History of the American Home

Decoding work done

Identification of bottleneck

Students find it difficult to view Home as a constructed ideal.

Description of mental tasks needed to overcome the bottleneck

Students must be able to:

• Understand that a text can have multiple meanings
• Ask questions about what did not happen in a text, as well as what was actually on the page.
• Recognize that carefully reading requires an investment of time beyond just passing one’s eyes over the words
• Read more than once
• Compare the text to a series of prompts or questions
• Look for clues that relate the text to the secondary scholarship on the topic
• Consider other possible models of the phenomena being presented (in this case the family)
• Recognize the biases that a figure from the past brings to his or her description of phenomena
• Look for contradictions and tensions within the text
• Distinguish between what is and is not important in a text
• Step back and take themselves out of the story
• Recognize that the text is the creation of particular people
• Compare different sources to understand each of them better
• Recognize that people in the 19th century are different than us, that they have very different assumptions
• Reconstruct the identity of the person who produced the text
• Ask questions about the text – why was it produced, what was its purpose, what is it arguing

Researchers involved

Leah Shopkow and George Rehry as part of the Indiana University History Learning Project

Available resources

Transcript of the interview