connecting k-12 students & teachers with online archival material
TRANSCRIPT
ConnectingK-12 Students & Teachers
withOnline Archival Material
Matt [email protected]
twitter: @herbison
Legacy Center, Archives & Special CollectionsDrexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia
SAA 2012 San DiegoSession 2082012 Aug 09
See slides at bit.ly/ARCHK12
...which means
Students say...
I felt like a detective!
...I was thinking critically about documents.
The old photo was more real!
...I have a sense of authenticity & original-ness.
I got angry!
...I was personally engaged and excited.
Exploring history through primary sources
Students need this...and Teachers too
Doing History.
More than Historical Thinking...
Critical Thinking!
Teachers benefit by combining their expertise with our expertise.
There's a new emphasis on the use of primary documents in the teaching of K-12 history.(Common Core School Standards - CoreStandards.org)
(See NARA talk at SAA Session 402)
We can learn from museums
Museum educators connect their objects with K-12 audiences all the time.
We should be doing this too.
Interpretation…in a museum sense.
What we're doing at theDrexel University Med School Archives
How do we connect with K-12 online?
Planning grant and new implementation grant from the Heritage Philadelphia ProgramProgram of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage,
supporting public history practice in the Philadelphia region.
Worked with groups of students and teachers to get their input through in-class story-testing sessions, surveys, and focus groups.
Where we're starting from
Custom-grown digital collections system(from IMLS grant 7+ years ago)
It works well for our typical researchers
But our metadata, interface, and featuresfail for K-16 users
(and other novice users)
Wait.
You are in 9th grade.
Who are Eliza & Matilda?
Archives' online collections are too hard for teachers & students to use.
We can do much better in making our digital collections:
AccessibleUseful
Engaging
…essential for K-12 users
Online - Students & Teachers Want
• CONTEXT - Why should I care about this?
• Video & Audio
• Transcripts, even for scanned typescripts – need to be easy to read and copy
• Easy to grab & use images from website
• Good balance of images and text("good" might mean 2-10 images for 1 text)
• Teachers tear apart lesson plans for their context and primary sources. Should we make things more a la carte?
Digital History Toolkit
Where we’re heading – based on our findings
Interpretive layer on top of revamped digital collections database>>>Driven by Story-based pages
Improved item-level pages
Digital History ToolkitInterpretive layer on top of revamped digital
collections database
• Improved item-level pageso Context to answer "Why does this matter?"o Easy to grab and use images and text
• Story-based pageso Gather, connect, and contextualize several items
that support the storyo Place in time and geographicallyo Prompts to help explore documents and connections
• Later phases of development will add more options for guided discovery
You should do this. You can do this.No matter where you work.
All it takes to start:
• a good story with several supporting documents
• the historical context
• a connection with a teacher
Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) Symposium:Engaging Students & Teachers: Integrating PrimarySources in K-16 Curricula (archivists & teachers mingling!)October 18-20 in Cincinnati, OHMidwestArchives.org
So you're interested in the K-12 audience...
Also Session 402 at 10:00am tomorrow in Sapphire AB will touch on some of these topics, including field experience for pre-service Social Studies teachers in archival institutions
Reference Access Outreach (RAO) Section meetingat 3:30pm today in Sapphire 400...the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) discussion group
ConnectingK-12 Students & Teachers
withOnline Archival Material
Matt [email protected]
twitter: @herbison
See slides at bit.ly/ARCHK12
Special bonus slides…
Come for the contentStay for the process
Are the students learning content, process, research skills? Is it an intro to your repository?(See BHS talk at SAA Session 402)
All counts towards critical thinking.
Starting points:
Not: Is there bias? More: What is the bias?
Easy starting point: WDYK? WDYWYK?
(What do you know? What do you wish you knew?)
Structured document analysis approaches are an easy place for you to dive in.
Systematic approaches for analyzing primary sources
• Library of Congress - Teacher’s Guides and Analysis Tool
• National Archives - Document Analysis Worksheets
• SCIM-C Historical Inquiry strategy (a favorite; too thorough!)
• Stripling Model of Inquiry
• UC-Irvine History Project - The “6 C’s”
• Primary vs Secondary sources at Princeton, handy dandy examples
• Peter Pappas’ Teaching With Documents website
• Nikki Lamberty at Carleton College
• John I. Brooks at Fayetteville State University
• Brooklyn Connections @ BPL - Independent Research Project Packet (another favorite starting point, worksheet based)
• many more