Introduction to sources

Activity 1

Introducing the study of original material.

Ask students to write down their recollection of a recent shared experience that they are likely to recall subjectively – for example, a school assembly, your last class, or Sorry Day. You could even stage an argument with a student or teacher at the start of a lesson and get students to write about what they ‘think' they saw.

Discussion questions

• Did people have different versions of the event? Why?
  
• How did your personal perspective, ideas, opinions and interests change the way you remembered the event?
  
• What kind of evidence would you need to back up your version of events, or to help the group come to an agreement?
  
• As a group, can you come to an agreement about what actually happened, based on common memories and supporting evidence?
  
• What clues does this process give us about how history is reconstructed?

Extension/assessment task

Ask students to talk to their parents or siblings about an event they remember from when they were young.

• How has the passing of time affected their memory of events?
  
• What does this tell us about sources that were created after an event took place?

Activity 2

Ask students to take or bring in photographs of their:

• classroom
  
• bedroom
  
• house
  
• street
  
• friend or family
  
• favourite place.

Ask students to think about what someone 50 or 100 years from now might think about them and their life based on their image.

Discussion questions

What does the image tell you about:

• fashion – clothes, hair styles, trends in different age groups?
  
• relationships – family structure, friendships, how people relate to each other, what they do together?
  
• transport – how people move from place to place?
  
• technology – materials, how things are made, and energy sources?

Extension/assessment task

Ask students to search the State Library of Victoria Pictures catalogue for an image similar in composition to their own. Ask them to compare and contrast their image with one from a different period, using a Venn diagram.

Activity 3

Ask students to bring a primary source to class, including:

• letters
  
• tickets
  
• menus
  
• pamphlets
  
• advertising material like junk mail
  
• magazines
  
• newspaper articles
  
• badges
  
• packaging
  
• children's books
  
• photos.

Discussion questions

• What would your source tell a researcher or historian about you and the society in which you live?
  
• Places like the State Library of Victoria collect material you might think is of little historical value, like junk mail, pamphlets and comics. Why do you think they might be worth collecting?

Activity 4

Create a table with two columns, with the headings ‘Today' and ‘A hundred years ago'. Under the column ‘Today', ask students to brainstorm the methods they use to communicate during their day, including:

• text messages
  
• blogs
  
• IM chats
  
• mobile phone photographs
  
• emails
  
• digital photographs.

Then, ask students to complete the second column by thinking about what people used to create when they communicated a hundred years ago.

Discussion questions

• How are the records you leave behind different to what people did in the past?
  
• Not many people keep digital photos, text messages or personal email. The past equivalent – letters and hard copies of photographs – are core sources for historians and researchers today. What would the implications be for future historians trying to find out about how you live your life today?
  
• What could libraries do to make sure your history is recorded and archived for future generations?

Extension/assessment task

Talk about:

• changes in technology that mean we can't use or access old information (for example, the move from HTML to XML or systems like Flash, or floppy disks and cassette tapes compared to USBs and MP3s)
  
• initiatives like Pandora, which archive websites the way libraries archive physical records
  
• the dominance of written/physical records leading to gaps in history from illiterate people, women, and cultures with oral traditions.