Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Western Region @ Metropolitan State University of Denver

California Grantees


University of California Davis
Contact: Nancy McTygue – Executive Director
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://chssp.ucdavis.edu/

Grant awarded January 20, 2020

Localizing US History for California Students is a two-year, three-pronged grant program funded by the Teaching with Primary Sources Western Region office at Metropolitan State University Denver, in partnership with TPS Consortium Member, the California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP), headquartered at UC Davis. This program will be implemented in three diverse regions of California:

  • Mendocino, Sonoma, and Lake Counties (Critical Engagement with Primary Sources): UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project and the Mendocino County Office of Education
  • Tulare and Kern Counties (What Does it Mean to be an American in Modern Times): Tulare County Office of Education, Kern County Superintendent of Schools, and the Statewide Office of the California History-Social Science Project
  • Riverside and San Bernardino Counties (Localizing the Narrative: The Inland Empire and US History): San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools, California State University, San Bernardino, and the UCLA History-Geography Project

These partnerships will leverage the knowledge and experience of local educational leaders with the CHSSP’s 30 years of professional learning, including a decade of TPS service, and experience as the primary writers of California’s History-Social Science Framework. The overarching goal is to develop, implement, and refine a customized program of instructional support in History-Social Science for each of the identified areas. CHSSP will provide teacher professional learning, aligned with the Framework, infused with primary sources from the Library of Congress’ vast digital collection, and customized in response to a needs assessment conducted by each partnership.


San Francisco State University
Contact: Dr. Brad Fogo – Project Director
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://www.sfsu.edu/

Grant awarded December 6, 2018

San Francisco State University’s project will build and deliver a series of professional development workshops for both pre-service and in-service teachers in the Bay Area. These workshops will train teachers how to develop and teach visual literacy lessons using resources and strategies from the Library of Congress. The project will feature a series of four curriculum and instructional classes for pre-service teachers and three professional development workshops for in-service teachers. Both groups will participate in model visual inquiry lessons and have structured opportunities to practice and receive feedback on using teaching strategies. In addition, Dr. Fogo will observe teachers using program materials and strategies with their classroom students. This project is well designed to support both novice and experienced teachers in using an inquiry-based approach and a literacy focused curriculum.


University of California, Berkeley College Writing Programs
Contact: Dr. Patricia Steenland – College Writing Programs
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://www.berkeley.edu/

Grant awarded March 15, 2018

UC Berkeley requires all beginning students to complete two Reading and Composition courses through their campus-wide Discovery Experience. These courses are designed to give undergraduate students the skills necessary for critical analysis and research at the university level. The courses have been developed to support beginning college students and to empower them to see themselves as agents of independent inquiry. While the use of secondary sources had been a part of the students’ research projects, Dr. Patricia Steenland raised the bar by integrating primary sources from the Library of Congress into the course curriculum. Dr. Steenland worked closely with librarians at the Bancroft Library who developed instructional modules for teaching media literacy to beginning students. This project also included faculty and students from the French Department who developed their own primary source-based curriculum under the leadership of Vesna Rodic.

Their culminating event, on May 8th 2019, was a campus-wide symposium in which faculty and students showcased their work. As Dr. Steenland summarized, “The final symposium was a very exciting event. It allowed the participants in the pilot project to present their findings from over a year’s worth of work, monthly meeting, discussions of pedagogical practice, and classroom results…Student work was also showcased at the symposium, focusing on a Creative Discovery grant that features an installation in campus on the Japanese American internment that was based on students’ primary source research…It has been a tremendous pleasure to do this project collaboratively with the Library. We are so grateful for this opportunity and hope to continue this work in the future!


Kodály Center for Music Education at Holy Names University
Contact: Anne Laskey – Director
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://kodaly.hnu.edu/

Grant awarded April 16, 2018

The Holy Names University Collection of American Folk Songs for Teaching is recognized as a folk song archive by the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. The collection builds on the principles of prominent Hungarian composer and music educator, Zoltán Kodály, that children become connected to their communities and the wider world by hearing and singing the traditional folk songs of their own culture. Project Directors Anne Laskey and Gail Needleman reached their goal of adding over 100 songs from the western Unites States to the online American Folk Song Collection. This was accomplished through painstaking research and the extensive process of finding new songs from Western states that had previously not been available online. The highlight of the project was the week spent by Anne and Gail Needleman at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center listening to dozens of original field recordings. Several new songs were added to the website collection including sea shanties from San Francisco, cowboy songs from Colorado, Wyoming, Colorado, and Texas, folk hymns from Utah, Spanish language singing games from New Mexico, and songs from the migrant camps of Central California.

