Lesson Plan on the Age of Encounter:
Aztec and Spanish Perspectives
Sarah Cornog
The Brearley School, New York
Introduction
This site provides the building blocks for a lesson plan based on a series of primary documents that recount the Spanish colonization of Mexico. To gain an understanding of the multiple sides of an historical event, the students are asked to study several of the recorded encounters between the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and the Aztec emperor Montezuma II. Since I use these documents for a seventh grade course, my goals for the students are relatively rudimentary:
- to establish a basic narrative of events for each document
- to determine who the author is, who his or her audience is, what might his or her purpose be in writing the text
- to compare the three viewpoints offered by the documents in order to discuss basic issues of historiography such as: recognizing the influence an author's specific culture has on his or her recorded perceptions, evaluating potential bias in a piece (looking for key words and phrases), and determining how to make use of the information provided by a document
The bibliography provides some possible sources for gaining more historical background on the period in terms of both Aztec and Spanish history as well as in terms of the broader trends of political, social, and ideological developments in Mesoamerica and Europe during the sixteenth century. Also mentioned are a few web links for students and teachers to explore.
The reading comprehension and analysis questions are examples of the questions that can be put to a class as springboards for discussion. They are specific to primary documents for which I have listed bibliographic information as well as page numbers.
Additional activities is a brief list of some alternative activities for exploring the history of Spanish and Aztec relations.
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