Humanizing History by Teaching with Primary Sources

View the full episode transcript.

To an outside observer, there’s nothing particularly special about the beige rug at the front of Miranda Lyle’s fourth grade classroom. But for Lyle, it’s the best spot in the room. It’s where students gather for morning meetings, read-alouds, and when Lyle wants to facilitate an intimate learning conversation instead of a lecture. Lyle compared the feeling on the rug to that of gathering around a campfire. “They’re all kind of sitting in a relaxed, comfortable place, there’s proximity, but there’s also, you know, just like a shared comfort level of having the rug,” she said. That makes it easier for her students to test new ideas, express emotions and disagree civilly. “It’s been a very intentional place for us every year to see each other as equals and see each other as people,” Lyle said.

Last spring, her students gathered on the rug as they kicked off a social studies unit on school desegregation in Virginia, where they live. Lyle projected vocabulary words, like segregation, prejudice and integration on the smartboard above their heads, and the class practiced saying them together. Then Lyle clicked forward to a black and white photo of a group of teenagers. Lyle asked the fourth graders to study the image closely. “I want you to observe and see as many things as you can before we even start today,” she said.

The teenagers in the photo were students at R.R. Moton High School – a segregated school in Farmville, Virginia, just over two hours southeast of where the fourth graders attended school. In 1951, the Moton students went on strike to demand better school conditions, which the white school board denied them. Their activism led to them becoming the only student plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education – the Supreme Court case that found school segregation unconstitutional 70 years ago.

Instead of reading about the Moton student strike in a textbook, fourth graders in Rockingham County Public Schools, where Lyle teaches, learn about it through photographs, diary entries and stories of the young people involved. These first-hand accounts of history are called primary sources. “A primary source at its very core is the raw material of history,” said Lee Ann Potter, the Director of Professional Learning and Outreach Initiatives at the Library of Congress.

Many students today are learning history through primary sources. That shift, according to Potter, arose in the last two decades as museums and archival institutions began digitizing their collections, making them accessible to teachers and students online. At the Library of Congress, Potter and her team develop resources to help teachers use primary sources in their classrooms. 

In Rockingham County, Lyle and a team of teachers designed a fourth grade civil rights unit using the Inquiry Design Model, an instructional approach that encourages students to explore and investigate topics, rather than being passive recipients of information. In the civil rights unit, primary sources prompt that inquiry and exploration. That’s possible because, according to Lyle and her colleagues, primary sources can make people and events from history feel more real and more textured for students. They can also help kids learn to think critically about the information they’re consuming. That’s increasingly necessary as young people navigate a digital world filled with misinformation and disinformation from both humans and artificial intelligence.

Building empathy with historical figures

On the first day of the civil rights unit last spring, Lyle didn’t tell her students all the details about the Moton student strike. That would come later. Looking at the photo of the students was a preview amid a broader introduction to racial segregation. After answering some initial questions, Lyle clicked through slides that included background information on the Jim Crow era and more black and white photos of segregated water fountains, buses and neighborhoods. With each slide, the fourth graders pointed out details and asked questions. As the images marched on, their frustration with the injustices of the past rose.

“So far, are you guys feeling like ‘separate but equal’ is fair?” Lyle asked.

“Nooo! No!” The students shouted before she even finished the question.

“I think that’s a lie,” said one student, Alex.

Lyle said their reactions illustrated how photographs can help students empathize with people and events of the past. “Giving kids primary sources is one of the biggest signs of respect we can show the kids and the story,” she said. “I think it tells [them] we trust them. We know they can do it. And it gives them the opportunity to not just sit back and listen, but to become detectives, to uncover the story that might be deeper than what we were going to present them to begin with.”

Examining agency and decision making

At another fourth grade classroom in Rockingham County, students know teacher Carrie Lillard as a history buff who will occasionally bust out a rap from Hamilton. On one wall of her room, a bulletin board says “History is storytelling” and features over a dozen cards highlighting notable people and events in Virginia history. By framing history as storytelling, Lillard said she wants students to see that the past is composed of people who made choices. And to be able to analyze the consequences – good, bad or complicated.

