do that kind of moment with them, have them break down the sort of ideas and the themes that are part of the media. And the students really like doing that and so they can have really long conversations in class sort of picking apart the different elements of the images that you portray.

They spend some time in the, in the archives themselves looking around for images so or text or whatever. But the resources that are there so it's not just me presenting images they also do work on their own as part of their study of the French revolution of 1989. In the spring, where they look through the archives themselves looking for images to or text resources to talk about their, either the debate or their written presentation.

So sometimes we have a debate and that can take the form of some kind of prompt like you know, of the revolutions we studied which one in your mind created the most dramatic change and why? And then they have to use the sources from the French revolution in 1989 to sort of frame an answer to that.

And then the other prompt I use is a, is more of a traditional essay. Around a two-page essay fundamentally answering the same thing which is, which do you think is the more dramatic revolutionary moment and why do you believe that to be so?