Back in the old “chalk and talk” days of textbook homework and worksheets, anyone suggesting document analysis would be seen as an outsider. Today, it’s just the opposite, DBQs are commonplace. But are they any better?
Consider this little gem:
In order to answer this question, you would need to know if 1) FDR reinstated public confidence, and you would need to know if 2) FDR reinstated economic wellbeing.
This question comes with the standard FDR documents, all the usual suspects are here. A fireside chat, pictures of sweaty young men shoveling for the CCC and a WPA mural along with a few excerpts from Social Security, TVA and NRA legislation, and a political cartoon. The question asks about results, did FDR reinstate confidence and economic well-being? Yet only one of the documents addresses results, an unemployment chart.
What do you do if none of the provided documents give you anything related to public confidence and economic well-being? Simple, you write an essay and pretend it answers the question. This DBQ comes from an educational publishing company that’s been marketing instructional materials for more than 40 years. If they can pretend, why can’t you and your students?
There may have been thousands of students who wrote answers to this DBQ that were then graded by hundreds of teachers and no one stood up to say that the emperor had no clothes.
DBQs present an imitation of the practice history that historians would never tolerate. DBQs pair up a broad question with a few shards of specific evidence, no historian worth their salt would ever do that.
Don’t believe me?
If I asked you to write an essay that explains the 2020 Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit using just a short clip from the first episode of the first season, two clips from two different episodes in season two, an episode from season three and the last scene of the series, could you do it? If you can’t do the whole series justice with just these scenes, then you know that students can’t do the past any justice with just a couple of documents either
It would be helpful to show students that most of the DBQs we give them are bunk. And we could do that using any Netflix series or film. Give one group of students five or six scenes, then give another group of students a different set of scenes from the same series that proves something entirely different. Ask each group to explain the entire series and comapre the results.
Students should know that we can cherry-pick facts, quotes and data in any way we’d like, and prove anything we want. So can anyone else.