One of the historical characters the fourth graders learn the most about in the civil rights unit is Barbara Johns, the quiet 16-year-old who led her Moton High School classmates in the strike for better school facilities and resources. According to the Robert Russa Moton Museum, Moton High School was constructed for about 200 students. But by the 1950s it held more than 450. And that wasn’t the only challenge. The roofs of the buildings leaked. Students had to hold umbrellas over their heads on rainy days. The only heat was from a potbelly stove. Anyone who sat near it got too hot, and kids who sat far away shivered in their winter coats.

None of these problems existed at the nearby high school attended by white students. But despite lobbying by parents, the school board refused to build a new school for Black students. When Johns and her classmates went on strike, they wrote to the NAACP for help and eventually sued the school board. Their case became one of five that made up Brown v. Board of Education.

“For a nine and ten year old, it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that someone their age, or slightly older, or sometimes slightly younger, can change the world and with just one small decision. And that’s exactly what she did. So kids really grasp onto that,” said Lillard. 

In addition to photos, the Rockingham County fourth graders learn about Johns’ motivations through another primary source: her diary. They read entries that Johns wrote later in life, recounting her time in high school. In one entry, she recalled missing the school bus one morning and trying to hitch a ride.

“One morning I was so busy rushing my brothers and sister down the hill to school that I forgot my own lunch and had to rush back up the hill to retrieve it. In the meantime, the bus arrived, picked them up and left me standing there by the roadside waiting to thumb a ride with whomever came by. About an hour later, I was still waiting when the white school bus drives by half empty on its way to Farmville High School. It would have to pass by my school to get to that school, and I couldn’t ride with them. Right then and there, I decided, indeed, something had to be done about this inequality – and I still didn’t know what.”

For Emery, a fourth grader in Lillard’s class, reading Johns’ own words brought this history to life. “I liked how it was, in particular, how it was [the story of] a young girl,” Emery said. “Normally we learn about older people. But no, we learned about a 16-year-old, still a teenager.”

Although the Moton students and other Brown v. Board plaintiffs were successful, school segregation didn’t end immediately in Virginia. Local and state officials there actively defied the court ruling, even closing schools in several counties instead of integrating. It took more protests and more court cases, for schools to actually integrate.

Lillard said her emphasis on viewing historical figures as people who had agency and made choices helps her students process this complex history. “I’m like, OK, so, you know, think about the same people who weren’t just automatically okay with the Civil War being over? They still harbor a lot of anger and resentment the same way, just because you’re forced to apologize to a friend doesn’t automatically fix it,” she said.

Fostering critical thinking skills

Lillard and Lyle said that their former students still bring up Barbara Johns even when they leave fourth grade. For Lyle, that’s different from when she covered this topic without primary sources. “They knew her role. They knew her name. That was really it,” she said of earlier students. “I’m not even sure if they remember her story at all. Because they were passive in that process.”

The goal of social studies isn’t just to memorize a list of names and dates. It’s also to help kids learn skills like analyzing information sources, using evidence to distinguish fact from opinion, and comparing and contrasting people, places and events. An example of that kind of critical thinking occurred as Lyle’s students studied old photos of segregation. While examining a photo of a sign for a whites-only neighborhood, a student named Lily raised her hand.

“What makes me mad is that when the sign says, ‘We want white tenants in our white community,’ it has American flags on it,” Lily said. “And the Black people … are a part of America. So why do the white people say they’re usually more a part of America than the Black people?”

Lyle said that Lily’s observation and question impressed her: “I was kind of sitting back there like, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s brilliance.’ And that’s because she had the opportunity to just stare at a picture and stare long enough to see the little details that otherwise could be missed.”

Potter, the Library of Congress educator, agreed that giving students opportunities to study primary sources can foster critical thinking. “The fact that you can go to the source where the information originated and get the context of the source and the rest of the story – if you can get kids interested and excited about that, then what we’re going to do is train a generation of young people to constantly question where information is coming from,” she said. “That is absolutely what primary sources can do for young people. And goodness knows we need more of that.”

