The Primary Source Librarian

Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on January 2, 2012

I just returned yesterday from a one-week stay in Oaxaca, Mexico, where I experienced an extraordinary art exhibit by Alejandro Santiago.

Artist Alejandro Santiago, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco

During my family’s first walk into the center of Oaxaca, we noticed policemen unloading truckloads of clay figure sculptures and carefully laying them down on the street in front of the Santo Domingo de Guzman Church. By the end of the day, there were hundreds of these sculptures, now standing throughout the pedestrian area near the church. Policemen guarded them. Visitors took their photographs with the figures. Many simply stared in silent contemplation. Others walked among them.

A passerby told us that she had heard that each one represented a Mexican worker killed by American border guards while trying cross into the United States. For several days we accepted her explanation, but it was quite simply wrong!

When I teach about the use of primary sources to promote critical thinking, the idea of “sourcing” sometimes comes up. Did the lady with the wrong information represent a primary source much like an oral history or was this only her opinion? Did she have firsthand knowledge of the art exhibit or of the artist? As a learner, I needed to check her “facts” by collecting evidence from multiple sources.

The search for the truth about the exhibit led me to several fascinating sources:

• Alejandro Santiago’s Web Site
• A Brief Comment on the Significance of the Project, by Jorge Pech Casanova
• A 2009 Art Culture International article by Scott Norris
• A documentary trailer for 2,501 Migrants: A Journey – Director/Producer Yolanda Cruz
• A study guide for the documentary

If you skim the Web sites and watch the trailer, you will learn that Alejandro Santiago did not intend to make any political statement. His motivation was purely artistic and cultural. Two thousand five hundred of the figures represent the inhabitants of his native Zapotec village of Teococuilco — more than half the population — who left to find work in northern Mexico and in the United States. The single remaining figure represents Santiago himself.

I hope my readers will spend a few minutes following the above links to this remarkable story. How could you use this story to help students understand the impact of immigration on the Mexican families that remain behind? In all the American political hoopla about illegal immigration, is theirs the story that is not being told? I think the potential for deep and difficult conversations and learning is all here in this artist’s story.

In addition, here are three photos of the exhibit from my iPhone:

La Ruta del Migrante

Exhibit in Front of Santo Domingo Church

Exhibit along Pedestrian Street

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Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on November 30, 2011

One of the disadvantages of working as an education consultant is the temptation to dwell in a world of theory. I once asked a school superintendent and superb conference speaker if he had ever considered committing to a full-time speaking circuit. He responded, “Absolutely not. I’d give myself six months to become completely irrelevant.” Ouch.

To fight against this idea of irrelevance, I value and welcome every possible opportunity to learn from the real teacher soldiers in our school trenches. Every workshop I present teaches me something about a teacher’s reality:

• A teacher who taught 6th grade mathematics last year and 7th and 8th grade social studies this year — the curse of the “highly qualified” teacher.
• A librarian who worked for years to build a strong open-schedule program only to be ordered to return to a fixed schedule as a “specials” teacher.
• A teacher hired at the last minute to ease the 40-students-per-class load of two grade levels.
• A teacher assigned to the inclusion class at her grade level, with seven severe needs kids and an aide added to her class.
• Several teachers who did not yet know their teaching assignments two weeks from the beginning of a school year.

Not every teacher’s reality is negative, but I am constantly reminded that every teacher encounters a unique set of challenges that can change vastly from year to year. In one recent workshop I met Native American teachers at a pueblo school, a teacher who was adjusting to what he perceived as huge differences in his students’ background knowledge from one state to the next, and a teacher who had dealt with a dangerous fight the previous day.

The young pre-service teachers in a workshop I did just yesterday were excited and a bit nervous, I think, about their upcoming practice teaching experiences. During my trip home, I wondered how much they really understood about the world of teaching they were about to enter. And yet, each one of them was present for a rather grueling 8-hour workshop during “Dead Week” — the week before final exams. That already says something about their resilience and commitment. They’re going to need it.

No matter who comes to my workshops about teaching with primary sources, I am grateful to each one for keeping my feet on the ground and for enriching my own professional life with their stories.

Elementary school children standing and watching teacher write at blackboard, Washington, D.C., ~1899, Library of Congress

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Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on November 15, 2011

I want to pass on three blogs that I regularly read for their teaching ideas and valuable links to primary sources.

I hope you’ll add these to your own RSS feeds. Just look for this RSS icon to subscribe:

• Teaching with The Library of Congress

This is a relatively new blog written by Library of Congress Educational Resource Specialists and other expert contributors. The posts appear every few days, and they are all of the absolute highest quality. They’re filled with links to primary sources. Many of them connect to events or holidays, and because they are so timely, they can rescue a teacher with a “just-in-time” lesson idea. For example, just for the month of November, you can find ideas for Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, and Native American Heritage Month. Over time, you can also pick up ideas for getting started with primary sources, find primary source analysis tools, and discover hidden treasures that simply enrich your understanding of the Library of Congress collections.

