Feudalism Module Introduction 
This module was developed by two teachers, Anneka Harper and Lynn Dillon, who participated in the California READI Teacher Inquiry Network, in collaboration with a member of the READI Research Team, Gayle Cribb. Anneka and Lynn taught in a highly diverse middle school serving low income students and English Learners in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their 7th grade course was World History and Geography of Medieval and Early Modern Times. Given the opportunity to work with the support of the READI Research Team, they set out to tackle what they felt were their least successful units, betting that a READI design would make a difference. Those units were the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Upon reflection, they realized that part of what was challenging about those units was that many Reformation and Enlightenment ideas are part and parcel of the fabric of their students’ daily lives. For example, individuals reading the Bible for themselves, the separation of church and state, and religious tolerance are status quo in their students’ contemporary experience. How could such familiar ideas be tremendously controversial or enlightening?
The solution, they realized, was to give their students the opportunity to develop historical empathy by inquiring into the context from which the Reformation and Enlightenment sprang. Hence, they turned their attention to the previous unit, on Feudalism in Medieval Europe, in order to lay the groundwork for the Reformation and Enlightenment. This unit, then, was a way for students to build enough knowledge of the feudal context that the Reformation and the Enlightenment would seem like the big, significant changes they were. They chose to focus the study of feudalism on daily life for ordinary people, in particular, for serfs. As a conceptual tool that would allow their students’ developing ideas to cohere and engage their historical imaginations, they developed two figures, Serf Thomas and Serf Anne. This device would anchor students as they explored the foreign land of the past, considered religious and philosophical ideas, and tracked change over several centuries.
In keeping with the READI Student Learning Goals, students would build knowledge by reading multiple texts. Students would do the intellectual work of making sense of each text and making sense across the texts. They would create a synthesis of what they would learn, by embodying the synthesis in their drawing of the two serfs. Serf Thomas and Serf Anne would then provide a touchstone for students as they progressed through the course, for them to consider how the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment would have seemed from the perspective of these serfs, and how, if implemented, those ideas would have changed their lives.
Lynn and Anneka’s students by this point in the year were accustomed to interacting with texts through annotations (Talking to the Text) and having metacognitive conversations about how they were making sense of texts. In those conversations, they would share reading processes, surface confusions and, work together to clarify. New to their students were the routines Lynn and Anneka introduced in this unit, the routines of creating claims, noting possible textual evidence for those claims, citing the source of that evidence, and explaining “how you know” that the evidence supports the claim.
Students read five tertiary texts in order to answer the inquiry question, “What was life like for a medieval serf and how do you know?” The definition we had developed of historical argumentation in READI is included below. Descriptive arguments answer the question “What is the case?” Our inquiry question asked students to determine what was the case during feudal times: “What was the case of everyday life for a medieval serf?” The text set provided evidence from the historical record and the work of historians. The second part of our inquiry question, “… and how do you know?” required students to articulate their reasoning. While the module did not include students writing a complete argument, it gave students many opportunities to engage in the smaller units of argumentation, creating a claim, providing evidence and explaining reasoning. These are the stepping stones students need to approach larger arguments and more formal argumentation. Moreover, the module gave students multiple opportunities and reasons to read for understanding.
This unit foregrounds READI History Learning Goal 3: Construct claim-evidence relations, using textual evidence and explaining the relationship among the pieces of evidence and between the evidence and claims. It addresses Goal 1, in that it supports students to read a set of tertiary history texts closely. The unit provides students with the opportunity to corroborate across the texts and synthesize what they are learning, which advances Goal 2. Since the texts are tertiary sources, they do not afford rich sourcing opportunities. (In Anneka and Lynn’s course, primary sources would be emphasized in the following units.) In this unit, the focus is on creating claims based on textual evidence and explaining how the evidence supports one’s claim, which is part of Goal 3. These practices are building blocks for evidence-based argumentation from multiple texts. The unit serves as an introduction to those practices. Also introduced is the embedded routine for citing the source of information. Students create claims, note potential textual evidence, keep track of the citation for the source of that the information, reason through the connection between the evidence and the claim, and revise their claims iteratively. Given that the students are learning about the societal structure of feudalism and how that affected the lives of serfs, they are advancing Goal 4. To the extent that they are considering and evaluating each other’s claims, evidence and explanations, they are addressing Goal 5. To the extent that students are making their own interpretations, grounded in textual evidence, by imagining what daily life would be for Serf Thomas and Serf Anne, they are developing an awareness of the epistemology of history, and advancing Goal 6.
Serf Thomas and Serf Anne remained a part of the class for the rest of the year, embodied in a class poster that consolidated many of the claims created and the evidence provided by the students. The imagined historical figures were referenced often by both teachers and students. Lynn and Anneka continued the routines throughout the next units on the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. In those units, both primary sources and tertiary sources were included in the text sets. New figures of ordinary people were introduced and used as conceptual tools for argumentation in each unit. These new routines and provided students opportunities to develop historical imagination by envisioning what life was like for the ordinary person in these periods of history, grounded in textual evidence from multiple sources. Lynn and Anneka implemented the module in their classrooms in January.