Teaching with Primary Sources

Archivists, historians, and educators have all written compellingly about the impact of using primary source materials in educational pursuits. The existing literature highlights their value in instructional settings, providing students of all learning types and ages with enriching experiences that help them to feel connected in ways that make history real for them.⁴ Evaluating primary sources as historical evidence can also support students as they develop their critical thinking skills. Digital primary sources are particularly important and instrumental for engagement in the twenty-first-century classroom, where they help students “feel like they have discovered something, inspire curiosity, and add credibility to their work.”⁵

Elizabeth Yakel and Deborah Torres's model of archival intelligence built a foundational pillar for current conceptualizations of primary source literacies and their broad applicability to critical thinking skills.⁶ Writing in the context of K–12 educational needs, Anne Gilliland-Swetland underscored that archives and archivists can “begin to grow a ‘records literate’ as well as ‘information literate’ audience that is aware of the importance, relevance, and complexities of records as bureaucratic, social, political, and cultural evidence.”⁷ The publication of the 2018 Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy and the Society of American Archivist's 2016 Teaching with Primary Sources, according to Kathryn Matheny, indicates the profession's broader commitment toward developing both pedagogical experiences for archivists and robust primary source literacies for archival users.⁸ According to the Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy: “Primary source literacy is the combination of knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, and ethically use primary sources within specific disciplinary contexts, in order to create new knowledge or to revise existing understandings.”⁹

Much of the literature on primary source literacy and archival instruction centers on K–12 and undergraduate classrooms. The Brooklyn Public Library's “Brooklyn Connection” program brings primary sources to K–12 students with the specific imperative to foster civic awareness. Embedding learners of all ages within the specificities of their local surroundings fosters a civic awareness, where a sense of place within their own communities can prompt further engagement. Primary source literacies and civic engagement are not merely serendipitous connections but “can instead be understood as a framework for articulating competencies students are learning and outcomes they will be able to apply to their lives and their communities.”¹⁰ Source-centered instruction such as the hands-on laboratory approach described by Anne Bahde shows positive benefits for primary source literacy across all four years of undergraduate education, while Barry Houlihan demonstrated that instructional use of everyday, ordinary materials (as opposed to a treasure tour approach) engages students.¹¹ In a comparative study of students who received inquiry-based versus lecture-based archival instruction, Chris Marino concluded that “students who received inquiry-based instruction felt significantly more confident handling archival materials; excited by the materials presented to them; comfortable contributing to the discussion; and appreciative of the archival materials they encountered.”¹² COVID-era instruction has also demonstrated the efficacy of hands-on approaches even in remote environments.¹³

Archival Graduate Education and Pedagogy

Calls for archivists to acknowledge their additional role as educators emphasize the need to “increase our theoretical knowledge of learning and of teaching methodologies.”¹⁴ Though they are often charged with performing instruction and outreach in the workplace, archivists are rarely taught how to teach with primary sources during their archival graduate education.¹⁵ Indeed, archival studies educators have long pointed to difficulties covering the minimum amount of expected content in a two-year archival program and may ultimately bypass specialization skills and multiliteracy training in favor of traditional approaches to archival science.¹⁶ According to the published guidelines for graduate education in archival studies, students are expected to obtain at least eighteen hours of “core archival knowledge” that includes coverage of archival functions, knowledge of the profession, and contextual knowledge.¹⁷ Most archival graduate programs report teaching an introductory class, but the rest of the curriculum varies widely. In a preliminary evaluation we conducted of twenty-four North American graduate programs with archives concentrations, we found over thirty-five courses containing components related to outreach, advocacy, access, and instruction. However, the majority of these are not explicitly focused on archives environments. For example, of the seven courses covering instruction and literacy, six were aimed at information professionals broadly.

Effectively preparing future archivists to work with digital primary sources will likely extend into far-reaching domains, such as storytelling, project management, community outreach, and historical thinking. In case studies on digital history exhibits, a wide range of transliteracy skills are noted throughout project construction.¹⁸ Awareness of open-source content platforms like Omeka or fluency with Dublin Core metadata standards are just two examples of the kinds of skillsets that prove helpful for teaching and learning in twenty-first-century knowledge environments. As Julie Thomas discusses, “teaching artifactual literacy for physical sources in an online environment can be a challenge because it requires extrapolating the important elements of an object's materiality without up-close, hands-on inspection.”¹⁹ Practically speaking, acquiring such skills may pose an ongoing challenge for educators teaching in archival graduate programs, who might not have the technical background or access to resources for online site hosting. In a recent study with digital curation educators working in archival graduate programs, the authors note that while “educators agree on the importance of teaching digital technology” they also “struggle with how to teach it, and with what platforms to teach, particularly given resource and technical support constraints—which the advent of Covid exacerbated.”²⁰

