If knowledge is the cornerstone of democracy, as Thomas Jefferson was fond of saying, then the Library's Educational Outreach Division is making a significant contribution to supporting his strongly held belief.
The Library of Congress has taken the lead in harnessing technology to bring the countless treasures and boundless knowledge of the largest repository ever assembled to bear on the educational needs of America's young people. The Library of Congress' Educational Outreach Division, a unit of the Office of Strategic Initiatives, is responsible for directing and developing the institution's efforts to make its resources available and useful to the nation's K-12 educators. Over the past decade, Educational Outreach has used digital technology and its collective educational expertise to bring the Library's collections and scholarship into classrooms across the country.
The Mission
Librarian of Congress James Billington met with teachers, students and the public at this year's National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. - Michael R. Savage
"The mission of Educational Outreach is to provide the nation's K-12 educators with the guidance and resources they need to most effectively use primary source materials from the Library's collections in their classrooms, said Elizabeth Ridgway, director of Educational Outreach. "Through digitization, the Library has made millions of items from these collections available to any teacher with an Internet connection. Our division is charged with using our expertise as education specialists to develop a wide range of programming—from workshops to digital learning experiences to teacher-education networks—that will allow educators to identify the best strategies for integrating those primary sources into their curriculum."
"Supporting K-12 education is central to the mission of the Library of Congress," said Jo Ann Jenkins, the Library's chief of staff. "By serving the needs of this crucial audience, the Library fulfills one of its key goals as an educational institution. And if it succeeds in lighting the spark of inspiration in young people, then it can also help ensure the creation of a new generation of scholars and researchers."
"The staff of this division is made up of master teachers, librarians, archivists and educational publishing experts, with more than 100 years of educational experience among them," Ridgway said. "But many also have extensive technology and communications backgrounds, which gives us the ability to reach our core audience through a number of different means and in a variety of environments."
In 2005 alone, Educational Outreach specialists worked with more than 9,000 teachers through nearly 100 workshops held at the Library and in communities across the nation, in addition to the unknown numbers of teachers using online Educational Outreach materials. "And I suspect that those numbers are only going to increase," Ridgway added.
American Memory Web Site and Fellows Program
The Library's current educational outreach efforts have their roots in a program launched shortly after James H. Billington was sworn in as Librarian of Congress in 1987. At Billington's urging, the Library began digitizing selected primary source materials from its Americana collections and in 1990 made them available to 44 schools and libraries across the country on a set of CD-ROMs called American Memory.
Teachers and librarians responded with enthusiasm, and in 1994 the Library undertook its first large-scale World Wide Web publishing initiative, the National Digital Library (NDL) Program. Its objective for 2000 was to place 5 million items from the collections of the Library and its partners on the new American Memory Web site (http://memory.loc.gov), which has since grown to more than 10.5 million items. From its beginnings, one of the primary goals of the NDL Program was to make the Library's primary source materials available and useful to K-12 students and teachers, and a substantial portion of its private-sector funding was set aside for the development of new educational initiatives.
Danna Bell-Russel and Elizabeth Ridgway - Michaela McNichol
In 2000, as part of the celebration of the bicentennial of the Library, the America's Library Web site (www.americaslibrary.gov) was launched to target children and families. America's Library uses the digitized primary sources that are accessible in the American Memory Web site to accompany fascinating stories told in a kid-friendly manner. This interactive site also offers educational games and activities that make history come alive.
At the core of the NDL Program's educational outreach effort was the American Memory Fellows program, which brought 250 master teachers and school library media specialists to the Library from 1997 to 2001. These educators participated in intensive weeklong institutes, working with experts to develop lesson plans based on the Library's digital collections. According to Gail Petri, a 2000 American Memory Fellow and current Educational Outreach staff member, "The Fellows program gave me an opportunity to learn creative ways to use primary sources and introduced me to a network of collaborators from many diverse communities." This network of Fellows continues to spread the word about the Library's educational materials among their colleagues and in their professional development activities. Building on the success of the Fellows program, Congress created An Adventure of the American Mind (AAM), a program that began piloting similar networking projects in 2000, eventually reaching eight states.
"Over the past 10 years, the digitization efforts of the NDL Program have allowed us to bring the Library's collections into homes and classrooms across the nation," said Laura Campbell, associate librarian for Strategic Initiatives, who continues to serve as the director of the National Digital Library Program. Today, with the support of the private-sector community and farsighted members of Congress, we are building on that achievement by delivering Library resources to teachers in new and better ways, as well as by building programs that will inspire master educators to develop innovative teaching strategies for the future."
The Learning Page
The Library's first and most prominent online educational outreach resource, the Learning Page Web site (www.loc.gov/learn/), was the result of the NDL Program's early period of development. From its launch in 1996, the Learning Page has been the primary online destination for teachers seeking to use the Library's collections in the classroom, offering teaching tools and instruction on integrating these historical artifacts into high-quality K-12 learning experiences. More than 70 lesson plans, all of which were created and tested by educators, allow teachers to build single- or multi-day lessons around Library content, while interactive activities, timelines and Webcasts provide historical and cultural context for the Library's materials.
