From Corn Chips to Garbology
The Dynamics of Historical Inquiry
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12129386 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen L Kalmon (corresponding author), S Kalmon, Peggy O'Neill-Jones, Candace Jesse Stout, C Stout, L Wood (0000-0002-5235-8181), L S Wood |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 13-18 |
| Publication date | 2012-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | OAH Magazine of History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0882-228X • E-ISSN: 1938-2340 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/oahmag/oas024 |
| OpenAlex | W2331194304 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
What can corn chips teach us about history? Quite a bit, as participants learned at a History Education Clearinghouse workshop at the 2011 American Historical Association annual meeting. Upon arriving for the workshop, we found sandwich baggies filled with golden-brown chips on every seat. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Harvard Project Zero director Shari Tishman used the chips as artifacts to lead the participants through a See/Think/Wonder exercise. They provided a thinking routine that provokes inquiry about artifacts—even the mundane corn chip—that is useful for learners of all ages (Figure 1). By encouraging detailed observation and turning the ordinary into a voyage of exploration, See/Think/Wonder teases out many historical questions and connections: from corn planters and pickers to ethnobotany and the history of cooking, from African American work songs to Native American creation stories, from agribusiness to manufacturing to ethanol (1). A month later, one of the authors of this article repeated the same exercise with a cohort of K–12 teachers. They noted how corn chips and the step-by-step thinking process provide a flexible vehicle for moving from personal connections through intriguing questions to investigation. After that workshop, one of the teachers decided to test the exercise with her fourth graders, giving them magnifying glasses to help them inspect the chips in greater detail. “Students came up with the same questions that our cohort came up with back in February,” Teresa Robbins reported. “I was so surprised and proud that they used higher order thinking skills to formulate these questions. They asked about the families that were involved in growing the corn, the brand and its historical significance, the factory that it was produced at, the packaging that was used, and many other questions” (2)
Art · Historical Thinking · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Sociology · Visual arts · Wonder · Diverse Educational Innovations Studies · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Psychology · History · Social Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.4 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2022 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |