The stories of History are told to inculcate values into students, rather than offer them opportunities to engage in the kind of inquiry Historians do. An opposite approach might be to offer students the accounts and pictures first, and ask then what they see. Questions of situation, authenticity and relevance are asked in the same way historians ask them. Students must construct their own theories of what happened and what it meant, and the study of History can be engaged in in earnest. To try this approach, explore the Time Detectives Demo .
Students needs some savvy to interpret clues, and access to tools to check hypotheses.
Some artifacts will be more suggestive than others, and a degree of scaffolding is required before students can achieve success. The Time Detectives problems are most appropriate for students who have enough experience with the period under study to ask useful questions. This project is an experiment, to see how in practice these skills might develop.