Everyone! All educators – regardless of subject, grade or specialty – will be introduced to the breadth of primary sources, their value in instruction and how quality arts content enriches student learning.
You’ll learn what, exactly, a primary resource is and why it has unique value. You’ll learn how to gain access to those primary sources and how to save them for your classroom use. Perhaps most important, you’ll learn how you can integrate these primary sources in your lesson plans and the best practices for using them as teaching tools.
We’ll help you bring the power of primary sources to your classroom by showing you how to create what are termed “inquiry-based learning experiences.” Primary sources are meant to stimulate students’ minds to ask questions and to question assumptions, to be a unique kind of learning experience.
Primary sources are often very human and profoundly personal documents with the power to engender deep emotional reactions. They can, and often do, connect with the human experience in a way that second-hand retelling cannot.
The arts teach us to think about qualitative relationships, celebrate multiple perspectives, develop aural and visual literacy skills, and consider complex forms of problem solving. The arts enable us to have experiences we can get from no other source; these experiences enrich us and our students.