About Teaching with Primary Sources Across Tennessee
Teaching with Primary Sources is a program of the Library of Congress that helps educators get students engaged, excited, and empowered through the use of primary sources. It provides professional development opportunities for educators and guides them in using the digitized primary sources available from the Library of Congress Web site in their classrooms, libraries, and museums. The Teaching with Primary Sources program contributes to the quality of education by deepening content understanding and improving student literacy in our nation's schools.
Primary sources—letters, maps, photographs, scientific data, music, postcards, documents, and more—are the materials of lives. Exploring primary sources allows people of all ages to
• investigate topics from different perspectives;
• think of and voice questions;
• compare, analyze, understand, and communicate; and
• follow individual interests.
The Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, has digitized over eleven million primary source items and made them available through its Web site. This mammoth site is rich in sources from the humanities, the arts, music, drama, history, geography, anthropology, and the sciences.
Teaching with Primary Sources is administered through a consortium of educational institutions in nine states across the nation. Tennessee joined this consortium in May 2008, and is now into its second year of the initial three-year program. Teaching with Primary Sources across Tennessee (TPS-TN) is administered by the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University. TPS-TN seeks to link current state-focused educational initiatives to larger national themes and to emphasize the student exploration of history, science, arts, and culture through the use of primary sources.
TPS-TN reaches out to many kinds of educators: K-12 teachers of all subjects, pre-service teachers and graduate students in education, faculty and administrators of collegiate departments of education, school and institutional librarians and media specialists, and directors of education at museums and cultural institutions and heritage organizations.