We are living in an age where deepfakes attempt to rewrite history, search engines tailor what we see, and students scroll past more misinformation in a day than I encountered in a semester in the 1900s. In this moment, teaching history isn’t optional. It is urgent.
You might be wondering, “Where do I find the time? ELA takes up most of my schedule, and we’re barely getting through the standards.”
I can relate. I taught in K-6 classrooms where it felt impossible to cover a holistic curriculum of multiple subjects. But I also discovered something game-changing: teaching history with ELA doesn’t take more time. Rather, it can transform the time we already have.
The Past Matters More Than Ever
In a matter of seconds, AI can generate convincing narratives that twist, spin, or omit historical facts. AI has even been known to hallucinate and make up sources. Search results reflect bias. Social media can reinforce conspiracy theories. Our students need more than comprehension, they need context to understand nuances of the past. More than merely decoding skills, even in ELA classes students need discernment, they must learn to actively question what they read. History gives students opportunities to think critically, ask questions, and make connections across subjects.
Unfortunately, in many K-8 classrooms, history gets sidelined. This happened in my own experience as well. Teachers are pressured to focus on math and ELA to raise test scores, with history/social studies taking a backseat. What if we stopped seeing ELA and history as separate?
Interdisciplinary = Intentional
The idea isn’t to “fit in” history. It’s to build it in. Reading a primary source is reading. Writing a historical opinion piece is writing. Discussing the positive and negative impacts of a historical event develops speaking and listening skills. History can do more than merely support literacy, it can act as a driver, particularly when taught with intention.
In our upcoming book, co-author Adam Juarez and I provide guidance and lesson ideas to elevate student thinking, streamline planning, and deepen relevance through an interdisciplinary approach.
Moving Forward with an Eye on the Past
Our students are learning in a world where truth can be difficult to discern, and context is a necessity. We owe it to our students to teach history not as a list of dates to memorize, but as a lens to understand the present and shape the future.
Together, we can support literate, thoughtful, historically grounded instruction to prepare our students to thrive in the modern world.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing actionable ways to integrate history into literacy, mathematics, science, and computer science without sacrificing instructional time. Check out this week’s idea snippet below.
Idea Snippet: Primary Source Inferences
To practice identifying textual evidence to support inferences, start by selecting an excerpt from a primary source, such as Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” or a child’s letter from the Dust Bowl. In my own teaching, one of my most memorable experience teaching sixth graders about inference was an interdisciplinary lesson in which students analyzed poems by Langston Hughes. In order to identify figurative language and nuanced diction, we listened to bebop music, and examined art from the Harlem Renaissance to build historical context of the time during which the poems were composed.
To implement a lesson like this, you can begin by having students read the excerpt, and then ask them to annotate the text, considering notices and wonderings. Prompts can include: “What do you think is happening?”, “Who is speaking, and to whom?”, and “What clues in the text help you figure that out?” During a class discussion, students can share their inferences and the evidence they used to support them. Interdisciplinary activities like this encourage students to think critically about historical texts while reinforcing key ELA skills, such as identifying textual evidence and understanding characters, events, and interactions. As an extension option, consider highlighting how understanding the voices of the past builds empathy and analytical skills, vital when seeking truth in a world inundated by AI generated content.