One of the most powerful outcomes was dissemination to teachers not only in music classrooms, but in other content areas. This effort resulted in two new initiatives; “Songs from the Dust Bowl”, a blog post which provides teachers with additional resources related to the songs, and “Storybooks Based on Folk Songs”, a collection of their favorite children’s books with links to additional verses of the songs, singing game directions, and background information.

As Anne summarized, “We are grateful for this grant, and the enhancements that is has supported. We believe the site is now more responsive to teachers in other content areas besides music, especially in social studies and language arts, and we are eager to continue our work in making the site more useful to teachers of all subjects.


Imperial County Office of Education
Contact: Dr. Tracy Canalez – CoordinatorImperial County Office of Education
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://www.icoe.org/

Grant awarded January 14, 2016

The Imperial County Office of Education is located in a rural desert community of the southeastern most part of California. It provides educational services to 17 school districts in one of the most economically distressed regions in the US. Through their TPS regional grant, ICOE improved the quality of learning in the Imperial County through a broad dissemination of primary sources from the Library of Congress. Their professional development plan initially included working with two different cohorts of teachers; twenty secondary teachers and twenty elementary teachers. To fully leverage the power of TPS, the Western region coordinated with TPS-UC Davis, the UC-Irvine History Project, and the Stanford History Education Group. Dr. Nicole Gilbertson with the UC-Irvine History Project facilitated two full-day trainings for the first cohort of secondary teachers and Grant Coordinator Tracy Canalez followed-up by coordinating five Professional Learning Community (PLC) sessions. This model was replicated for the elementary cohort. Grant leaders exceeded their goal by serving 85 educators. Teachers designed lessons which integrated primary sources into their instruction and created videos of their lesson or student project. They were also asked to work with one of their colleagues to expand the use of primary sources across the county. As Tracy Canalez summarized, “We will continue to use the TPS website with the existing professional development that we have with districts. It is because of the grant opportunity that I have been able to learn and implement this into my regular practice with teachers that I serve… Teachers are becoming increasingly more confident in their ability to design lessons around inquiry.


El Dorado County Office of Education
Contacts: Kevin Tierney – Coordinator of Professional Development250_El Dorado County Office of Education
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://edcoe.org/

The El Dorado County Office of Education (EDCOE), located in Placerville, CA, provides leadership and services to 15 surrounding school districts. The publication of the new California History/Social Sciences Framework provided the impetus to put History/Social Sciences back in the forefront of the state’s educational agenda. Through their TPS regional grant, EDCOE leveraged this opportunity to bring the districts together in a cooperative and collaborative Community of Practice (COP), identified as the Project to Integrate Primary Sources (PIPS). The Western Region coordinated with TPS-UC Davis program to provide the initial training. The project initially kicked off with 18 participating teachers in the PIPS program. Through dissemination efforts, they reached a total of 108 educators in face-to-face meetings in which the LOC website and PIPS unit plans were shared. Teachers were provided ample time to explore resources, understand the inquiry process, and appreciate the value of primary sources. In addition, the unit plans were shared throughout the county and with other school districts both within and outside of California. To promote sustainability, Community Coordinator Kevin Tierney, scheduled school site visits throughout the county to educate teachers about the PIPS website and help steer the county’s history/social science instruction toward best practice.

As Kevin Tierney reported, “In a survey completed at the end of the program, 100% of the participating teachers stated that the PIPS program provided opportunities for them to grow as a teacher leader and that they had grown in their understanding of the California Framework for History/Social Science and the California State Standards. These are very encouraging results.


Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS)
Contact: Andye Daley – Project Coordinator
Email: [email protected]
Website: https://icsresources.org/

Grant awarded November 12, 2015

ICS is a national initiative of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA). ICS works with partners across the U.S. to provide professional development to teachers on topics related to Judaism and Israel. ICS used their TPS regional grant to plan and implement the new workshop “Teaching the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” This 10-hour professional development event was held at Portland State University on June 28-30, 2016 for 23 teacher leaders from Oregon, Washington, and California. A main focus of the grant was to use primary sources to build an educational climate that is historically accurate and politically neutral. As Grant Coordinator reported, “Participants indicated a high level of engagement, learning, and motivation for implementing new resources and strategies in their classrooms as well as sharing what they have learned with others.” Based on the post-workshop evaluation, participants increased their ability to navigate the Library of Congress website and felt empowered to infuse their instruction with the Library’s resources.

