...any textbook is the author's subjectivity. There is no such thing as 'just the facts.' Consciously or not, willfully or not, no matter how hard they try to be 'unbiased,' secondary-source authors always infuse the books they create with their own attitudes, views and cultural stance. (p. 61)
A persuasive, postmodern stance from two professional educators. I do agree wholeheartedly agree with their outlook on how subjectivity is present everywhere in our texts. However, they reserve this judgement solely for secondary sources content that have "...been gathered from other materials (sometimes other than textbooks), and then combined, reshaped, interpreted, and presented by the authors" (Daniels and Zemelman, 2004, p. 61).
My issue is that they seem to imply that primary sources, as raw materials, somehow rise above the issue of subjectivity. Just because a source is primary does not necessarily divorce a source from its subjectivity. This may or may not have been exactly what Daniels and Zemelman were saying, but I think its important to bring this up when discussing content literacy.
1 comment:
Really good point about primary documents and one that I missed in my reading of D&Z. I agree with you that primary documents are infused with the subjectivity of the author...especially since they lack the distance of time and history. Thus, it's vitally important for a SS teacher to help students situate a primary document within the historical and cultural contexts in order to really make sense of it. Which brings me to wonder about DBQs. Those documents are presented in a decontextualized manner and require the students to bring the context to it. So teaching students how to respond to a DBQ not only requires teaching them how to interpret the surface features of a document, but also to analyze the historical, political, and cultural subtext. Whew!
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