Tech Expert Module
By Ashley Watkins
Overview:
One of the most daunting tasks for secondary English teachers lies in making literature both interesting and relevant to students. For novels set in earlier time periods, this can be a significant problem. By using the Library of Congress Digital Collections, however, teachers can give students the historical background knowledge they need to approach a text that takes place in or was written in an earlier time period. The Collections feature primary-source documents in virtually every format imaginable: news articles, advertisements, photographs, manuscripts, political cartoons, and songs, to name a few. Instead of presenting a PowerPoint on the Great Depression to introduce a novel, teachers can use the multimedia found in the Collections to show students what life was like during the era. The Collections can also be used to draw parallels between literature and real life, regardless of a texts' genre. Given the variety of information available on the site, teachers are sure to find sources that will capture students' attention and encourage them to make deep personal connections to the literature studied in class.
How to Get Started with the Library of Congress Digital Collections:
Teachers can choose to navigate the collections themselves by going to For users who are searching for a specific source, the "Library Catalogs" link at the top of the page will take you to the general catalog, with links to form-specific catalogs (images, audio, etc.) Users can also select "Browse by Topic" on the Digital Collections homepage in order to view a full listing of the topics under which collections are arranged. Each broad topiccontains links to smaller sub-categories. Below I have provided a series of screenshots demonstrating the navigation from the "Browse By Topic" page to the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room, an excellent resource for students to explore the ways in which children's literature has changed over time.
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The Library of Congress site also features a section devoted specifically to teachers: Users can follow the "Classroom Materials" link to arrive at a page that provides a wide variety of classroom resources listed under four categories: Lesson Plans, Themed Resources, Presentations & Activities, and Collection Connections. The Themed Resources page is especially useful because it provides a compilation of primary sources, inquiry guides for students, lesson plans, and presentations that revolve around a theme often taught in schools, such as Women's History or Civil Rights. Some teachers might choose to present one or two primary-source documents during a lecture to grab students' attention, while others might choose to let students explore the online activities and links to background information on the "For Students" page.
Teachers who are unsure of how to present primary-source material in the classroom may peruse the Library of Congress' guide to using primary sources, found here: The guide discusses the learning benefits of incorporating primary sources into instruction, shows teachers how to locate primary sources on the site, and provides PDFs of specific strategies for analyzing different types of primary sources.
Classroom Examples:
1) Great Gatsby: Investigating Life in the Jazz Age
Margie Rohrbach and Janie Koszoru's lesson on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby requires students to use primary source material from the Library of Congress site in order to better understand the social climate of the Jazz Age. In Part I of the lesson, students team up with a partner and browse through "artifacts" from the Jazz Age in the form of photographs, advertisements, and magazine articles. In Part II, students visit the computer lab and search the American Memory Collection for primary sources that illustrate various facets of life in the 1920's as described in Fitzgerald's novel. Some good examples are a newspaper article on Prohibition, an advertisement for a 1920's beauty product, or a picture of a popular jazz club. Finally, in Part III, students must use their research to create an 8-page historically-accurate newspaper from the 1920's. By engaging with primary-source material from the 1920's, students gain thorough understanding of the history of the Jazz Age, which in turn allows them to empathize with the characters in The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby lesson plan can be found here:
2) Found Poetry in the Aftermath of the Great Depression
Alison Westfall and Laura Mitchell designed a lesson in which students use documents from the American Memory collection as inspiration for creating an original poem. Students work specifically with the "American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project" collection, which contains manuscripts of personal narratives collected throughout the country by the Works Progress Administration from 1936-1940. Teachers can select some of the most emotionally captivating stories from the collection and assign them to students or students may peruse the collection and select a story that interests them. The teacher uses one story as an example for the class, and then presents an original poem that elaborates upon the themes presented in the personal narrative. After discussing the model as a class, students work to compose their own poems based upon the narrative they have chosen or been assigned. By getting a firsthand account of the aftermath of the Depression, students are able to form an emotional connection with the narrators, which gives them a more well-rounded understanding of the time period while also exposing them to the role of inspiration in the creative process.
The Found Poetry lesson plan can be found here:
3) Progressive Ideals in The Three Little Pigs
Rebecca Byrd designed a lesson in which students useartifacts from the Progressive Era to identify Progressive ideals that appear in L. Leslie Brooke's The Three Little Pigs, found in the Library of Conress' Rare Book Collection. The teacher provides students with a variety of pictures and articles from the Digital Collections in order to give students a glimpse of life in the early 1900's. Students come to recognize strong work ethics, poor working conditions, and the value of creative problem-solving as prominent features of the Progressive Era. Students then read The Three Little Pigs and identify evidence of Progressive ideals in the text. Finally, students must apply their understanding of the ways in which contemporary values influence literature to the creation of a modern-day version of The Three Little Pigs, geared toward teenagers. The inclusion of primary source documents in this lesson enables students to better understand the Progressive Era and to identify similarities and differences between life in the early 1900's and life in the modern world.
The Three Little Pigs lesson plan can be found here:
4) Out of the Dust
Jan King and Rena Nisbet designed a lesson in which students use pictures and poetry from the Dust Bowl era to guide their interpretation of Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust. Before students begin reading the novel, the teacher presents selected images from the Digital Collections to help students visualize life in the Dust Bowl. Once students begin the novel, they must keep a journal in which they make notes on passages that describe specific aspects of life during the Dust Bowl: family/school/community life, agriculture, and government assistance. Finally, students must choose passages of free verse from the novel and search the "America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945" collection to find an image that embodies an important element of the poem. The combination of primary-source photographs and literary analysis helps engage students in the themes of the text while also giving them a historical lesson on the Dust Bowl.
The Out of the Dust lesson plan can be found here:
Assessing Library of Congress for the Classroom:
Pro's: The Digital Collections are an excellent resource for bringing literature to life for students. For historical fiction novels like Out of the Dust, teachers can use primary sources from the Collections to provide students with essential background information on the era in which the novel is set. Furthermore, the variety in the types of resources available helps students develop a thorough understanding of life in distant eras. By analyzing photographs, listening to songs, and reading manuscripts of personal narratives, students are able to personally connect to the themes and issues that define life in the period being studied. The incredible amount of material available in the Collections also allows teachers to get creative in their uses of primary sources in the classroom. The Three Little Pigs lesson, for example, combines primary sources by taking a manuscript of a beloved children's book and placing it in the context of the Progressive Era, allowing students to discover new layers of meaning in what seems to be a simplistic bedtime story.
Con's: The greatest asset of the Collections might also be considered their greatest danger; the amount of information available can be overwhelming, and teachers run the risk of allowing the primary sources to become ornamental fluff for lessons instead of core content. Furthermore, if teachers choose to allow students to perform their own research on the site, they must provide some guidelines to keep students on-task and hold them accountable for reaching a learning goal. Navigating the site can be a confusing task for students, and the variety of information available practically guarantees that students will become distracted when they stumble upon an interesting artifact that catches their attention but is not related to the assigned lesson.
Considerations for Teachers:
1) Keep it basic. When possible, select specific primary sources that have clear connections to the content of your lesson. Do not go overboard with supplemental material.
2) If you choose to allow students to interact with the site themselves, guide them to specific sources by providing search terms or key phrases. This way, their time will be spent productively and they are less likely to be distracted by irrelevant information.
2) Use the "For Teachers" section of the site to save time and effort during planning. Unless you have a specific source in mind, the "Themed Resources" and "Collection Connection" links are the most efficient means of tracking down sources relevant to your lesson topic.
3) Use the site to teach students how to conduct research. Learning how to find, use, and cite primary sources are useful skills for any student—they will come in handy in the future.