Select a state to view activities and projects.

Grant Contact: Laura Nash, Program Director

American Song - the music, the history, and the people: the developed curriculum will be an ongoing part of the classes at both the University and in public school districts, impacting a different group of students every year. Pre-service teachers at Fairfield University will take the units with them to their positions when they graduate, thus increasing the number of students with exposure. Further dissemination will take place through conferences and professional development workshops. We would also be honored to share our work through the Virtual Institute, if so invited.

Check back for updates!

Grant Contact, Dr. Merry Boggs, Dean School of Education

Opening Pandora’s Box: Preparing Preservice Teachers to Use Primary Sources and Inquiry through a Collaborative Partnership. The phrase Pandora’s Box conjures countless images based on one’s experiences with Greek mythology. The Opening Pandora’s Box grant plays on this myth to envision a group of educators collaboratively “opening the Box” to unlock the positive power of primary sources and inquiry learning for public school students. Independently public school teachers, college professors, and media specialists will complete primary sources and inquiry professional development. Next, they will meet to discuss their training and build common knowledge. Then, based on shared training, the educators will develop inquiry topics and create kits to promote student inquiry social studies learning. Lastly, they will implement inquiry learning activities through the use of materials they have created and primary sources from the Library of Congress and other sources. Opening Pandora’s Box will benefit both public school students and pre-service teachers. 

Grant Contact: William R. Cranshaw, Ed.D., Social Studies Program Manager (K-12), Division of Academic Standards

Georgia Department of Education Teaching with Primary Sources is participating with 4 other states as part of the Social Studies Assessment, Curriculum, and Instruction collaborative under the Council of Chief State School Officers, to develop a pool of teachers and resources to improve instruction in United States History through the use of primary sources. The project also aligns with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Literacy for History/Social Studies. Approximately 100 teachers will be trained in Georgia at 4 different workshops. These workshops will be held the third week of July in 4 different regions in Georgia: metropolitan Atlanta; suburban Atlanta; a moderately rural area in central Georgia; and rural Southwestern Georgia.   

Jennifer Smith, Education Student, Waynesburg University and,
Amy Thornton (Pohodich), Graduate Assistant, Waynesburg University TPS Program

Emancipation: Effects on Individuals

Grant Contact: Nancy Cole, Education Director, Martha's Vineyard Museum

Being There: Primary Sources in the Classroom will provide face-to-face and on-line professional development workshops for teachers and librarians. These workshops will introduce participants to the wealth of primary sources, lesson plans, programs and virtual workshops available through the Library of Congress and teach them skills to effectively search and access appropriate materials to use with their classes.

The program intends to provide professional development workshops for Martha’s Vineyard educators and librarians in accessing and using primary sources to teach. It will also provide classroom support for teachers who develop and test curriculum materials using primary sources. The project will be presented in three phases, targeting two groups of participants. The project will utilize the technology labs and classroom spaces in the schools to present the workshops.

Grant Contact: Eileen McSwiney, Director, Seefurth Education Center

PRIMARY SOURCES: A Window to the Past will support the use of primary sources from the Library of Congress in ways that foster critical and creative thinking and a love of history.  We plan to address our goal over time. Initially, we will provide teachers and librarians with experiences that address the Teaching with Primary Sources Program (TPS) Level One Goals and some of the Level Two Goals that are connected to the MA Curriculum Framework.  As our experience grows we will move toward establishing a Level Three network within the Collaborative’s member districts.  This project addresses also an objective specified by many of our school district members, that of supporting active student learning with technology. The proposed workshops will foster teacher use of primary source images and video segments in a whole class activity in ways that capture the very visual student audience of today.

Grant Contact: Susan Zeiger, Program Director

Thinking Like a Historian: Primary Sources for Primary Students an online course focusing on immigration history, a topic that is integral to the elementary social studies framework in Massachusetts and other New England states. We seek to develop and increase elementary classroom teachers’ understanding of what a primary source is and how their students can benefit from observing and analyzing primary sources; knowledge of best instructional practices for helping their students learn from primary sources; capacity and confidence to find, select and utilize diverse primary sources in their social studies lesson plans/curriculum; knowledge of the resources available online through the Library of Congress and other historical institutions for teaching the history of immigration in the elementary curriculum.

