Integrating Creative, Critical, and Historical Thinking through Close Reading, Document- Based Writing, and Original Political Cartooning

Historical thinking, an unnatural and developed skill,1 is foundational for both civic

involvement and social studies education.2 To facilitate students’ historical thinking, teachers can

draw from a myriad of discipline-specific close reading strategies.3 History literacy stratagems can

be adjusted for learners both young4 and old5; teachers can target a specific heuristic6 or address a

distinct barrier to understanding.7 Whether termed content area literacy strategies, close readings,

processes, and simply methods,8 state and national education require students to scrutinize

complex, diverse, and, at times, competing texts.9 The education initiatives assess students—in

both history/social studies and English/language arts non-fiction curricula—on their ability to

extract, employ, and cite newly generated understandings within discipline-specific writing tasks.10