Reading across the Record: Source, Agency, Change, and Significance
A community-centered approach to teaching history through primary sources
One of the things I love most about teaching a sociopolitical history of Black Education-Memphis is watching people realize that a historical document does not simply tell us what happened.
A newspaper headline, photograph, court record, school report, oral history, church program, or letter was created by someone, in a particular moment, for a particular audience. Someone decided what to include. Someone decided what to leave out. Someone selected the words, framed the photograph, wrote the headline, or preserved the document. And sometimes the people most affected by an event had very little control over how that event entered the historical record.
That means teaching students to use primary sources requires more than asking, What does this document say? We also have to teach them to ask: Who is speaking? Who is acting? What is changing? Why does this matter?
This approach grows from work Dr. Anna Falkner and I developed through a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources grant supporting The Memphis 13 Foundation. Through that project, we partnered with Memphis 13 members, local educators, curriculum specialists, students, and community members to co-create curriculum grounded in Memphis history and community knowledge, compensating local educators and Memphians for their expertise. Within this larger collaboration, Anna led the development and facilitation of an approach that helps learners interrogate primary sources through four lenses: Source, Agency, Change, and Significance. I have had the blessing of working alongside her and seeing how these questions help students slow down, examine perspective and power, recognize people as historical actors, trace change over time, and consider why a historical moment matterss.
Primary sources are evidence, but they are also artifacts of power, perspective, memory, and meaning. Reading the record therefore requires us to consider not only what a source says, but how that record came to exist and whose experiences it allows us to see.
Reading the Record
(By Anna Falkner)
Source — What kind of source is this? Who created it, when, and why? Who was the intended audience? What else was happening when the source was created? What words, images, or ideas stand out? How does the creator frame what is happening, and what might that framing reveal about their perspective?
Agency — Who is acting in this source? Whose decisions, knowledge, resistance, leadership, or creativity are visible? Were the people represented given an opportunity to tell their own story? Whose voices or perspectives are missing? How might the people represented have described the event differently?
Change — What appears to be changing in this historical moment, and what appears to have stayed the same? What people, institutions, policies, or movements contributed to that change? What made change difficult? What traces of this history remain visible today?
Significance — Why does this source matter? What does it help us understand that we might otherwise miss? How did the people represented in the source shape their school, community, or city? What larger questions about education, knowledge, power, or freedom does the source raise? What additional evidence would we need to understand the story more fully?
Reading a Memphis Record
Consider the October 1961 Press-Scimitar headline published as thirteen first graders began desegregating Memphis City Schools:
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“4 Schools Desegregated: City Takes It in Stride.”
At first glance, a student might reasonably conclude that the source tells us Memphis experienced school desegregation peacefully. But the questions above complicate that reading.
Who wrote the story? What did “takes it in stride” mean to the newspaper and its intended audience? Were the six- and seven-year-old children entering those schools interviewed? Were their parents? What might the Memphis 13 have written as the headline?
Those questions shift the historical inquiry from Did desegregation happen? to something much more interesting: Who gets to define what desegregation meant?
Agency pushes us further. The photograph shows Black children and their mothers entering previously all-white schools. They are not simply subjects in somebody else’s story about desegregation. Their decisions and actions made desegregation happen. Recognizing their agency changes the historical narrative.
Change and significance push us beyond 1961. What actually changed when those school doors opened? What remained unequal? How have Memphis schools changed since then? How have they stayed the same? And what did those thirteen children and their families make possible for the generations that followed them?
The source has not changed. Our reading of it has.
Reading Across the Record
A single document, photograph, newspaper article, oral history, or official record can illuminate part of a story, but rarely all of it. Historical understanding deepens when we place sources — and the people who created and experienced them — in conversation with one another.
A newspaper might tell us how an institution narrated an event. An oral history might tell us how someone lived it. A photograph might reveal something neither source says explicitly. A court record may document what became legally actionable while leaving much of everyday life outside the record altogether.
For educators, this is also an opportunity to resist teaching history as settled knowledge that students simply receive. We can invite young people into the work historians actually do: questioning evidence, comparing accounts, noticing absences, interpreting context, reconsidering conclusions, and asking whose knowledge has been preserved.
Through our work with The Memphis 13 Foundation, I have seen what happens when community history becomes something people investigate rather than simply memorize. Students begin asking different questions. Teachers begin seeing familiar places differently. Community members become knowledge holders rather than supplemental voices added after the “official” history has already been told.
And sometimes a newspaper clipping that has existed for more than sixty years suddenly tells an entirely different story.
Not because the words changed. Because we learned how to read the record.