For teachers new to primary sources, Potter recommended picking one item or document that complements the secondary sources in the curriculum. Teachers can invite students to observe, reflect and ask questions about the primary source using a one-page worksheet developed by her team. The library’s website also contains curated sets of primary sources related to popular curriculum topics, such as the New Deal, women’s suffrage and Rosa Parks. Blog posts offer tips for how to use those resources.

Episode transcript

Kara Newhouse: Welcome to MindShift, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Kara Newhouse.

Nimah Gobir: And I’m Nimah Gobir.

Kara Newhouse: Nimah, do you like to make pancakes?

Nimah Gobir: I do! They’re one of my favorite foods.

Kara Newhouse: Have you ever put peanut butter in your pancakes?

Nimah Gobir: No. It sounds delicious, but Kara, why do you ask?

Kara Newhouse: I recently learned that civil rights icon Rosa Parks put peanut butter in her pancake batter. Her recipe is handwritten on the back of a bank envelope.

Lee Ann Potter: And the recipe itself is terrific. It really is. If you need a good pancake recipe, add some peanut butter to it, and you will love them.

Kara Newhouse: That’s Lee Ann Potter. She’s the Director of Professional Learning and Outreach Initiatives at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where the Rosa Parks papers are held.

Nimah Gobir: The Library of Congress is home to all sorts of documents from America’s past. They range from legal records to items that reflect the daily life of historical figures.

Kara Newhouse: The Rosa Parks collection includes a date book, photos of her with family, birthday cards sent to her by admiring children, and more. 

Lee Ann Potter: There’s a series in her papers of her membership cards. And, you know, you see her membership card for AARP. And it’s like, never occurred to me that Rosa Parks might be a member of AARP. But her membership card is in her papers.

Kara Newhouse: Lee Ann and her team develop resources to help teachers use Library of Congress materials like these in their classrooms.

Lee Ann Potter: There is not a day that goes by when I don’t stumble on something in the collection that either catches my breath or makes me think, oh, who can I tell about this cool thing? And the former classroom teacher in me is always thinking about, what is the thing that might have captured student attention or gotten students to think differently or deeply about something?

Kara Newhouse: The materials at the Library of Congress are what we call primary sources. Unlike textbooks, they are first-hand accounts of the past.

[Music]

Lee Ann Potter: A primary source at its very core is the raw material of history. They can be newspapers. They can be photographs, maps, architectural drawings, sound recordings. They can be receipts. They can be memos. They can be scribbles. They can be doodles. They can be, truly, objects.

Kara Newhouse: Many students today are learning history through primary sources. That wasn’t always the norm.

Nimah Gobir: In the past two decades, museums and archival institutions started digitizing their collections and putting them online.

Lee Ann Potter: I think as soon as the materials became available and more and more of these organizations worked in partnership with educators to really start building some pedagogy and tools around using these materials as classroom tools, as exercises, as opportunities for students, that’s when everything started to change.

Kara Newhouse: Primary sources can make people and events of the past feel more real and more textured for students.

Nimah Gobir: They can also help kids learn to think critically about the information they’re consuming. That’s increasingly necessary as young people navigate a digital world filled with misinformation and disinformation from both humans and artificial intelligence.

Lee Ann Potter: The fact that you can go to the source where the information originated and get the context of the source and the rest of the story – if you can get kids interested and excited about that, then what we’re going to do is, is train a generation of young people to constantly question where information is coming from and constantly wonder, what is the original source for this bit of information that someone is trying to convey to me? And I think that is absolutely what primary sources can do for young people. And and goodness knows we need more of that.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: In this episode of MindShift, we’re going to hear how primary sources can bring history to life and deepen students’ understanding of the past.

Nimah Gobir: We’ll do that by visiting two schools in Virginia where students are learning about the Civil Rights Movement. Stay with us.

Miranda Lyle: What happened after the Civil war?

Whole class: Reconstruction!

Kara Newhouse: To dig into the power of learning with primary sources, we’re visiting a fourth grade classroom in Rockingham County, Virginia.

Miranda Lyle: So what are the words we’re gonna talk about today?

