Teaching Strategies
This unit invites students to imagine the diverse perspectives of people living through the events we study in history. To that end, the assessment at the end of the unit is not an exam or essay. Instead, after examining primary sources spanning thirty years of Filipino history, students will synthesize what they learned by putting themselves in the place of different witnesses, imagining what their experience would be like, and reporting on this experience in the form of newspaper articles. Students will imagine what it would be like to live through momentous events and catastrophic change in the lives of the Filipino people who experienced multiple empires, multiple wars, and much hardship over the span of just one generation.
There are few Filipino-perspective sources available from the early days of the Spanish colony. More and more records from the Filipino perspective become available as time goes on. Unfortunately, these records largely center the perspectives of the elite, educated, and mostly male population of the islands—a narrow portion of the population as a whole. To tell a complete story, therefore, we must proactively seek out information about the experiences of the rest of the population—women, Indios, Chinese migrants, non Christian Igorots, Moros, and many other people. We must, in other words, do history.
In this unit, students will take on the role of historians in filling in these missing voices. This will require them to “read against the grain” of the dominant narrative in a written source, an approach historians use all the time. The organization “Learning for Justice” explains how students can participate as well: “students analyze the dominant reading of a text and engage in alternative or ‘resistant’ readings. Resistant readings scrutinize the beliefs and attitudes that typically go unexamined in a text, drawing attention to the gaps, silences and contradictions.”5
In our class we use the International Baccalaureate “O.P.V.L.” method to gain an understanding of the biases and unstated goals of a historical document. The initials O.P.V.L. stands for “Origin, Purpose, Value, Limitations.” With O.P.V.L., a student begins by reading a given document for its nominal content. But this is only the beginning of the process. They then go deeper by taking into account where the information came from, the purpose the creator had in making the document, and its value to us in understanding the events of the past. Students are encouraged to examine all potential limitations of the document such as the identity or biases of the author, the information that person had available to them at the time, and that person’s ability to understand or transmit the information reliably enough to be trusted without question. Whatever the limitations and biases of the document, students will be equipped to frame it in the appropriate context, extract information about the creator of the document, and use their analysis of the document as legitimate historical evidence.
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