Reflecting on Teaching with Primary Sources

On Sunday, 06/29/08, I attended Cheryl Lederie-Ensign and Danna Bell-Russell's workshop on "Teaching with Primary Sources." Both women are educational outreach specialists with the Library of Congress. I learned so much in the workshop, and then I went to their booth in the Exhibit Hall and Cheryl taught me even more!

I have explored the American Memory project in the past. I used the incredible lesson "To Kill a Mockingbird: A Historical Perspective" two years ago. I modified it a bit in order to differentiate assignments, since all of our freshmen attend the same honors English I class. Since then, I have used photographs from the American Memory project as I teach.

I have struggled with the Library of Congress's website. I find it difficult to find what I am looking for sometimes. Cheryl and Danna gave me so many great search tips and wonderful lessons about how to use the primary source documents in my own classroom.

At one point, Cheryl said, "Texbooks give answers. Primary sources give questions." Because SILSA focuses on inquiry-based education, I was very excited about using primary sources to generate questions and to try to construct meaning from several sources.

In groups, we completed a Primary Source Investigation. Each group had maybe four to six manila folders, each with a copy of a different artifact. All of the artifacts pointed to a single person, place, or event. As my group examined and discussed the artifacts, each group member filled in boxes on a sheet for "I see," "I think that," and "I wonder." My group examined a picture of an Easter card, a picture of a man holding an Easter card like the first, a picture of a page from a poet's journal, a copy of a proof page of "O Captain, My Captain," and a letter to a mother during the Civil War. In the letter, Walt Whitman described to his mother the joy of finding his brother alive after they thought he might have died during a battle. The activity was extremely engaging, and I can't wait to put some of these together for my students!

We also discussed point of view and the importance of knowing about an artifact: who created it? what was happening when it was created? when was it created? and for what purpose was it created? We examined a political document that was a fake ad for Abraham Lincoln, a document about immigrantion statistics that was published by an anti-immigrant group, a filmed re-enactment of a firing squad, two films about the San Francisco earthquake and fire (one fake, one real), a picture of an African-American in which his satchel had been replaced by a watermelon, and several pictures of Billie Holiday. Through all of it, we were carefully examining to the documents in order to determine who created them and why.

Gail Petri, a colleague of Cheryl and Danna, stopped in to share her work with books and primary source documents. She has developed sets of primary sources documents to accompany different picture books and novels. As she reads a book, she notes dates, names, events, places, etc. Later she locates primary sources that correspond to those.

We also talked about how to navigate the Library of Congress website. There are several different areas that have great information for teachers. If you are having trouble locating some information, then use the Ask a Librarian.

(I realize that I refer to these women by their first names and to Konrad Glogowski by his last name in an earlier post. I believe I have done so because Cheryl and Danna were my teachers, and I spent the morning talking with them and learning from them. Konrad Glogowski presented a lecture I attended, so I wasn't introduced to him, and I didn't speak with him.)