Archives: Education and the Archives

Today I spent some time looking at digital educational programs from archives. The topics included all fit into a national, twentieth century timeline of events. I landed on the Presidential Libraries and Museums page of the National Archives that lists different educational initiatives. 

I focused my looking on the Presidential Timeline, which includes historical sources, exhibits, and activities for presidents beginning with Hoover.I specifically looked at the educational activity “Visiting History - President Clinton and Little Rock Central High School.” It is a historical investigation into an event commemorating a historical event. “Visiting History” was particularly poignant because it asked student to look at primary source materials from Little Rock in 1957 and about President Clinton in 1999. Additionally, it involved an activity where the students research a historic site local to them and track down primary sources about the site. I appreciated the reflectivity of the assignment. Asking students to consider primary sources from two periods is a good way to get them to think about change and what it means for a source to be historical. Asking the students to find their own historic site engages them in the question of how society labels certain sites as historic.

Besides linking to digitized sources, the website exists segregated from the archives. I wish that the primary sources had a link back to their place in the actual digital archives website, as that may be a way to make them consider the archives as the place where all of the information comes from. (See: here for an example of how the sources are formatted.)

Most of the educational initiatives that I looked at incorporated a combination of materials such as timelines, introductions to events and historical context, and activities where the students can look at primary sources and actively interpret them. I am curious if there are any studies about the use of these types of digital activities and feedback from the students and teachers that use them.