Teaching Strategies-
The four parts of this unit all involve interpretation of visual images. The main strategy I will use is oral discourse and written analysis using the International Baccalaureate OPCVL strategy.63 This strategy splits up the way a source can be assessed for usefulness without defaulting to reductive categories such as “reliable” or “biased.” All sources in history have a bias, and most eyewitnesses are at least to some degree unreliable, so how do we teach students to use sources in a careful and thoughtful manner? The OPCVL strategy is a way to do this.
OPCVL asks students to look at a source for its ORIGIN first. Namely who created it, when and where was it created. Then they analyze the PURPOSE behind the creation of the source. Was it sponsored? Was it intended to argue a point of view? The third step is to describe the CONTENT of the source in detail. What are all of the ideas/details contained in the source? Does it tell us any specific facts or statistics? Does it not contain something that should be present? Then students assess the source’s VALUE to us as historians. How can it help us in the context of this unit? How helpful is the creator of the source’s specific perspective? Last we identify the LIMITATIONS of the source. This can include things such as ways in which depictions are clearly biased, or simply the nature of a visual source that obscures certain things. For example, a photo from long ago that is blurry because of long exposure times might not give the best details because of the nature of photography at the time. Whereas a photo taken by someone outside of the community being depicted might select unrepresentative things to include in its composition.
I have included as much historical background as I can in this document to enable a teacher to guide their students through these visual records of history. My hope is students can be prompted to come to as many conclusions as they can on their own.
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