Upon completion of the summer institute, teachers returned to their social studies classrooms equipped to deliver rigorous, standards-based instruction and guide their students in the analysis of primary sources from multiple perspectives. These best practices will enable teachers and students to learn about the origins of Arab Nationalism and Zionism, and discuss the complex Arab-Israeli conflict from an academic perspective.


California History-Social Science Project
Contact: Dr. Tuyen Tran – Assistant Director, California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP), University of California
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://chssp.ucdavis.edu

The Western Regional Center partnered with TPS-UC Davis to facilitate sub-grants in California and extend the reach of TPS to previously un-served parts of the state. All participants became a part of the TPS network and were registered for the CHSSP network. The following four grants were part of a pilot project in collaboration with CHSSP and TPS at University of California Davis.

‌San Diego Office of Education‌

Grant awarded July 12, 2013

A fourth collaborative venture brought together the resources of the San Diego County Office of Education (SDCOE), the University of California, Irvine History Project (UCI HP), the California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP) and the TPS Western Region. This regional grant provided TPS professional development to teachers throughout San Diego County in grades K through five on March 5 and March 12, 2014. Participants were asked to complete a lesson template that required a historically relevant investigation question and a set of primary sources with complementary analysis tools.

After the workshop, teachers expressed confidence about independent loc.gov exploration as a result of a guided scavenger hunt and workshop time devoted to searching the Library’s digital archives and teachers resources. As one teacher commented, “Learning about the resources (on the Library of Congress) was wonderful as well, but I love that this workshop also showed us how to implement these great sources.” SDCOE has plans to work closely with local school districts to help their teachers develop standards-based, Common Core aligned lessons. The inclusion of primary sources will be at the core of this work with history-social science teachers.

Butte County Office of Education

Grant awarded July 8, 2013

In a third collaborative venture, a TPS workshop was presented to 32 teachers in Butte County on February 7, 2013. The training was presented by Letty Kraus, Program Coordinator for History Project at UC Davis. A highlight of the workshop was the interaction between participants and the three teacher leaders that grant funding allowed Letty to bring with her. This allowed for more direct instruction and peer-to-peer interaction. As one teacher reported,

“The activities that involved analyzing and interacting with primary documents were most effective for me. The analyzing activities were instructed effectively and in a manner that seemed easy to incorporate in my classroom.”

For Butte County teachers and administrators, this was a rare opportunity to bring discipline-specific training to a school district that does not usually have access to history professional development.

San Joaquin Office of Education

Grant awarded August 9, 2012

Western Region funding allowed the San Joaquin County Office of Education to provide discipline-specific training to teachers, librarians, and paraprofessionals from 3 remote eastern counties; Amador, Tuolumne, and Calaveras. These rural counties are comprised of many small school districts and serve over 11,000 students. They are typically only able to offer discipline-specific professional development when they are able to tap into outside funding resources. The workshop was conducted on September 22, 2012 and addressed all seven goals of the TPS Level I program. During the workshop, participants were specifically trained in developing historically relevant investigation questions to frame their lessons. They also provided critical feedback of lesson questions in grade level groups.

Mendocino Office of Education

Grant awarded February 7, 2012

The CHSSP collaborated with the Mendocino Office of Education to provide a Level I workshop for teachers and librarians. Through training teachers in the process of historical investigation, a discipline-specific model of inquiry base learning, all goals of the TPS Level I program were met. The workshop was held on March 29 and April 18, 2012.


Densho
Contact: Tom Ikeda – Executive Director‌
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.densho.org

Grant awarded June 26, 2012

Densho’s mission is to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished. Densho offers these irreplaceable firsthand accounts, coupled with historical images and teacher resources, to explore principles of democracy and promote equal justice for all. Through a TPS Western Regional grant, Densho integrated the rich resources of the Library of Congress with its own digital archives to create professional development for middle and high school teachers. Teachers engaged in historical thinking about the Japanese American WW II experience by analyzing primary sources and discussing how this can inform thinking about current events. In addition to their home base in Seattle (Washington), Densho offered TPS workshops in Los Angeles (California), Portland (Oregon) and Honolulu (Hawaii).

The first workshop was held in Los Angeles at the Japanese American National Museum for a group of 33 teachers. Workshop participants appreciated the tight integration of pedagogy with the primary sources about the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. In the words of Tom Ikeda, “Working with TPS changed the way we trained teachers. We added more resources from the Library of Congress website and spent time exploring the richness of loc.gov with workshop participants.” Densho plans to create an online course to reach a larger national audience of educators based on the work done for the TPS workshops.

*Multiple States Served