Why timelines?

“When they engage in this process, students move beyond the simple reflection of temporal order generated by the analysis of a time line to a more critical determination of how the events along the line were determined to have a relationship with one another. By challenging students to create chronology, they gain insight into how historians have determined what happened in the past and to practice the types of thinking skills relevant to the twenty-first century.” (p. 77)

Lesh, B. A. (2011). “Why won’t you just tell us the answer?”: Teaching historical 

                   thinking in grades 7-12. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Chapter 4 of Bruce Lesh’s book focuses on a lesson he used in his classroom to teach students about both chronology and causality.  Lesh gave his students a collection of source documents relating to the Rail Strike of 1877 and asked them to develop a chronology.  The class uses their documents to create a narrative describing what happened.  However, Lesh’s lesson does not en d there.  He next asks his students to explain the relationship between the events along the chronology.  

Why did he create such a lesson?  Why timelines?  This exercise is about more than the Rail Strike of 1877 and it is more about making sure students can arrange events in chronological order.  The key to this lesson is the emphasis on determining causality between the events.  A timeline is a useful tool, employed by historians and history teachers alike, to illustrate patterns and connections between events.  When students look at a series of documents, images, or descriptions of events, they need to be able to make inferences about the relationship between the information in order to make sense of it.  Lesh also points out that this lesson allows students to practice skills that are identified by the National Standards for History including “identify[ing] in historical narratives the temporal structure of a historical narrative or story”, “interpret[ing] data presented in time lines”, and “reconstruct[ing] patterns of historical succession and duration” (p. 78).  A lesson such as this one allows a teacher to combine content instruction with development of historical thinking skills.

I was happy to read this passage on the day I did, because I was in the process of preparing a lesson in which I had already decided would include a timeline activity.  Lesh’s lesson gave me confidence that my instinct to ask students to use a timeline to make inferences about a time period was supported by work done by a much more experienced teacher.  I am in the middle of co-teaching a unit on the rise of Stalin to power in the Soviet Union and wanted to introduce a new type of document that historians use to learn about a period: art!  I displayed a collection of Soviet Avant-Garde and Socialist Realist art along a timeline on the board stretching from the Bolshevik revolution to 1940.  I did not include any titles of the works because I wanted students to examine the pieces based on their images, without any hints titles might give.  I designed this activity to give students a chance to make connections among the art on the timeline without any commentary.  I hoped they would be able to see the abrupt change in artistic styles and make inferences about why such a drastic change might have happened.  I am pleased to report that my students exceeded my expectations!  They used their knowledge of the time period and the Soviet regime to correctly hypothesize that government censors eventually deemed abstract art to be a little too “bourgeois” and not accessible to a wide enough audience to serve their purposes.  The timeline gave them a much clearer idea of the changes over time than they would have had if they had just read about the works, or looked at them in a book.   The ability to see the pieces plotted over time gave my students the opportunity to make connections between what they saw and the methods they knew Soviet officials used in other aspects of society.  I will definitely be using timelines in this manner in the future.  Thanks Mr. Lesh!

"Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge". 1919.  by  El Lissitzky http://www.michaelarnoldart.com/Beat%20the%20Whites%20with%20the%20Red%20Wedge.jpg

"Women of the Kolkhoz". c. 1930-1940. Artist unknown

·         http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai151_folder/151_articles/151_soviet_art_05.html