The Library of Congress's Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program works with an educational consortium of schools, universities, libraries, and foundations to help teachers use the Library’s vast collection of digitized primary sources to enrich their classroom instruction.
Teaching with Primary Sources builds on the success of the Library's previous outreach initiatives, particularly the American Memory Fellows and An Adventure of the American Mind programs, which reached more than 10,000 teachers.
Professional development opportunities provided under the Teaching with Primary Sources program include workshops, seminars, graduate courses, distance learning courses, and mentoring to teachers of all disciplines.
What Are Primary Sources?
Primary sources are actual records that have survived from the past, like letters, photographs, articles of clothing and music. They are different from secondary sources, which are accounts of events written sometime after they happened.
The primary sources found at the Library of Congress include published and unpublished documents and recordings like books, correspondence, newspapers, advertisements, maps, laws, pamphlets, memoirs, narratives, speeches, public records, and music; as well as visual arts items like photographs, paintings, cartoons and films. Approximately 10,500,000 of these are digitized and accessible by computer.
Why Use Primary Sources?
Students are enthusiastic about learning directly from primary sources. Use of primary sources in instruction guides students toward higher-order thinking and better critical thinking and analysis skills. Studying primary sources helps students form reasoned conclusions, base their conclusions on evidence, and connect documents to their larger context of meaning.
Primary sources make instruction come alive by providing an unfiltered record of artistic, social, scientific and political thought and achievement during the specific period under study, produced by people who lived during that period.
In analyzing primary sources, students move from concrete observations and facts to making inferences about the materials. "Point of view", for example, is one of the most important inferences that a learner can draw. Students consider questions like: What is the intent of the speaker, of the writer, of the photographer or of the musician? How does that color one's interpretation or understanding of the evidence?
"Working with documents like this makes thinking about history a lot more vital. Connections between history and real life happen more by viewing documents like this" 7th Grader, Arlington, VA