Grant Contact: Jayne Gordon, Director of Education and Public Programs

The End of Slavery: Documents and Dilemmas
Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS)

Massachusetts Historical Society staff will take 20 documents from the LOC From Slavery to Freedom digitized collections and 20 documents from the MHS African Americans and the End of Slavery and Images of the Antislavery Movement in Massachusetts digitized collections to develop educational materials for teachers based on both institutions’ resources. Working with Boston-area teachers we will create curriculum units that will be available through the MHS website. These materials will then become the core of a full array of professional development programs for educators, including primary-source-based workshops to be held at MHS in 2010, and conference presentations with partners at local and national conferences for historians and educators. MHS also hosts teacher fellows in three different programs each year, and at least one 2010 teacher fellowship will be devoted to expanding curricula around what has already been developed for this project, incorporating new documents from the collections of both repositories.

Grant Contact: Lana W. Jackman, President

The Power to Proclaim: The Impact of Presidential Proclamations on American Life, 1789-2010

The Teaching with Primary Sources 21st Century Skills Project is a collaborative teacher/librarian professional development activity between the National Forum on Information Literacy and North Cambridge Catholic High School (NCCHS), an inner city college preparatory/work study high school. A national model, NCCHS is a member of the Cristo Rey Network, an association of 24 college preparatory high schools across the country in which students work to earn tuition and gain real world experience.

The theme for this 21st century skills TPS project is The Power to Proclaim: The Impact of Presidential Proclamations on American Life, 1789-2010. The primary aim of this project is to introduce NCCHS instructional faculty to the 21st century information/digital literacy skill set needed to design and implement a guided inquiry teaching and learning process that enables high school students to critically and creatively use the primary sources of the Library of Congress. Preparing students and teachers for the new demands of the 21st century Information Society underscores the importance of utilizing the combined skill set of information/digital literacy and applying that skill set across the broad spectrum of academic and workplace teaching and learning. The Teaching with Primary Sources Program offers the ideal context in which to successfully advance the information and digital literacy skills of both teachers and students alike.

Amy Thornton (Pohodich), Graduate Assistant, Waynesburg University TPS Program

Thanksgiving Lesson Plan

Grant Contact: Charles O’Bryan, DCMO BOCES, School Library System Coordinator

Bringing Primary Sources to Life in a K-12 Library: the Delaware Chenango Madison Otsego (DCMO) Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) serves over 15,000 public and 500 private school students from 16 public and 2 private school districts. The targeted audience for the primary sources grant is comprised of the 42+ school library media specialists, or teacher/librarians currently working in their component districts.

Additionally, adjoining BOCES’ (BT and ONC) librarians are invited to participate in training. Coordinated offerings were also offered through the Teacher’s Center affiliated with the State University of New York, College of Oneonta . The Teacher’s Center offers professional development to component district’s teachers and to students in teacher training programs.

Grant Contact: Steve Zeitlin, Project Director

Heartland Passage: Utilizing Primary Documents to Teach the Erie Canal is an initiative designed to encourage teachers to draw on the primary resources of the Library of Congress, as well as local resources at the New-York Historical Society, the Erie Canal Museum, and other museums and archives. Funding will enable City Lore to develop lesson plans on using primary documents based on this summer’s “Teaching the Erie Canal in American History Institute” on July 8-11, prior to the start of the grant period. The curriculum materials developed with this grant will be utilized, and workshops on using primary documents workshops will be held at a number of subsequent professional development programs: two “Landmarks in American History” Erie Canal institutes (with 40 teachers each) proposed for the summer of 2009 (we are confident that we will receive the funding); the New York City Department of Education’s “Leadership in American History” Teaching American History programs taking place in the fall of ’08 and throughout ’09 for 40 teachers; and the NYC District 28 professional development program, “American Citizen,” in both in the winter of ‘08 and the spring of ’09 for 30 teachers.

All told, the materials and the primary document workshops will be developed with and for the 150 teachers who will attend the workshops, and many more who will use the materials on City Lore’s web site, http://www.citylore.org/.

Grant Contact: Suzanne Wasserman, Project Director

Remember Me to Herald Square: Gotham Center project will use in person, on-line training of TPS materials. We will use the Library of Congress American Memory and Photograph Collection. Specifically we will use maps from the Map Collection – Cities and Towns -- US – NY State – Manhattan collection as well as the photograph collection which includes images ranging from a 1914 photograph of the northwest corner and Fifth Avenue and 34th Street to a 1959 photograph of 34th Street by the esteemed photographer Andre Kertesz.

Grant Contact: John Buchinger, Associate Director

Connecting Classrooms to Primary Sources through National History Day this professional development project will be disseminated through the School Library Systems, Teacher’s Centers and other targeted listservs.

