Use a strategy for imagining the past built on two sets of guiding questions applied to primary source documents¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The author outlines an instructional strategy, developed directly out of Collingwood's theory, in which students inquire into a past topic using primary source documents. "At its heart, the strategy is based on the development of two sets of questions that guide student imagining when examining primary source documents." One set contains inquiry-specific probing questions to mine information, determine creator bias, and seek corroboration; the other contains general re-enactment and interpolation questions (e.g., what the author was thinking, what was left out) reusable across inquiries. Students record responses with supporting quotations as evidence for their imagined picture of the past.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

A guiding inquiry question related to the period, topic, theme, concept, or event being studied
Primary source documents located and collected, directly related to the topic or event
Students keep track of sources for copied quotations, learning appropriate referencing and citation styles

Constraints¶

The degree of sophistication of the interrogative questions is dependent on the age and developmental level of the students; younger learners may respond to only one or two questions and draw pictures or create collages captioned with a source quotation

Target Learners¶

K-12 social studies and history students, with adaptations by age and developmental level

Target Learning Goals¶

Imagining and reconstructing the past from primary sources
Evaluating source bias and corroborating evidence
Supporting interpretations with cited evidence

Affordances¶

Collingwood Method Re Enactment Interpolating Interrogating

Examples¶

Key Sources¶

Lemisko, L.S. (2004). The Historical Imagination: Collingwood in the Classroom. Canadian Social Studies. https://www.quasar.ualberta.ca/css. doi:10.29173/css130

Page metadata

Field	Value
`type`	`strategy`
`id`	`strategy-imagining-past-two-question-sets`
`title`	`Use a strategy for imagining the past built on two sets of guiding questions applied to primary source documents`
`description`	`The author outlines an instructional strategy, developed directly out of Collingwood's theory, in which students inquire into a past topic using primary source documents.`
`status`	`review`
`generated`	by `process:wiki-ingest` on `2026-09-27`
`trust`	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
`sources`	1 — `lemisko-2004`

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