For our class session, you’ll be working in small groups to explore primary sources. You’ll find three digitized sets of sources here. Your instructor or professor may assign a set to your group, or you may want to choose your own—coordinate with the other groups in your class to make sure that every set is assigned to a group. If your class is large, more than one group can work with a set – each group will bring different perspectives to the document analysis.
This activity can work for a synchronous (e.g., a Zoom class session that includes breakout rooms) or asynchronous (e.g., a multi-step discussion on an online forum) class sessions.
- Start by spending some time reviewing one of the documents in your group’s set on your own using the Document Analysis Worksheet to guide your analysis. This purpose of this worksheet is simply to have you think closely about the document – just make brief notes! Coordinate so that each document in the set gets analyzed – some of the documents are longer so it’s fine if a couple of people work on those.
- Next, working in your groups, share what you observed about your document, either via a Zoom breakout room or discussion forum posts. As you discuss, think about how your documents connect to one another and what sort of story they tell about the eugenics movement. (You’ll share with the class in the next step so think about what you want to tell the rest of the class about your documents and what you’ve learned from the documents.)
- Finally, each group will share what they’ve learned with the whole class, either by welcoming (and responding to) comments on your discussion posts or by an informal report at the end of a Zoom session. As the groups share, think about how your document set connects to the others, note common themes you notice, and ask questions of each other.