• Letters of Note  

Shaun Usher edits this fun and informative blog, and I look forward to reading a historical letter every weekday on this site. Shaun writes in his description of the blog: “Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at.” In the past month I’ve read a letter from an American soldier daddy on Adolf Hitler’s personal stationery, an early informal resume from Madonna, a letter from Jimi Hendrix to his father, a leaked Jeffrey Katzenberg letter trying to refocus the Walt Disney company, an Albert Einstein letter to the father of a boy who has just died of polio, and many more. The variety of topics and famous people make for fascinating learning. You can follow Shaun on Twitter @lettersofnote.

• Random Thoughts: Change, Primary Sources & Other Stuff

Like me, author Mary Alice Anderson is a former American Memory Fellow, and she is also an enthusiastic proponent of teaching with primary sources. In fact, she teaches a course called “Teaching with Primary Sources” at the University of Wisconsin – Stout. She has long been a leader in the school library world, and I’ve followed her writing for the past twenty years. Her blog offers an interesting mix of field trips, primary source teaching ideas, and school library issues.

If you enjoy reading other blogs about primary sources in teaching, I hope you’ll pass them on through the comments. Thanks!

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Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on October 5, 2011

Something has been bothering me about QR codes. When teachers first learn about QR codes, they immediately start thinking of all the ways they can use them to make learning more exciting. Their minds race ahead to projects with QR codes, scavenger hunts with QR codes, QR codes that introduce students to new concepts, and much more. Just let the kids use the cool tools and the cool iPods or iPads or smartphones and school will be wonderful.

Sounds good. So what’s my problem with all these ideas for using QR codes?

They are all teacher-directed. The teacher chooses the questions. The teacher finds the answers. The teacher makes the QR codes. The student receives. I don’t really see this scenario as an improvement over the lecture method.

Furthermore, if students are working with primary sources, teacher-provided QR codes do not take the place of solid historical analysis. They’re not much different from reading a textbook description of a primary source.

What if we instead encouraged students to gain understanding of a primary source by selecting resources that build context? What if the students had to debate the merits of their choices of contextual resources? How would a group set norms to justify one choice over another? Should they write a caption for a primary source photograph or a contextual paragraph for each primary source? These decisions could all precede QR code production.

Only after hashing out decisions about which sources best explain a concept or fill in the historical context around a primary source would the students…yes, the students…produce their QR codes.

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Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on September 14, 2011

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Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on May 28, 2011

Hmm. Is it possible that a blog post in WordPress can be too long? I hope my readers will click on the “More…” link in the last post. Now I’m going to try posting the photos here. Oh, for a little more coding knowledge!

Juvigny 1918. Some villages we visited were reconstructed, while others had not suffered much damage during the Great War. In a tiny 11th century church in Drovegny, a French woman told us that there had been very little damage to her village. She did say that supply trains had gone through the valley nearby.

Juvigny Today. Juvigny is a tiny village that was located on a strategic hill overlooking a large plateau. This made the capture of Juvigny an essential step in retaking territory previously held by the Germans.

Trenches near Juvigny Today. I’m not certain that these were old trenches. The farm land is quite flat near Juvigny, but ravines and woods remain. Soldiers had to clear out the woods of German machine gun nests after the battle was essentially over. Since Anton Bastian died a day after the “end” of the battle, I think it is possible that he was in the woods nearby when he died. Poppies bloom everywhere today.

Road to Roncheres. Anton Bastian began fighting between Roncheres and Fismes on the Vesle River in early August, 1918. Because the Germans held the high ground, the fighting here was fierce and deadly. The bravery of the 32nd Division soldiers here earned them the name of “Les Terribles” from the French 1st Army general.

Monument to Quentin Roosevelt, Son of Theodore Roosevelt. Quentin died July 14, 1918, near the village of Chamery. Across the road is an old stone farm.

Note: If you missed the narrative that accompanies the photos above, go to “A Personal Memorial Day Journey Part 1.”

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Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on May 28, 2011

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Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on April 5, 2011

I’ve been thinking lately about how often our students experience the joy that comes with connected learning. Nothing delights me more than those moments when I can connect whatever sources I’m reading, listening to, or viewing with each other and with my world. Here’s a recent example:

• I’m listening to an Audible.com book of Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand.
• I just finished reading the Kindle version of  For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, by Frederick Brown.
• I’m currently reading the hardcover version of Chicago: A Biography, by Dominic A. Pacyga.
• I’m working with a team from Teaching with Primary Sources at Metro State to build a workshop on inquiry using primary sources on the theme of revolution. We’re building a wiki around the Industrial Revolution.
• As part of the workshop, we’ll be looking at Barbara Stripling’s Inquiry Model, which begins with CONNECT!
  • Connect to self, previous knowledge.
  • Gain background and context.
  • And I would add “Make connections between and among learning pieces.”