Twenty-two years ago, Terry Cook noted a fundamental shift in the archival science paradigm with the emergence of what he termed “archives-as-community.”²¹ Multiple pedagogical frameworks and approaches have since been introduced into the archival literature, demonstrating the value that interdisciplinary perspectives can bring in extending archival theory and practice in fundamental ways. Recent work by ASU's Community Driven Archives Project shows how to ethically capture Indigenous knowledge transmission in the context of collective memory-building.²² Are there missed opportunities in archival graduate education for a more reflexive approach? How might the active incorporation of such pedagogical frameworks expand capacity for addressing archival silences in local and regional histories? Building on the potential for productive intersections between communities and institutions might help address shortcomings in current archival praxis, which has at times been perceived as entrenched in control, elitism, and gatekeeping.²³

Constructing Digital History Exhibits

In the following sections, two faculty instructors describe their experiences teaching MLIS students how to research and construct digital history exhibits using regional primary sources. Instructors note how different pedagogical techniques served to direct and orient students in the process of curating, interpreting, and using primary sources in digital exhibit making. Ultimately, both cases demonstrate that teaching students how to engage with primary sources through these methods afforded them the opportunity to learn a host of literacies and skills relevant to contemporary archival information environments.

Historic Hayti, Revisited

The Historic Hayti, Revisited digital history exhibit project was developed in Alexandra Chassanoff's spring 2022 course entitled Digital Heritage Projects. Six MLIS graduate students took the course in the School of Library and Information Sciences (SLIS) at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a comprehensive regional public university in Durham, North Carolina. Chassanoff designed the class as part of a newly established archives and records management (ARM) program part of the only remaining master's degree program in library science available at a historically Black college (HBCU). Since the ARM program was new, most students had received little practical training or experience in archives. Additionally, the global pandemic required that classes move online for the semester, and the class was also unable to connect with locally held archival and instructional resources.

Despite these setbacks, the class decided to focus on telling the story of Historic Hayti, a once-thriving Black-owned business district located in Durham. Like other American cities in the 1960s, Hayti was dismantled under the guise of urban renewal efforts. Today, many of the local businesses that existed in so-called Black Wall Street are not actively represented in narratives and storylines. With the assistance of the “Open Durham” online portal and the help of a local historian, Chassanoff created a list of six businesses from the pre-urban-renewal era for students to profile. She also assembled and provided students with a list of additional digital history sites containing both primary and secondary sources. These included academic and institutional sites such as the North Carolina Digital Heritage Project, a statewide library digitization effort, as well as a Durham-based Facebook group made up of community members called the Historic Fayetteville Corridor where Durham residents posted stories, images, and recollections from Hayti's past. Chassanoff also obtained materials from the Durham County Library's Urban Renewal Records located in the North Carolina Collection which contains property appraisals, photographs, and recently digitized recordings from meetings between neighborhood residents and county commissioners and the council discussing urban renewal.

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Course topics for each of the fourteen weeks during the semester sought to address both the conceptual and practical challenges of constructing historical narratives from regionally available, digital primary source materials. The first four weeks of class were split between understanding the larger context in which Hayti businesses operated and becoming familiar with digital history projects. Students read secondary sources on the history of Durham, watched short documentaries, and visited with local historical experts at NCCU. During classroom reviews of digital history projects, students answered analytical prompts such as “Where do you think these sources came from?” and “Who do you think created the metadata used to describe these materials? How well do you think the metadata does in describing the material?” In other prompts, Chassanoff asked students to describe their interpretations of emerging narratives in each digital history project. This line of inquiry was meant to prime students in how source selection and curation can activate multiple interpretations, sometimes of the same historical events or using the same source materials.

In week three, Chassanoff asked students to start collecting sources related to their business in a shared spreadsheet, or digital asset log. Because students were researching at the same time as they were building potential narratives, they were advised to select a broad, wide range of historical sources. As the first phase of the project progressed, Chassanoff observed that most students found it difficult to iteratively construct a narrative and expressed hesitations asserting a specific storyline from their selected digital assets. Chassanoff concluded that additional instructional activities with digital primary sources would likely help students feel more comfortable and confident in establishing (and potentially revisiting) narratives. Chassanoff also saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate the role of interpretive practice in both archival theory and history.

