"But what really IS the value of a source?" Getting A-Level Students to Approach Sources Like Historians

Some parts of teaching History can feel a bit soulless.

This has been my impression of teaching primary sources for some time. At best, it can feel like a rather run-of-the-mill exercise in identifying relevant features in order to have students write something of merit for their exam. At worst, it can feel like having students blindly groping around for anything they can attach at least a bit of coherent knowledge to.

Recently, I've started to worry that some of our A-Level students really have no idea what a primary source is to a historian or why a historian even bothers with them. Asked in their exams to identify content, provenance, and tone, they approach the exercise in a tick-box manner, dutifully plodding through often lively and fascinating documents in order to tell us who wrote them and what they did, what that kind of source might focus on, a contemporary event or two, and what bits of their contextual knowledge they know about the main points raised.

Part of my concern here is stylistic. Writing about sources like this seems stilted and lifeless. But mostly, my concern is methodological.  just don't think that any historian would begin to approach sources that way.

There's loads of great writing on approaching sources, which I don't want to simply summarise here. Instead, I'd like to briefly sketch out a general approach to sources which is hopefully both methodologically valid (i.e. mirrors the kind of thinking historians actually engage in) and practically deliverable (i.e. can be used in the classroom).

In broad terms, my proposed approach hinges on two questions:

• Why do historians actually use sources?
• What language allows them to analyse sources?

I doubt much if any of this is very original, but it might provoke some thought and discussion (and I'd love to know your thoughts on it, too!).

Why do historians actually use sources?

This seems to be a relatively simple question with a relatively simple answer. At its most basic, historians use sources to find out information about the past.

In fact, both the question and answer are a bit more complicated.

If you wanted to find out information about the past, it's far more efficient to read what other historians have written than it is to go to primary sources (unless, of course, you're looking at an area of history that no historians have looked at before). In that case, behind the relatively simply question lies another, less simple one: What do primary sources give a historian that they can't get from elsewhere?

In our exams, students are often invited to consider the utility ("how useful are sources x and y") or value ("what is the value of source z") of primary sources. But if this gives the impression that sources are useful or valuable in and of themselves, that would be misleading. Sources don't really have any use or value to a historian until considered in light of a research question. When that happens, a primary source suddenly becomes incredibly important to a historian's work. By identifying information from a source that can help answer a question, a historian begins to turn "facts" into something useable in their research: evidence.

Primary sources used this way are complex, dynamic, exciting resources. They can of course tell us about what happened in the past. They reveal, highlight, illuminate, and disclose facts about the past that we may not have otherwise been aware of.

But this is often less important than what they tell us about the people who wrote them. A historian will often approach a source with the question in mind not just of "what happened", but also "how did X perceive what happened?" A primary source gives historians an insight into how people from the past viewed events and developments in their worlds: in a word, they tell us about perspectives.

What language allows historians to analyse sources?

On one level, analysing sources is a matter of language. Knowing how to refer to what a source tells us allows historians to unlock its information and perspective to use both as evidence in their research. Here, as in so many other areas of the historical discipline, the linguistic releases the conceptual.

This is where the exam-board language of content, provenance, and tone starts to seem really inadequate.

Students may well be credited in exams by writing answers that begin with the words "The content/provenance/tone of Source A is useful/valuable because..." But this language is artificial and lifeless. It makes for dull writing and for plainly bad historical practice.

It's not just that this language stilted (although it is). It's that it suggests the "content", "provenance", and "tone" of a primary source can each be addressed separately from one another. It suggests that one of these aspects of a source can, without necessarily referring to the others, tell us something that is inherently valuable or useful. It implies that a primary source can be addressed without a clear research question in mind.

Historians will set about writing about a primary source with a clear idea about what they are taking from it as evidence. The language they use will of course link back to the ideas of "content" (what a source says), "tone" (how it says it), and "provenance" (its background). But all of these will be woven into a seamless analysis in which each aspect of the source interacts with the others.

To do this, historians tend to ask themselves a range of questions that can only be answered using precise language. For example:

• What is the author's perspective on an event and how is this revealed both by their own background and by the source they have produced?
• Why might the author have chosen to create this type of document and how does its type (e.g. a letter, a petition, a stone carving, etc.) shape not just its perspective and tone, but also what information it includes?
• What does the author's perspective tell us about which information they have chosen to include and omit?
• What does the information the author has chosen to include and omit in turn tell us about the author's perspective?
• How does the tone of the source shape what information it includes and omits and what might this reveal about the author at the time of production?

Modelling: How does One Historian Approach Her Sources?

If we look at how historians approach sources in their writing, we sometimes get a sense of an intellectual wrestling match which they have engaged in as they grapple with imperfect and incomplete source material in order to extract the evidence they need to answer their research question.

Take for example Wendy Webster, writing about her use of Mass Observation documents from Second World War Britain in her highly acclaimed recent book, Mixing It. Webster sets as her research questions who journeyed to Britain during the war and how people responded to them. Introducing Mass Observation documents for the first time, she grapples simultaneously with their content, provenance, and tone to give a lively sense of what they reveal.

Wendy Webster, Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two Britain, Oxford University Press (2018), pp. 21-22

Making it Work in the Classroom

I don't think it's remotely possible to have students consider a potentially endless range of interconnected methodological questions for analysing sources in a classroom (let alone exam) setting.

On the other hand, by instructing students in the language of rigorous source analysis - language which invites students to consider the multiple aspects of a primary source in conjunction with one another - I do think it is possible to set them off on the road to attempt some of the more complex thinking that historians perform when addressing a source. In short, I think that if they have the language, students can begin to grapple with primary sources to seriously interrogate how they might be used to address a question asked.

Thinking about how this might look in classroom practice, I've created two resources that hone in on the language which might be used to unlock a primary source. My intention here has been to make something which is useable in the KS5 classroom, does not contradict exam-board mark schemes (something of a guessing game at the best of times!), and crucially replicates the language used by historians when analysing primary sources.

The resources focus on content, provenance, and tone, but with a set of particular aims:

• provenance is used to unlock the perspective a source gives
• content is used in strict conjunction with the question asked
• tone is used to explore both what is said and who is saying it (tone is divided here between "orientation" [i.e. the overall feel/direction of the language in the source] and "strength" [i.e. how and how far that feel/direction is being expressed])

The first resource, which can be found here, gives a broad overview to approaching sources at A-Level (with both exams and coursework in mind).

The second resource, which can be found here, is intended to operate as a workable language guide for students.

This second document is crucially not a "word mat" - at least in the sense of a resource that can be plonked in front of students so they can dip into words at their leisure while writing exam questions. Like all linguistic resources for teaching History, I think it is only useable if students are carefully and thoroughly trained in using the language it contains.

This, needless to say, is a task that will have to run through an entire KS5 course, from the start of Year 12 to the end of Year 13. It's not something which can be done by simply giving them the "how-to" guide and asking them to get on with it. Ideally, it's something that would already have been started in previous school years.

Students can't be expected to be perfect in the use of its language by the end of their A-Level studies. And they won't be able to replicate all the nuances of a professional historian's analytical approach. But I hope this kind of linguistic framework might give them an induction into the historical discipline that serves them well not just in their A-Levels, but also beyond KS5.