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Teaching with Primary Sources

Illinois

  • DeKalb County History Center

    Arts in Action - National History as Local Examples

    By exploring national themes with local history that considers multiple perspectives, this workshop led by the DeKalb County History Center and Ellwood House Museum helped teachers build students’ critical thinking skills, strengthen the school-community bond, and expand opportunities to collaborate with one another. Using inquiry methods, Dr. VanGorder explored how local history lessons can be “teachable moments” that inform the national narratives that are already taught. Resources and presentations from the “Arts in Action” program, focused on local Black and Latino narratives, aided in constructing knowledge to illustrate how local stories can be woven into the larger fabric of American history narratives using Library of Congress resources. This workshop provided teachers with the tools to work with students in an engaging manner while connecting traditionally “unheard voices” to national themes with local examples.

    Contact: Michelle Donahoe

  • Western Illinois Museum

    Building Bridges to the Past: Teaching with Primary Sources and Public History Collaborations

    The Western Illinois Museum's grant project utilizes primary sources as teaching tools to provide educators with the means to offer students a direct connection to historical events, voices, and perspectives that have shaped their community. Connecting with K-12 and pre-service teachers surrounding the town of Macomb, workshops and labs encourage educators to create public history projects with their students, bridging the gap between the classroom and community and inspiring a collective sense of identity and heritage for all participants.

    Contact: Sue Scott

  • Chicago History Museum

    Finding, Analyzing, and Constructing History: A Seminar for History Day Teachers

    This event, held by the Chicago History Museum, was primarily intended for National History Day teachers or librarians in grades 6-12, but all were welcome! This two-day seminar introduced teachers to the new publication Finding, Analyzing, and Constructing History: A Research Guide for Students and Library of Congress digital collections suitable for the upcoming History Day theme, "Frontiers in History: People, Places, Ideas." The seminar used tools from the new publication and the Library's digital collections to explore how teachers can use the Library's resources to support History Day researchers. Participants accessed primary sources in different formats using the Library's "Observe, Question, Reflect" model and National History Day's "Frontiers" theme. 

    Contact: Crystal Johnson

  • Edwardsville Community Unit School District 7

    Teaching and Learning the Black Experience in the United States Through Primary Sources

    In this project awarded to the Edwardsville Community Unit School District 7, six middle and high school social studies teachers worked collaboratively to design inquiry-based lesson plans for an elective course in Black History offered to students at Edwardsville High School. The lesson plans featured primary sources from five key historical epochs of Black life in the United States: (1) enslavement; (2) Antebellum Black life, Civil War, and Reconstruction; (3) Post-Reconstruction to World War II; (4) Civil Rights Movement; and (5) Contemporary Black America.

    Contact:  Alexander Cuenca

  • Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law

    Using Primary Sources: Understanding the LGBTQ+ Equality Movement

    Using primary sources, the Constitutional Democracy Project at Illinois Tech's Chicago-Kent College of Law held a series of professional development sessions. Participants created lesson plans that explore the place of the LGBTQ+ equality movement in American history, milestones for the LGBTQ+ community, and court cases that secured civil rights for LGBTQ+ people. The content they created met the Illinois LGBTQ history mandate.

    Contact: Tristan Kirvin

  • Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

    Cultivating Future Historians: Using Primary Sources to Teach Historical Thinking Skills

    This project awarded to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum invited twenty-one K–12 and pre-service social studies educators to join the APLM for an exciting immersion into the world of historians and the archives. During a workshop, they used the Library of Congress’s primary sources and classroom materials to examine the role of the historian as well as the methods and skills they use to reconstruct the past. Participants also created effective, primary source-based instructional opportunities for students.

    Contact: Heather Nice

  • National Louis University

    Leveraging Primary Sources to Empower Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) Students in STEM Project

    In this project, the National College of Education (NCE) at National Louis University (NLU) offered professional learning experiences for pre- and in-service teachers.Five NCE faculty members worked collaboratively with two STEM teachers to develop two types of curricular modules. The first set of modules provided an overview of how to leverage visually dominant primary sources to work effectively with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students in STEM. These modules were integrated into the science, math, and English as a Second Language (ESL) methods courses. The second set of modules offered professional development for fifteen in-service STEM teachers (grades 4–8) from Chicago Public Schools with substantial CLD student populations. These modules focused on integrating digital visual literacy, TPS, and CLD strategies for teaching and learning STEM.

    Contact: Xiaoning Chen

  • Illinois State University

    Art of Teaching Critical Views of Women's History

    This project, awarded to Illinois State University, hosted a TPS workshop about the use of discipline-based art education to teach critical views of women’s history in elementary class settings. The project also resulted in the development of an ISU Women in History Workshop website containing a searchable database of lessons.

    Contact: Tom Lucey

  • Champaign-Ford Regional Office of Education #9

    Educating with Evidence en Español

    The Educating with Evidence en Español project was built upon previous funding from the Library of Congress that supported the development of English-language assessments with primary sources. This project by the Regional Office of Education 9 expanded this focus to include English Language Learners (ELLs) and Spanish Language Learners (SLLs) at Southern Illinois University as well as regional, state, and national Two-Way Immersion education programs in PreK–12 schools. For this reason, primary sources from Latin American history and 3D-printed artifacts from an archaeological dig in northern Peru were the key components of the sources participating educators used for curriculum development.

    Contact: Grant Miller

  • DePaul University

    Building a Legacy of Primary Source Literacy in the Chicago Suburbs

    This project, awarded to DePaul University, provided a variety of TPS programming to social studies educators from grades K–12 in the Chicago suburbs. The programs included the full three-level TPS curriculum, conference presentations, and collaborations with local scholars and educational groups. This work helped ensure the sustainability of the Library of Congress's resources and TPS methods in the Chicagoland area.

    Contact: Dave Bates

  • University of Illinois Springfield

    Using Primary Sources: A Collaborative Approach Involving UIS Teacher Education Program, UIS Social Science Faculty, and Springfield Middle and High School Teachers

    The University of Illinois Springfield's social science faculty, along with experienced classroom teachers from grades K–12 as well as pre-service candidates, were brought together to discuss, collaborate, develop, and reflect on inquiry-based lessons that utilized digital primary sources from the Library of Congress. Together with classroom teachers, five faculty members representing different social sciences created online learning modules that were used by teacher candidates enrolled in the course, "Social Studies Methods for the Secondary Classroom." All participants were introduced to strategies for analyzing, interpreting, drawing inferences, and teaching with primary sources.

    Contact: Brian Kahn