Chassanoff modified class sessions to include instructional activities designed using pedagogical theories on learning. In one session, students participated in a two-part exercise prompting them to analyze interpretive aspects of their collected assets. Drawing from PBE concepts, Chassanoff encouraged students to observe some of the sociocultural and political-economic dimensions present in their sources. These dimensions might constitute a chapter in a storyline about their chosen business, or provide important context related to its historical place in everyday community life. In another session, Chassanoff incorporated a series of prompts for students to respond about sources. Jotting down observations and bringing forth ideas for group discussion, students answered the following questions:

• Who are the significant people, events, stories, and/or artifacts presented?

• What conclusions are you able to infer from the details in your primary sources?

• What story do you believe your assets will help you begin to tell? What do you still want to investigate about this story?

Chassanoff emphasized the iterative task of storyline creation through the selection of different types of related primary sources such as oral histories and advertisements, which helped students navigate unfamiliar terrain and introduced greater ease for building short narratives about businesses. Despite not always knowing which storyline to focus on, students shared in their reflections how the boundaries of place helped orient them in their research:

With a name, I changed my search terms to “York Garrett Durham.” This led me to a census record for York D. Garrett and his wife and children. While this did not end up in my project it did give me an approximate birth date for Garrett and let me know that his son shared the same name, meaning I would need to be even more careful about finding the correct York Garrett in Durham during the time.… While the oral history is currently restricted, I was curious if anyone had accessed it in the past. Using the citation … I found the oral history had been used by Peter F. Lau in his book “From the Grassroots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education” and “American Democracy.” This source told me that York Garrett had a doctorate, graduated from Howard University, was born in 1894, died in 1998, and was a WWI veteran. It also gave the interesting detail that after the urban renewal of Hayti, the drug store was moved to the College Plaza Shopping Center.

To address the practical challenges of constructing an exhibit, Chassanoff reserved part of each three-hour class session to construct spaces for situated learning. These short activities and “pop-up” exercises provided students with hands-on opportunities for experimental curation of digital primary sources. Students learned how to create descriptive metadata for different types of materials, using the guidelines provided by the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center.²⁴ They also learned how to navigate different archival platforms in search of sources and how to select the appropriate surrogate size for online exhibits. The use of reflexive writing prompts throughout the semester provided students with an ongoing opportunity to document their decision-making process, alongside their developing storyline.

At this stage in the project, students were refining their selection and appraisal of digital primary sources. Chassanoff encouraged students to think through the design and organization of the exhibit, to facilitate historical thinking about the Hayti storyline. What different chapters constituted parts of the whole story that students wanted to tell? Who were the main players and how should they be represented? Even though none of the students in the online class had ever visited Durham or connected with local community members, they remained markedly committed to their interpretive pursuits. Such efforts are particularly inspiring when archival subjects are notably absent from regional histories. Writing about the Green Candle Restaurant, one student described their commitment to carrying out additional research as needed to help expand the storyline:

I hope I've given others a little glimpse into the life of Azona Meadows Allen and her Green Candle Restaurant. Although this class is ending, there are two unfinished things I want to do regarding this project. First, I plan to visit the Montford Point Marine Museum sometime soon. The museum is located on Camp Johnson in Jacksonville, NC, and it is reopening this month after having been closed for a while due to damage from Hurricane Matthew. As well, I want to find Azona Meadows Allen's gravesite. I haven't been able to find its location, and I would like to know. I plan to visit James Allen's burial place at Raleigh National Cemetery, and I'm hoping she is there beside him. If so, I plan to snap a photo and add her stone's image to findagrave.com and familysearch.org. If she is not there, I'll keep looking.

The use of place-based concepts as guideposts for student exploration of regional sources helped to ignite archival engagement throughout the course, suggesting the potential importance of preserving orphaned or otherwise decontextualized historical documentation of regional significance. In the final four weeks of the class, each student focused on building out a unifying narrative in the Omeka platform containing at least three chapters for each business. Chassanoff helped students troubleshoot issues with adding items to the site, including navigating descriptive metadata issues and decision-making as needed. Once each student had completed their draft profiles, Chassanoff added an introductory page to the collection. At the time of publication, students were actively encouraged to continue to add to their narratives. The full digital history project can be accessed here.²⁵