So what connects these seemingly disparate pieces of my learning at the moment? Let my illustrate just a few ways I’ve made connections:

• Louis Zamperini, hero of Unbroken, was the kind of student who would have driven most teachers crazy. He was a real pill, even what one might have called a juvenile delinquent.
  

  Louis Zamperini, America in WWII, http://www.americainwwii.com/stories/luckylouie.html

  BUT…he was also a perfect model for “critical thinking and problem solving” – you know, the kind of student we are trying to create! In the chapter I’ve just finished, Louis ties two parachutes to his severely crippled and bullet-ridden bomber to deploy in case there’s not enough hydraulic fluid left to brake before the end of a too-short runway on a tiny Pacific atoll. No matter what came out of the Industrial Revolution, creative problem solvers like Louis Zamperini will always push the limits of technology. Our students are still doing that today, long after the Industrial Revolution.

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, 1893

• In For the Soul of France, politics and industry are intimately linked. A long section on the life of Gustave Eiffel made me appreciate his élan and his brilliance far beyond his “Eiffel Tower” achievement. You must read this book to discover how everything connects: politics, the Catholic church, the growth of cities, republicanism, monarchism, anti-semitism, industry, the military leadership, and even Eiffel.

• The Chicago book is the complete Industrial Revolution package. Nearly everything I’ve read so far connects with the ideas in all the other sources I’ve mentioned. Canals, railroads, the growth of cities, labor relations, tycoons, sanitation, transportation, Chicago as emporium to the West, competition, environmental impacts, immigrant workers, child labor, minority groups,war,  factories, inventions, energy, power, capitalism…I don’t know where to begin.

• All of these sources have informed my current work with Teaching with Primary Sources at Metro State (TPS). For example, I contributed a list of historical search terms for use with the Library of Congress collections based on my reading. One of the most important points to make with kids when they’re searching for primary sources is that they’re not working with Google. Databases of primary sources are quite unforgiving. You must match search ideas to the terminology of the time period. That’s why I offered the list below to the TPS folks who were doing much of the searching:

canals, plank roads, sewers, docks, wharfs, bridges, railroads, reaper, smoke, smoke stacks, manufacturing, factories, mechanical, iron, laborers, iron finishers, lumber, steel, power, trade, economic development, bricks, agricultural implements, steam boilers, steam power, ship building, capital, (un)skilled workers, (un)skilled laborers, commerce, hoisting machine, ovens, “Automaton Bakery,” hopper, stockholders, enterprise, production, drainage, pollution, tunnels, workers, labor, labor unrest, unions, strikes, child labor, factories, tenements, immigrant workers, cities, saloons, merchants, trade, meatpacking, steelmaking, mining

So I’m making all sorts of connections, and I’m having a ball.

Am I just an oddity, or can our students experience this same kind of joy at making connections?

Is this something we can teach?

How can we help students CONNECT pieces of learning to each other and to their own experience?

What tools and strategies can help us help them CONNECT?

What do you do in your teaching to enable your students to CONNECT during their daily inquiries?

When Learning Connects

Detail of Alexander Graham Bell’s Telephone Sketch

Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress 1862-1939

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Tags: Chicago, Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel, Industrial Revolution, inquiry, Laura Hillenbrand, Louis Zamperini, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival Resilience and Redemption

Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on February 23, 2011

Last week I helped out at an all-day workshop in Denver for 3rd and 4th grade teachers called “The Hispanic Experience in Colorado.” The grant-funded workshop was the result of a collaboration among History Colorado, the Center for Colorado and the West at Auraria Library, and Teaching with Primary Sources – Colorado (Library of Congress). The teachers who attended are required to teach Colorado history, and they seemed truly grateful to discover ways to enrich their lessons with Hispanic materials.

As presenters, we had a few goals. First, we wanted to introduce teachers to the new legislature-approved Colorado State Social Studies Standards that took effect in December, 2010. Second, we wanted to show participants some of the rich resources available at the Library of Congress as well as those that the Center for Colorado and the West has been collecting to fill significant gaps in the Western history collections of the Denver Public Library. Third, we wanted to help participants learn ways to incorporate primary sources into their teaching.

I’m excited not only about the wonderful Hispanic resources that we introduced to the teachers, but also about the next six weeks of online follow-up training. Teachers will be developing lessons based on their “annotated resource sets,” and they will be sharing them with the “TPS Connect” group online.