Whole class: Amendment, segregation, and pre-

Miranda Lyle: Prejudice.

Kara Newhouse: Amendment, segregation and prejudice. 

Whole class: Prejudice.

Kara Newhouse: Those are the vocab words that students are learning in Miranda Lyle’s fourth grade class. The class is gathered on a beige rug at the front of the room.

Miranda Lyle: You think you know what segregation means? What do you think it means?

Nimah Gobir: This is the start of a social studies unit about school desegregation. 

Miranda Lyle: White and Black people were separated from each other based on race, right?

Nimah Gobir: Next, Miranda projects a black and white photo of a group of teenagers onto the smart board.

Miranda Lyle: You’re going to read this picture. I want you to observe and see as many things as you can before we even start today. What do you, what do you notice? Why don’t you have a quiet thumb up. Keep looking at the screen. See if you can give me more than one idea.

Kara Newhouse: The photograph is from 1951. It shows about 40 African-American teenagers standing outside looking at the camera. The boys wear collared shirts and in some cases ties. The girls wear dresses or long skirts and blouses. Many also wear long coats. In the background there are two buildings and a sidewalk flanked by mud and puddles. 

Levi: They look like they’re going to school.

Miranda Lyle: They look like they’re going to school. What makes you think they’re going to school?

Levi: Because they have, like, uniforms on. Well, like they have clothes that look school-y.

Miranda Lyle: They have clothes that look kind of professional, kind of ready for school, I like that.

Nimah Gobir: These teenagers were students at R.R. Moton High School. That was a segregated school in Farmville, Virginia – just over two hours southeast of where the fourth graders are sitting now.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda’s students don’t know it yet, but the young people they’re looking at were some of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education – the Supreme Court case that found school segregation unconstitutional 70 years ago.

Miranda Lyle: Abigail.

Abigail: It looks like, like, in the background those are like schools. Like the schools that they were in, like those small buildings.

Unidentified student: Like cabins.

Miranda Lyle: It looks like schools, smaller buildings, you notice they kind of look like cabins. What makes you think cabins when you look at that?

Unidentified student: Like they’re made out of, like, wood and, like, it doesn’t really look like somewhere you’d want to live.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: The buildings they’re discussing were temporary classrooms made with cheap tar paper siding. Some people in Farmville said they looked like chicken coops. County officials built them to deal with overcrowding at Moton High School.

Nimah Gobir: The school was constructed for about 200 students. But by the 1950s it held more than 450. And that wasn’t the only challenge. The roofs of the buildings leaked. Students had to hold umbrellas over their heads on rainy days. The only heat was from a potbelly stove. Anyone who sat near it got too hot, and kids who sat far away shivered in their winter coats.

Kara Newhouse: None of these problems existed at the nearby high school attended by white students. But despite lobbying by parents, the school board refused to build a new school for Black students. To protest the disparities, a quiet 16-year-old named Barbara Johns led her classmates in a two-week strike in 1951.

Nimah Gobir: The students wrote to the NAACP for help and eventually sued the school board. Their case became one of five that made up Brown v. Board of Education.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda’s fourth grade class will learn about all of that during this social studies unit. For now, this photo of the R. R. Moton students is just a teaser. Today is all about understanding the historical context of the Jim Crow era.

Miranda Lyle: We’re going to keep going because today we’re going to be looking at a lot of different pictures and a lot of different primary sources like this one.

Nimah Gobir: Miranda clicks through slides that include background info and more black and white photos depicting segregated water fountains, buses and neighborhoods. The fourth graders point out details and ask questions.

Kara Newhouse: As they study the photos, they’re getting a strong sense of what racial segregation looked like. And they are not happy about it.

Miranda Lyle: So, so far, are you guys feeling like separate but equal …

Alex: Is really a lie.

Miranda Lyle: Is fair?

Whole class: No. No!

Miranda Lyle: What are you feeling so far, Alex?

Alex: It’s like, I think that’s a lie.

Miranda Lyle: You think that separate but equal is a lie.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda says, these photographs help students empathize with people and events of the past.

