Teaching with Primary Sources
The Library of Congress’s Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program works with a number of colleges, universities, school systems and other providers of professional development for teachers. The TPS consortium partners, including Mars Hill, help teachers use the Library’s vast collection of digitized primary sources to enrich their classroom instruction. We are committed to bringing teachers and school library media specialists professional development with primary sources as its central focus. Pre-service teacher are introduced to the Library’s materials a number of times during their course work.
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.
Primary sources are all around us – in our homes, communities, libraries and museums. The primary sources found at the Library of Congress include documents and books, correspondence, newspapers, advertisements, maps, pamphlets, speeches, public records and music, as well as visual arts items like photographs, paintings, cartoons and films. More than 13 million of these are digitized and accessible by computer.
Why should we use Primary Sources?
Primary sources make your classroom come alive by providing an unfiltered record of artistic, social, scientific and political thought and achievement, produced by people who lived during that period.
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. In analyzing primary sources, students move from concrete observations and facts to making inferences about the materials.
What can MHC TPS do?
The TPS staff, TPS advisory board and Mars Hill College faculty are working together to bring classroom-tested primary source activities to your classroom. In a series of snap-together modules, we can create a custom workshop that connects your students with the past and makes learning fun and engaging.