New York State History Day (NYSHD) also has an extensive statewide network of teachers.  NYSHD will also make these resources available to this network through the use of our mailing list of 500+ teachers, and our Facebook page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cooperstown-NY/New-York-State-History-Day/52450055692
Our Blogs:
http://historydaygal.wordpress.com/
http://historydayguy.wordpress.com/
And our website:
http://www.nyshistoryday.org/

Long term dissemination of project results could include: NYS School Library Media Specialist’s Annual conference, N.E. Regional Social Studies Conference and The New York State Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference, and The October Conference for Teachers, held in Cooperstown, New York.

Grant Contact:  Illana Lane, Ph.D., Acting Dean

Teaching with Primary Sources at Medaille College School of Education serves Western New York. The College is developing a CD that demonstrates how to use the Library of Congress digital primary sources within K-12 classrooms consistent with New York Standards to assist the teachers in providing hands-on, constructivist, inquiry-based lessons across the curriculum in K-6, and in Social Studies 7-12. The College is working with local school districts and their partnership schools to demonstrate the methodology and to give teachers access to the materials. Medaille College is also embedding this unit in each of its graduate and undergraduate programs. Each participant in the training sessions and classrooms will leave with a copy of the CD and additional coaching will be available through the College. These same training and materials are being made available to other area teacher training preparatory colleges and universities

Grant Contact: Karen M. Dutt-Doner, PhD

Increasing pre-service and in-service teachers’ capacity to utilize and implement primary source instruction in the elementary classroom. The project involves a collaborative instructional effort between a team of Education and History faculty members at Canisius College and two Library of Congress Fellows that teach at Nichols School who will work with pre-service teacher candidates enrolled in the Childhood Program and in-service teachers enrolled in advanced master’s Differentiated Instruction Program. 

Both pre-service teacher candidates and in-service teachers will incorporate primary source instruction for either their required field experience or in their own elementary classrooms.

Grant Contact: Thomas Dublin

Teaching with Primary Sources: A U.S. History Professional Development Collaboration will design, implement and evaluate a variety of robust, standards-based professional development activities for teachers, librarians, and M.A.T. students in Social Studies under the umbrella so the Teaching with Primary Sources program of the Library of Congress.

Using the Library of Congress to Support the Study of History through Critical Thinking K-12 is a program dedicated to the collaboration between Library Media Specialists and Social Studies and English Language Arts instructors.  This inquiry based initiative is focused upon research of local history and the incorporation of Library of Congress sources in the classroom.  The project will begin within a well-networked consortium of school districts and teachers.  We will conduct a monthly “History Dinner Club” consisting of six historians presenting lectures on the local aspects of immigration, manufacturing, Native American issues, women’s suffrage, western expansion, and the Underground Railroad.  Local TPS staff will join these historians to link their content to Library of Congress resources. 

In addition, twenty curriculum development mini-grants will be provided for teacher projects utilizing inquiry based methodologies that will be supported by our Library Media Specialists.  The projects will develop new skills connecting regional historical events and materials to national topics and issues represented in the Library of Congress collection.  Projects will be posted upon completion at http://tpsjamestown.wikispaces.com and will be distributed through our affiliates who will permanently house and promote these models through their websites, educational events and newsletters. 

Grant Contact: Christine Woyshner, Ed.D., Associate Professor of Education

Picturing Women: Gender, Images, and Representation in Teaching History with Primary Sources: this project seeks to develop teaching approaches using primary source materials on the Library of Congress Website. The approaches draw on ideas from the fields of museum education, art history, and media studies. They include looking closely at images, switching the gender of those pictured, and juxtapositioning different images together to tell a story or raise questions. Overall, the goals are to help classroom teachers guide students’ questioning of social constructions of gender while developing and supporting their conceptual understanding in history.

During the summer of 2008, the Picturing Women Project invited classroom teachers to adapt the above three approaches to their own teaching and curricula. The resulting project, found on the TPS website, addresses four topics or time periods in history: middle-class African Americans in mid-nineteenth century Philadelphia; women’s suffrage; women and transportation; and women during World War II. The teachers brought looking closely, switching places, and juxtapositions to bear on Library of Congress primary sources such as propaganda posters, photographs, and comic books.

Dr. Woyshner continues to work with teachers in disseminating the three approaches, helping them adapt them to various topics and subjects in the K-12 history and social studies curriculum.

Completed Project: Picturing Women: Gender, Images, and Representation in Teaching History with Primary Sources

Grant Contact: Teresa G. Wojcik, Ph.D.

Digital Windows to the Past: Enhancing the Study of Social Studies and Language Arts through On-Line Primary Sources and WebQuests: with the rapid advancement of technology, primary sources once amassed in distant archival collections are now being made ever more available to teachers.  This project seeks to acquaint pre-service and in-service teachers with the vast on-line resources available at the Library of Congress website and to provide guidance in how to search the collections, properly document findings, and embed primary sources in lessons.  In addition, Digital Windows to the Past seeks to aid teacher education students at both the undergraduate and graduate level in realizing the benefits of WebQuests as a means of integrating primary sources and technology in their teaching. 