Miranda Lyle: Actually giving kids primary sources is one of the biggest signs of respect we can show the kids and the story. I think it tells us we trust them. We know they can do it. And it gives them the opportunity to not just sit back and listen, but to become detectives, to uncover the story that might be deeper than what we were going to present them to begin with.

Kara Newhouse: Here’s one student, Lily, responding to a photo of a sign for a whites-only neighborhood.

Lily: What makes me mad is that when the sign says ‘We want white people in our white community,’ it has American flags on it. And the Black people are a part of America. So why do the white people say they’re usually more a part of America than the Black people?

Miranda Lyle: You’re angry because those flags are for the United States, right? And you’re saying all races live in the United States. And at this point, remember, this is after that 15, 13, 14, the 15th amendment. So the Constitution says, yeah, these people are Americans, too.

Nimah Gobir: Miranda and a team of teachers in Rockingham County designed this civil rights unit using inquiry-based teaching. That’s a method that encourages students to ask questions about the world and develop analytical thinking skills.

Kara Newhouse: Lily’s observation about the flag is an example of how primary sources can drive inquiry.

Miranda Lyle: I was really impressed. I was I was kind of, like, sitting back there like, oh my goodness, that’s brilliance. And that’s because she had the, you know, like, had the opportunity to just stare at a picture and stare long enough to see the little details that otherwise could be missed.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: Learning with primary sources has some great benefits, but it also comes with challenges.

Nimah Gobir: One of the big ones is that documents from the past may use language we wouldn’t use today. 

Kara Newhouse: For instance, some of the photos that Miranda’s students were looking at included signs referring to Black people as “colored.”

Miranda Lyle: Which is a sign that we’re going to see in a lot of different primary sources we look at. But remember, we talked last week about that Maya Angelou quote in, um, growth mindset that said, ‘know better and do better.’ Remember how we talked about how that’s something that was on those signs, but are we going to use that term? No, because we know better than that, so we’re going to do better than that. So using terms like African-American, even saying things like Black people or brown people, that’s allowed. But we want to stray away from using words that aren’t used anymore.

Nimah Gobir: Even with the upfront discussion about appropriate language, these are fourth graders. They’re still learning. And things can come up that require gentle correction.

Unidentified student: … that the Blacks are not getting treated very nicely because they have like —

Miranda Lyle: Black people – we want to make sure we have that ‘people’ word at the end there. The Black people.

Unidentified student: Mmhm.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda tries to model the “know better, do better” idea herself, too. During their Civil War study, she had a slide that used the term “runaway slaves.”

Miranda Lyle: And I was talking with my class one day. I was like, I don’t like how that sounds, because, you know, and they’re like, ‘Well, yeah, runaway sounds like it’s a bad thing.’

Kara Newhouse: She went online and looked for alternate terms.

Miranda Lyle: And one that I found that my kids have really attached to was freedom seekers, because we talked about how ‘runaway’ sounds like they’re doing something wrong and they’re not doing anything wrong. They’re trying to, you know, gives them just a different way of looking at the entire situation.

[Music]

Nimah Gobir: It’s not just language that can be hard in social studies. Topics like slavery and segregation reveal difficult truths about violence and injustice in American history. These topics have also become politicized in recent years.

Kara Newhouse: According to the news outlet Education Week, 17 states have passed bills or other policies that limit teachers’ ability to discuss racism in school.

Nimah Gobir: That includes here in Virginia, where the governor issued an executive order that bans so-called “divisive concepts,” such as critical race theory – which is an academic and legal framework.

Kara Newhouse: Proponents of such policies often say that talking about racial injustice will make white children feel guilty. Miranda’s school is predominantly white, and that hasn’t been her experience.

Miranda Lyle: I had a student put on a study guide, ‘Which side did Virginia support?’ It was like ‘Virginia,’ he outlined in a heart, and then ‘supported the Confederacy’ and then had a broken heart. So they’re able to see, like, it’s not ‘you’re the problem’ or ‘Virginia today is the problem.’ They’re able to kind of see these, yeah, that was a big mistake people made for a long time. That was actually really detrimental. Why? Because kids, I think even our age, when we were children would have had the same, ‘That’s not fair’ had it been presented as, look at these primary sources. Look at these actual pictures.