Recipes Resurrected: North Carolina Culinary Treasures from the Archives

Recipes Resurrected was developed by four archives graduate students taking a practicum course at the School of Information and Library Science University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-SILS). At UNC-SILS, students design practicum projects that incorporate hands-on learning and group collaboration together with a project sponsor who is often a faculty member, to fulfill graduate requirements for earning their MSLS or MSIS degree. The project was developed in collaboration with their project sponsor and professor Dr. Elliott Kuecker, with research support from the Wilson Special Collections Library's North Carolina Collection Research and Instruction (R&I) librarian, Sarah Carrier. In this case, the practicum was proposed by students with a shared interest in incorporating primary sources, scholarly research, and food studies. This intersection of topics arose after the completion of a previous research project in a preservation class that Kuecker taught. During that project, students learned how to engage with southeastern recipe cards and cookbooks as rich material sources for studying daily rituals, blended cultures, and representations of culture. Food history is a form of public history, often revealing how cultures change over time, providing insight into economic situations experienced by everyday people, and engaging with issues of race, class, and gender. Students in the practicum were able to use skills obtained in their degree coursework, including preservation, archival description and access, outreach, and advocacy. The practicum took place over two semesters, with the bulk of the work done in spring 2023.

Recipes Resurrected sought to explore regional food culture through archival materials available in the North Carolina Collection at UNC's special collections library. After a brainstorming session, the group settled on a style of digital exhibit where each student would have the opportunity to individually research different areas of interest. Each of them would produce a short narrative that incorporated archival primary source photographs, postcards, and recipe cards alongside text. Since students were in their last year of a professional degree, they were particularly excited about the opportunity to showcase useful skills that might aid in their upcoming job search.

Students began their research by browsing both rare books and manuscript materials, such as cookbooks and texts selected by Carrier from the North Carolina Collection. Carrier's deep knowledge of this collection area was invaluable to students, particularly for giving them research ideas and techniques that used keywords beyond, simply, “cookbooks” and “recipes.” Students conducted ongoing archival research in tandem with writing and asset selection for each of the four regions in North Carolina. They created narrative essays describing regional histories and corresponding relationships to foodways for each region. The inclusion of these primary sources helped bolster the visual presentation of materials accompanying the text.

Kuecker chose Omeka, an open-source digital platform that offers multiple options for incorporating text and media together, including image, video, and audio, with some aesthetic flexibility. Kuecker held a ninety-minute training for the students on how to use the platform, covering both conceptual and practical factors related to digital history exhibit creation. The group practiced media uploading and page arrangement and discussed the outline of the exhibit. Organizational choices needed to be made even before content was created. Decision points focused on anticipating how users might navigate the exhibit and aimed to design for logical flow. After this training, students were able to carry out independent work weekly at their own pace until their draft pages were complete.

Since the project was intended to be a public-facing online exhibit, students had to make many curatorial and pedagogical decisions based on anticipated user needs. For example, students had to gain an understanding of regional histories and awareness of local material culture to proceed with identifying relevant materials. This task was less structured but no less important to the overall success of the exhibit. Like creating a primary source lesson plan, the students had to decide on objectives for each of their pages and stick to those boundaries. On their pages, students needed to focus on single aspects of the region's food culture, introduce several primary sources, develop concise and well-written narratives, and ensure accuracy in presentation and information. Kuecker encouraged students to think about how each page could tell a unique story and to consider how the creation of a multimedia narrative might ultimately serve as a useful instruction tool. As Kuecker explained to his students, online exhibits have great potential to reach more users than physical exhibits. As such, this exhibit represented the rare opportunity to show users how a handful of primary sources can be researched and woven into a story about the everyday lives—family, work, leisure—of people from a region.²⁶

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Kuecker assisted each student in narrowing their scope and advised them on secondary readings as needed. Additionally, Kuecker served as both reviewer and editor, making suggestions for accompanying visuals, suggesting grammatical and stylistic edits, and highlighting where historical claims needed citations. The group held multiple collaborative meetings, where Kuecker and students decided on page layouts, page order, and nesting of pages, creating an aesthetic symmetry among all the collaborators. This process of curatorial mentorship, built on collaborative labor, helped to create a final exhibit that was polished and comprehensive.

At the end of the spring semester, students presented their exhibits in conjunction with the department research symposium. They created and handed out cards with archival recipes and served handheld foods from the region. This was an homage to the many North Carolina cookbooks and recipes that were created by church groups, women's clubs, and other community-based organizations—often accumulated to be circulated among friends and family. The digital exhibit lives on for everyone to enjoy.²⁷ However, the practicum was intentionally designed to allow future contributions from archival graduate students interested in using primary sources to tell thematic stories regarding the foodways in North Carolina and the South that the general public could view. The stable URL allows the curated stories to circulate in the same way a community cookbook might—seen and used by as many people as possible, made accessible beyond the confines of a specific location.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this set of case studies, two faculty instructors shared their experiences teaching students through place-based modes of pedagogical inquiry that emphasize digital literacies at the intersection of primary sources. In both cases, developing courses culminating in digital history exhibits began from conversations with motivated graduate students eager to augment their existing skills with new digital literacies. They also recognized the opportunity to fill in what they deemed as absent histories from the historical record, making the case for broadening access to robust and rich digital sources.