I was thrilled that our workshop was covered by Yesenia Robles, a reporter from the Denver Post. You can imagine, then, how shocked I was at the 127 often rambling and astonishingly vitriolic comments that followed the Denver Post article. You’d have thought our workshop was all about turning the United States government over to illegal immigrants! Some of the comments just sickened me. So much for reasoned public discourse. Sigh.

At any rate, I did learn some interesting facts from our workshop speakers about the history of Hispanics in Colorado, so I think I’ll pass them along here:

• Historians today prefer the term “borderlands history.”
• Hispano history in Colorado goes from south to north rather than from east to west as is normally the focus of “westering.”
• San Luis, founded in 1851, is the oldest non-Native American community in Colorado.
• The R & R Grocery in San Luis was founded in 1857. It still exists.
• Denver proper was 38% Latino in the 2010 census. Denver metro was 13% Latino.
• “I didn’t cross the border; the border crossed me.”
• In 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, the governor of Colorado closed the southern state border to anyone coming north who spoke Spanish. The fear was that the Spanish speakers would take what few jobs were available. (Hmm. Where have we heard this argument?)
• Hispano traders dominated the trade along the Santa Fe Trail.
• A man named Rivera made the first mining expedition into Colorado in 1765.
• The first Colorado State Constitution was written in three languages – English, Spanish, and German!

Obviously, I have much more to learn. To that end, tomorrow I plan to pick up a book at the public library that one speaker recommended: No Separate Refuge, by Sarah Deutsch.

And I will keep telling myself, “You cannot argue with a closed mind.” And I’ll take a deep breath.

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection

Young Spanish-American Potato Picker, Rio Grande County, Colorado, 1939

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Tags: Auraria Library, Colorado, Denver Post, History Colorado, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census

Posted By Mary, The Primary Source Librarian on February 9, 2011

Two days ago I attended a grant planning meeting for “The Hispanic Experience in Colorado” – a collaboration among Teaching with Primary Sources-Colorado, The Center for Colorado & the West, and History Colorado. We developed an agenda for a one-day face-to-face workshop, to be followed by six weeks of online collaboration. We are expecting about forty 4th grade teachers to attend.

Why 4th grade teachers? Because they teach Colorado History.

Why “The Hispanic Experience in Colorado?” Because in spite of a major Hispanic presence in the state since long before people of European ancestry moved West, Hispanic history has rarely been taught. Typically in 4th grade Colorado State History, kids learn about Mesa Verde, Native Americans, pioneer ranchers, mining, and…get this…dinosaurs!

Because our Colorado History Museum has been closed during the demolition of the old building and the construction of a new History Colorado Center, the History Colorado staff has been working from temporary quarters. Much of their work has focused on developing exhibits for the new museum. According to History Colorado’s ”Moving Memories 2009/2010 Annual Report“:

“Staff lived up to History Colorado’s new exhibit development model—“audience first”—by launching four audience research projects. Staff and volunteers engaged with more than 400 patrons of museums, libraries, and coffee shops to examine their knowledge, interest level, and perspectives about History Colorado’s exhibit and program concepts.

Based on that research, staff developed a History Colorado Center exhibit plan that will invite audiences to experience Colorado history thematically—by meeting people throughout the state and the places they have built; discovering the landscape that has shaped us and that we have shaped; and exploring the dreams, visions, and folklore that Colorado has always inspired in the people who have come here.”

I learned in our planning meeting that History Colorado soon noticed a distinct lack of primary sources from the Hispanic communities they sought to include. As a result, they sent out a researcher to gather photographs and other artifacts from Hispanic communities throughout the state. They also added metadata so the resources can be easily shared online. I was delighted with the photographs that I viewed during the meeting, and I’m convinced that this effort will fill in a major gap in our visual knowledge of Hispanic culture, labor, and civil rights in Colorado.

As the staff develops exhibits, they will also develop Web-based curricula and educational outreach programming. Hence the grant mentioned above.

Sadly, museums across the country are suffering from the high-stakes testing squeeze put on social studies curriculum. Our 4th graders are lucky to receive 25 minutes per week of social studies instruction. This situation creates some difficult logistical challenges, such as:

• If we start with the new Colorado history standards, will teachers be overwhelmed?
• If we start with the typical social studies topics covered in 4th grade, will teachers resist unfamiliar Hispanic content?
• How do we insert Hispanic materials and content into 25 minutes a week?

We wrangled through some of these difficulties, and we’ll soon see how effective our plan is. We’ll be doing the first workshop next week (Feb. 17th).

Wish us luck!

“Bunch of genuine old-time cowboys and bronco busters at Denver, Colorado” – 1905

Prairie Settlement Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters

American Memory, Library of Congress

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