Sara Trettin, formerly Suiter, our 2010-2011 Teacher in Residence, was one of the first coordinators for the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog. She wrote and edited some of the first posts and provided a solid framework as we added more writers and continued to shape the blog and its message.
Rebecca Newland, 2013-15 Teacher in Residence, is supporting the needs of faculty and students in a school library. She also continues to contribute to the Library of Congress Poetry Center's blog, From the Catbird Seat.
Welcome back to the classroom, and welcome back to Teaching with the Library of Congress! Are you looking for powerful ways to incorporate primary sources into your classroom activities? Here are a few blog posts that will supply some ideas you can use.
When I talk to teachers, it's clear that one thing has not changed since I left the classroom: teachers are always looking for ideas to increase learning opportunities. Even better if those ideas are quick and easy to implement!
I am in charge of recommending collections from Colombia, Venezuela, as well as material on Latin American art for the Library; and I work on the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape, a collection of audio recordings of prominent poets and prose writers, which the Hispanic Division began curating in the early 1940s. I have been working on an effort to digitize and bring online access to some of these literary audio archives.
Individually and collectively humans exert both positive and negative influences on Earth's systems. Teachers and students studying the interactions among Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and biosphere and related human activity can explore images, manuscripts, and recorded oral history interviews from the Coal River community in West Virginia.
In my first Multimedia Moment post, I focused on the action in actuality street scenes. One of the films, the 1897 Edison film Corner of Madison and State Streets, Chicago, showed people walking across the street with large signs that appeared to be advertisements. I instantly wanted to know what was written on the signs.
Textbooks and teachers often tell students about German scientist Alfred Wegener who went public in 1912 with his theory of continental drift. The scientific community did not widely accept Wegener's ideas during his lifetime and often derided colleagues who entertained the theory. Wegener passed away in 1930. Even as Marie Tharp was creating maps in the 1950s, scientists were actively constructing ideas and compiling evidence related to seafloor spreading and magnetic striping.
What might a map from 1977, a poster from 1944, and a newspaper article from 1915 have in common with three twentieth century wars and the theory of plate tectonics? These three digitized artifacts in the Library of Congress’s collection have quite a bit in common when it comes to the emergence of evidence supporting a key theory in Earth science.