Grant Contact: Ann Johnston, Program Specialist, Instructional Technology Services

Creating Inquiry Activities with Primary Sources:  This project involves a train-the-trainer model for professional development of K-12 Social Studies and English/Language Arts teachers in the Lincoln Intermediate Unit (LIU) #12 region (Adams, Franklin, and York Counties).  Two IU-based trainers will receive training to provide professional development for 15 lead teachers from districts within the LIU region to create inquiry-based activities with Library of Congress primary sources. Teachers will participate in face-to-face professional development, as well as collaborate online to continue conversations with each other and share created activities. Ultimately, these created resources will be available for all PA educators through the state-wide social networking site, Keystone Commons. Teachers will be encouraged, as well, to submit their instructional activities to be incorporated into PA’s Standards-Aligned Systems web portal as resources for improving instruction throughout the Commonwealth. Beyond the grant period, LIU will use the capacity built by this grant to continue to offer TPS training to local educators.  

Grant Contact: Rick Bradford, Project Director

Teaching the Compromise of 1850 via Primary Sources is a plan to develop skills necessary to effectively use the Library of Congress primary sources, create effective curriculum incorporating those resources into our instruction, and to share skills learned with students, colleagues, and student teachers we supervise.  Sharing, mentoring, and curriculum writing opportunities with colleagues will allow primary sources to be integrated at all grade levels within the district.

Ann B. Canning, Ed.D., Professor of Education (retired), Waynesburg University

Manchester Academic Charter School Student Projects

The Poetry and Art of Liverpool Street Landmarks
A Collection of Sketches and Poems by Manchester Academic Charter School Students

During this neighborhood walking tour of the historic Manchester neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania , one hundred elementary school students examined architectural details of landmark buildings that were built in the 1870s.  Back in their classroom they wrote poetry and drew charcoal sketches from photographs of those same buildings.  This project was sponsored by the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation.  Funding was provided by the Alfred M. Oppenheimer Memorial Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation.

Growing Up In Manchester

This oral history project brought 7th and 8th grade students from the Manchester Academic Charter School and senior residents of their neighborhood together. In the interviews, students learned about the economic, political and social changes that occurred in this urban community over the past 75 years. Short documentary videos were made using local and national primary source documents archived at Historic Pittsburgh and the Library of Congress.

Ann B. Canning, Ed.D., Professor of Education (retired), Waynesburg University

Ellis Island Project: OASIS Pittsburgh & LOC

Drawn To America

This project combines creative writing with oral history in the documenting of American immigrant stories. Four members of OASIS Pittsburgh, a unique educational program for senior adults wrote their family stories for the Ellis Island- Statue of Liberty Foundation “Tell Us Your Story” project. These stories were then enriched by scanned family photographs and images from the digital archives at the Library of Congress. Each author recorded her own story that was used for the narration of the story videos.

Scott Sakai, Middle School Teacher, Central Greene School District and,
Amy Thornton (Pohodich), Graduate Assistant, Waynesburg University TPS Program

The Lay of the Land

In this lesson, developed for sixth graders, students analyze historical and present-day images and maps of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Visual analysis and higher-order thinking skills are developed as students investigate how natural and man-made influences impact the development of industry in southwestern Pennsylvania.
Lesson Plan

Social History of the United States:
Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?
This publication is meant to serve as a case study—a sampling of the ways pre-service teachers use primary source materials in developing learning activities for the classroom. It is hoped that a thorough analysis of these lessons will provide the reader with examples that lead to further discussion about the various ways primary source materials can be integrated effectively toward the improvement of education in K-12 classrooms.

Secondary social studies pre-service educators investigated the struggles America has encountered throughout the nation’s history in striving for racial, ethnic, gender, and social equality. Each pre-service educator used this theme as underpinning for the development of a learning unit focused on a given time period in American history.

Grant Contact: Sigrid Lumbra, Social Studies Coordinator, Vermont Department of Education

The Vermont Social Studies Inquiry Collaborative will bring teachers, historians, and content/assessment specialists together around the goal of increasing student performance in the area of historical inquiry, specifically through the use of primary source documents. The group will work together to create performance tasks and related instructional materials that focus on elementary-level Vermont History.

A 3-day summer workshop series will introduce teachers to Vermont history content, primary source analysis, and historical inquiry. The workshop will be followed up by online collaboration and 2 in-person workshops through the fall of 2009 as teachers classroom-test their lessons.