Collaborative brainstorming and speculation on course design between the students and their instructor proved helpful, and the relatively small number of students in both classes made iterative, exploratory project design feasible for practicums. Both instructors used concepts from place-based education and active learning techniques to teach students how to engage with regionally-significant primary source materials in the crafting of digital history exhibits. Chassanoff created sets of pop-up exercises to provide students with experiential learning opportunities for descriptive metadata. In project reflections, students described the impact and effectiveness of such approaches:

Applying the Dublin Core rules learned from class, and conferring with my classmates and Chassanoff, I was able to determine what kind of metadata made most sense for my collection and what would work the best with the exhibits of my classmates. This turned out to be the most well rounded and put together digital exhibit I have ever created. Using primary sources from archives of newspapers and photography was a very useful skill to develop that I have already utilized for patrons at the public library in which I work.

Both instructors also note several challenges that might impact the transferability of similar approaches at other institutions. First, faculty instructors should recognize the time-intensive commitments of such projects. In the case of Recipes Resurrected, the research and instruction librarian was eager to assist students, offering deep knowledge of regional collections. At the same time, special collections staff may not always be readily available or able to serve as an ongoing resource for students. In some cases, faculty teaching in archives programs may not have established relationships with campus libraries and archives. Building relationships is, of course, another form of labor for both the instructor and the archivists. Kuecker also noted that other LIS faculty and the administration lacked understanding about this genre of work. Practicums in Kuecker's program usually focused on processing assignments or storage activities for student learning. Consequently, Kuecker had to explain the rationale and value in teaching students about the applied components of archival practice, such as conducting archival outreach and instructional activities. Another challenge facing Chassanoff was the lack of technical capacity and resources for managing and providing access to digital collections. Chassanoff took additional steps to adequately prepare students for considering sustainability and digital preservation concerns from the onset.²⁸ It is worth emphasizing that both instructors had previous experience building digital history exhibits and digital humanities projects, giving them some familiarity with countering the issues introduced by iterative, applied collaborative work structures.

The interpretation and use of primary sources in building out storylines was initially difficult for students, likely due to the constraints of active engagement in the dual processes of research and historical thinking. Exercises based on active and reflective learning seemed to help students feel confident enough to construct and follow narrative arcs. However, many students might find it stressful and difficult to engage in learning and doing project work simultaneously. Students can easily become sidelined by sociotechnical roadblocks, particularly in group projects where tensions may arise from ownership quibbles and/or responsibility for work. Questions regarding ongoing permissions, appropriate source selection, editing privileges, and site hosting and monitoring are important considerations for similarly-scoped projects to consider. When are digital history exhibits such as these considered complete as a storytelling artifact of a time and place?

Despite the challenges implicit in this work, both instructors felt they achieved successful learning outcomes. Through experiential learning and guided hands-on activities, students learned how to curate and use digital sources for narrative building and storytelling. Working with heterogeneous materials from regional collections provided students with a unique, structured opportunity to explore interpretive and sense-making aspects of archival work. In course assessments, students reported feeling a sense of empowerment in making connections between materials, places, and regions. Although many primary sources are inherently place-based materials, the use of place-based concepts in archival pedagogy and instructional work remains underdeveloped. Carey Beam and Carrie Schwier highlight this absence as a missed opportunity, pointing out: “Missing, however, is a grounding in pedagogical theory inextricably tied to the local primary sources that form the foundations of most archival collections.”²⁹ An unanticipated outcome in both projects was student recognition of the absence of certain regional stories, which motivated them to address what they termed “existing archival silences.” Another unexpected impact students described was the opportunity to learn how to appraise digital images for reuse in new contexts.

As the Society of American Archivists-Association of College and Research Libraries (SAA-ACRL) Guidelines highlight, skillfully working with primary sources in contemporary information environments requires comprehensive understanding of a variety of intersectional literacies.³⁰ Archival graduate education and its relational home in information and educational studies departments affords a unique opportunity to extend these literacies toward a wide range of professional interests. At the same time, expanding archival graduate education to include experiential, active learning approaches alongside concepts from place-based education gives students the unique opportunity to participate and engage in both the curatorial and interpretive aspects of archival work, in turn helping to broaden archival access and impact in communities. Teaching future archivists through these lenses can help prepare them for a wide variety of professional opportunities and career pathways, including digital collections building and management, information literacy, outreach and advocacy roles, community exhibit-building, and data and digital storytelling endeavors.