This post was written by Amara Alexander, the 2019-20 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress. For the 2019-2020 school year, I left the classroom, and accepted the role as the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress. The year began with excitement as I explored the collections, and the beautiful city of Washington, DC. Leaving now is bittersweet.
Rob Williams first used the Library’s digital newspaper collections more than a decade ago as a high-school teacher of U.S. history in Powhatan County, Virginia, near Richmond. Today, he’s a recording artist—he released his third album, “An Hour Before Daylight,” in October. But he still draws inspiration from the same online resources that captivated his history students.
I am the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library. The Center is home to the U.S. Poet Laureate, the only federally-funded position for a literary artist in the country and the most visible position for a poet by far.
In my first blog post as Teacher in Residence, I set a number of goals: to connect primary sources to literature, to create research questions to advance inquiry, and to foster library skills. I was able to meet these goals in a number of ways and to reach out to teachers and librarians with approaches to working with primary sources and teaching research skills.
This summer, attending the Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institute took me back to the “awe” of history. Seeing the diary entry from the night President Lincoln was shot, and being able to see the emotion in the writing…You don’t get that in a transcript or in a modified document.
These resources offer an enormous variety of choices and unleash students' imaginations as to how they want to tell the story. We start with the available analysis tool and teacher’s guides and work from those to expand our projects.
April has been set aside as a time to celebrate and explore the rich and varied legacy of poetry. This conversation with Library of Congress staff Peter Armenti, Digital Reference Specialist, and Rob Casper, Director of the Poetry and Literature Center, explores how to find poetry resources from the Library.
