Using a central guiding question of “How do we access the past?”, students engage in a survey of material culture using objects housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Assignment has students visit and sketch their object and then consider a theme associated with their object. In this way, students use material culture to gain primary insights into the belief systems, lifestyles, and worldviews of the cultures under investigation. Furthermore, each of the objects under consideration speaks to the historic effort to make sense of the world and to explain humanity’s place in it. The scaffolded research process culminates with a paper consisting of a careful examination of scholarly sources and represents the beginning of a high school history experience founded on asking good questions, leveraging curiosity, and developing the tools to arrive at sophisticated conclusions.

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Submitted by Kevin Slick