Grant Contact: Diane Kemble, Education Coordinator

Vermont and the Nation-Investigating Our History
The Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation will extend its history education programming to incorporate inquiry activities based on primary sources. The new Coolidge Museum and Education Center, scheduled to open on August 7, 2010, is positioned to serve as a site for teacher workshops, educational conferences, meetings and as an active resource to model the use of primary sources through activities with students on class trips, families, and the public. The compelling topics of history will be the inspiration for competent and purposeful reading and expressive and skillful writing, all in line with the Vermont Standards.

Initially the goal is to design a program of teacher workshops that can serve as an introduction to using primary source documents and that will build to serve the developing needs of educators. Integrating history activities with language arts is a way to strengthen reading, writing, and social studies. The program will be sustainable as a primary source activity will become a component of student visits to the site and at least one primary source workshop or program will become a regular part of the Coolidge Foundation’s education offerings. Another outcome is that as the Education Coordinator and volunteers become more adept at using primary sources themselves, more research possibilities about President Coolidge and his era become available.

Article published in the Rutland Herald, July 30, 2010
Three presentations at the new President Calvin Colidge Museum and Education Center

Grant Contact: Tameka Bradley Hobbs, Program and Education Coordinator, The Library of Virginia

The “Shaping the Constitution” (STC) module will serve as a prototype for a possible series of educational products designed to introduce the wealth of the collections of both the Library of Congress and the Library of Virginia to K-12 audiences, in a compelling, interactive, and accessible form. The module will be designed to be delivered as an interactive web site with the main focus of examining and interpreting primary source documents, with up to 40 archival documents to be presented within the module.

Grant Contact: Mark Hofer, Principal Investigator

The “Historical Scene Investigation” (HSI) project is a collection of freely-available Web-based cases in American history that positions students as investigators of particular events in American history.  In each HSI case, students are presented with a key question (e.g. Who fired the first shot at Lexington Green?), a task, key historical documents, and analysis prompts to help them develop a tentative answer to the key question. With support from the Eastern Regional Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) partnership, three new cases using LOC online collections will be developed.  Strategies developed through the TPS program, as well as ways to differentiate the exercises to better meet the needs of diverse learners in the typical heterogeneous public school classroom, will be implemented. Visit the HSI project at: www.hsionline.org.

Grant Contact: Dr. Monica Brooks, Associate Dean of Libraries

Teaching with Primary Sources at Marshall University: this project will engage 10-12 members of the College of Liberal Arts faculty, several members of the library faculty, and the library’s Information Literacy program in a collaboration that will enhance teaching and learning during the 2007-08 academic year and beyond.

Promoting expansion of the use of primary sources, the MU TPS project will provide faculty with a professional development opportunity that will improve course content and student exposure to resources among the Library of Congress’s expansive collections.

Contact: Dr. Kevin G. Cain, Dean of Teacher Education

Teaching with Primary Sources in Central West Virginia will be utilizing two existing collaborative partnerships, the “K-12 Initiative” and the “Professional Development School ( PDS ) Partnership,” educators from 14 central West Virginia counties will learn from, teach with, and develop learning activities focused on Library of Congress primary source materials. Glenville State College will provide professional development for its education department faculty and for in-service K-12 teachers and librarians, support for classroom integration, and training for pre-service teachers. One highlight of the project is a focus on collaboration among school library staff, K-12 teacher leaders, and student teachers. This multi-faceted approach will provide more opportunities for students to practice analysis of Library of Congress primary sources and to learn about a topic more deeply.

Grant Contact: Robert Waterson, Assistant Professor, Curriculum and Instruction Literacy, College of Human Resources and Education

Teaching with Primary Sources: A Pre-service Teacher Education Program Integration Model at West Virginia University's College of Human Resources & Education will provide faculty as well as student education of TPS. Initiated in Summer 2009, an online workshop designed for WVU faculty delivered Teaching with Primary Sources Basics. The TPS integration model at WVU targets pre-service teachers enrolled in the college of Human Resources & Education’s five year teacher education program. The program will ultimately impact the education of students all over the state of West Virginia and beyond.  Eight faculty members from two departments will participate in the TPS integration at WVU. Four faculty members from Technology Learning & Culture will emphasize the technology education integration concepts of TPS, while another four faculty members from Curriculum & Instruction / Literacy Studies will emphasize the curriculum education integration concepts of the TPS program.

Amy Thornton (Pohodich), Graduate Assistant, Waynesburg University TPS Program

John Brown a Hero?

In this multi-day lesson, students in grades three through five use primary sources to investigate the historical significance of the raid by John Brown and other militia members on the munitions store at Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
Lesson Plan
Student Workbook