Using Locally Available Resources in Teaching History

One of the faculty marked assignments  that were given in our graduate studies class involved the conduct of  a brief survey of locally available resources for teaching history. This assignment afforded me an opportunity to improve my competence as a social studies teacher. In particular, I realized the wealth of instructional materials available in our local community that we teachers could utilize to enrich our students’ learning experiences, develop their understanding of the dynamics of culture change and continuity, and teach them the procedural skills involved in the study of history.

I conducted my survey of resources in two important repositories of records of our town’s residents: the Central School, and the  Civil Registry.

One of the important finds that I made during the conduct of my brief survey in the town’s Central School was the bank of old student records in its archive. Some of these records date back to 1980’s, 1970’s, 1960’s, and 1950’s. They contain information about past curricula as well as data about former students. These records may provide an avenue through which social studies students could inquire into past culture, how it evolved, and how it assumed its present form. For instance, the students may observe from the student records from different decades how Filipino names evolved from being predominantly Hispanized to being mostly Americanized or Anglicized, and thus conclude that Filipino culture did not change instantly with the incorporation of the country to the American empire at the turn of the 20^th century. The student records could also provide glimpses to past government policies with respect to education.

Aside from the aforementioned resources, I have also made other finds that may be of use to students of culture and history. These included the Register of Deaths and the Register of Marriages at the municipal Civil Registry. Information from these resources may provide students opportunities to investigate the town’s pathological history (through examination of the causes of deaths), life expectancy, and marriage practices of people (how old people used to get married) across the different decades from 1940’s. From examination of these sources, not only could students enhance their disciplinal knowledge and skills in history, or the knowledge and skills employed by historians as scientists, but enrich their knowledge, and deepen their understanding of history and culture as well.

The results of my survey demonstrate that social studies teachers in the town where I live do not lack for locally available resources that they could use to enhance their students’ learning–if they know where to find them. These resources are available to us teachers and to our students at no cost. Using these resources also has the added advantage of making history come alive because students would not only be dealing with information from textbooks or movies, and about people who lived in very distant past and in places they have never seen, but with relics left by people who, like them, lived in the same community not so long ago. Ω