Perhaps the most important role of the Learning Page, however, has been in providing online instruction on the Educational Outreach Division's principal focus, the authentic instructional use of primary sources. Many teachers are familiar with the powerful role primary sources can play in giving students background knowledge of a historical period or in providing concrete examples of what daily life was like in a bygone era. However, in the hands of a prepared educator, the close analysis of primary sources can also help students build information literacy and critical thinking skills, which have become even more important in today's crowded information environment.
Leni Donlan, a digital project coordinator in Educational Outreach, likened the use of primary sources to "touching the past. Teaching with primary sources lets students not only learn more about history, but also learn historical thinking." In 2006, as the Learning Page takes on a new identity as the Library of Congress Teachers Page, it will continue to serve as a vital link to primary source materials for K-12 teachers.
At the same time, the Educational Outreach Division's diverse online efforts are paralleled by the many in-person teacher-education opportunities it provides every year. From workshop sessions at national, state and regional educational conferences to weeklong teacher institutes on the Library's campus, every year Educational Outreach staff members work with thousands of teachers in face-to-face explorations of the Library's educational potential. Ridgway noted that, by working with educators, the Library is able to reach their students more efficiently. "There's a multiplication effect. If 5,000 teachers begin using our collections, then the Library has reached 5,000 classrooms full of students, for six periods a day, possibly for years into the future."
Library Exhibitions in the Classroom
During the past five years, Educational Outreach specialists have collaborated with the Library's Interpretive Programs Office (IPO) to create teacher institutes that focus on the Library's online exhibitions (www.loc.gov/exhibits/). These institutes bring teachers from across the country together to explore the rich exhibition content in-depth.
Susan Mordan-White, an education specialist for IPO, explained that the coordinated effort allows the Library to create multifaceted programming that continues well after the real-time portion of an institute ends.
"Educational Outreach is instrumental in helping us develop hands-on activities for teachers and lending their expertise to in-person presentations," she said. "The Educational Outreach staff also create lasting digital assets that teachers can continue to use, such as Web activities for the Learning Page and collections of relevant resources to guide further teacher research."
Left, teachers examine a panoramic photograph as part of the "Song of America" teacher institutes; right, Janice Ruth from the Manuscript Division shows teachers from around the country several of the Library's unique documents related to women's history. - Gail Petri
Music in the Classroom
In 2005, Educational Outreach and the Library's Music Division participated in the "Song of America" tour (see Information Bulletin, September 2006), the Librarian's collaborative effort with renowned baritone Thomas Hampson. This ambitious 11-city musical and educational cross-country concert tour, which featured the renowned baritone Thomas Hampson, highlighted the Library's unparalleled collections of American song through performances, master classes and exhibits of one-of-a-kind song sheets, poems, photographs and recordings.
To take advantage of this opportunity to reach new audiences, Educational Outreach and Music Division specialists developed teacher institutes that would introduce educators to the best ways of bringing music and poetry-related primary sources into their curriculum. Cheryl Lederle-Ensign of Educational Outreach helped create and lead several of the half-day and full-day institutes.
"Teachers were given facsimiles of primary-source song and poetry materials from our collections, along with analysis tools, and encouraged to ask analytical questions about the documents: When were they written? For what purpose? What was the intended audience? What does this document tell us about what life was like during this period in history? We found that working with primary sources brought out the historians in our institute participants, and once they'd been encouraged to explore the documents they dug in deep and made discoveries that surprised us all," she said.
The success of the "Song of America" teacher institutes has sparked further collaborations between Educational Outreach and the Music Division, and has extended the life of "Song of America" programming far beyond the end of the concert tour. Stephanie Poxon, a music specialist in the Music Division, reported that she and Educational Outreach staff members had led song- and poetry-related videoconferences as late as August 2006, months after the final tour dates. "It's such a rewarding experience to work directly with teachers," Poxon said. "It's gratifying to be able to see firsthand the impact the Library's materials can have in creating new thinking in the classroom, and the ideas generated by the educators we work with have helped inform the ways we look at our own collections."
Gail Petri with a young visitor to the National Book Festival. - Michael R. Savage
Teaching with Primary Sources Program
The Library's most recent Educational Outreach undertaking is perhaps its most ambitious and far-reaching. In September 2006, the Library held the inaugural meeting of the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program, a multistate effort to help pre-service and in-service teachers learn the best practices for using primary sources in the classroom. Vivian Awumey, the coordinator of the program, said that, under the TPS program, "the Library is working with a consortium of universities and other educational organizations to create professional development opportunities for teachers. The focus of these activities is to enhance the ability of teachers to embed primary sources into high-quality, inquiry-based instruction."
The Teaching with Primary Sources program, which builds on the lessons learned from the AAM pilot, currently has 15 partners in five states, but, according to Campbell, "Our goal is to create partnerships in all 50 states and the District of Columbia." Meanwhile, teachers in states without partners will be able to take workshops and courses online through a virtual institute that brings teachers together using advanced networking technologies, including Internet2.
Summing up, Awumey described the TSP program in terms that Jefferson might approve: "I see this as fundamentally a program that creates good citizens—citizens who can analyze and think critically, and who develop an appreciation for American thought and achievement."
An inspired reader shares her experiences on a giant graffiti wall during the National Book Festival. - Michael R. Savage