Kara Newhouse: Miranda also makes sure her students know that even though the R.R. Moton facilities were unequal, the students there were smart and had teachers who maintained high expectations for them. She doesn’t want her students to unconsciously equate bad conditions with people being downtrodden.

Miranda Lyle: Just because they had more supplies or they had better buildings or things like that, does that mean that the students weren’t as good?

Whole class: No.

Miranda Lyle: Does it mean that the teachers weren’t as good?

Whole class: No, no.

Miranda Lyle: Remember we talked about at one of the schools we’re going to discuss, at R.R. Moton high school, one of the teachers would go on to work for NASA. Does that sound like somebody who’s going to be a good science teacher? Somebody who goes to NASA?

Unidentified student: Yeah.

Miranda Lyle: A good math teacher? Yeah. So we’re going to keep talking about these things.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: After this introduction to segregation, the fourth graders will learn about Barbara Johns, the 16-year-old I mentioned earlier. She led her classmates in a fight for equal education that they took all the way to the Supreme Court. That story is the beating heart of this unit.

Carrie Lillard: One of the coolest things about Barbara Johns is that she was one, a student. She was not the same age as my own kids that I teach, but she was still a student who saw a problem in her school, which was in Virginia.

Kara Newhouse: This is Carrie Lillard. She’s another fourth grade teacher in Rockingham County. She was on the same team as Miranda that created this unit about Barbara Johns and her classmates.

Carrie Lillard: For a nine and ten year old, it’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that someone their age or slightly older, or sometimes slightly younger, can change the world and with just one small decision. And that’s exactly what she did. So kids really grasp onto that.

Nimah Gobir: One way the fourth graders learn about Barbara Johns is from another primary source: her diary.

Lily: One morning I was so busy rushing my brothers and sister down the hill to school that I forgot my own lunch and had to rush back up the hill to retrieve it.

Kara Newhouse: That’s one of Carrie’s students, Lily. She’s reading a diary entry that Barbara Johns wrote later in life recounting her time in high school. In it, Barbara recalls missing the school bus one morning and trying to hitch a ride.

Lily: About an hour later, I was still waiting when the white school bus drives by half empty on its way to Farmville High School. It would have to pass by my school to get to that school, and I couldn’t ride with them. Right then and there, I decided, indeed, something had to be done about this inequality.

Kara Newhouse: Here’s another student, Emery, recalling what Barbara did after the day she missed the bus.

Emery: She went up to her music teacher and said, ‘Hey, I have a problem’. And the teacher and she told her the problem. And the music teacher said, ‘If you have a problem, why don’t you fix it?’ And she gathered all these people in the auditorium and said, ‘If you want to be with me, you can be with me.’ And then she led a strike.

Kara Newhouse: Reading the diary entries helped Emery connect with Barbara Johns and the Brown v. Board case on a personal level.

Emery: I liked how it was, in particular, how it was a young girl. Normally when we, we learn about, like, older people. But no, we learned about a 16 year old. Still a teenager.

Kara Newhouse: Why did that stand out to you?

Emery: Because usually to teenagers, like these days in 2024, do some dumb stuff.

Kara Newhouse: [laughs] But Barbara Johns wasn’t doing dumb stuff?

Emery: No, she was doing brilliant stuff.

Kara Newhouse: The Rockingham County teachers told me that their former students still bring up Barbara Johns even when they leave fourth grade. Miranda says that’s different from when she covered this topic without primary sources.

Miranda Lyle: They knew her role. They knew her name. That was really it. And if they held onto it, what I could say about it now. I’m not even sure if they remember her story at all. Because it was more, they were passive in that process.

Nimah Gobir: The goal of social studies isn’t just to memorize a list of names and dates. It’s also to help kids learn skills like analyzing information sources, using evidence to distinguish fact from opinion, and comparing and contrasting people, places and events.

Kara Newhouse: I heard examples of all of those skills as the fourth graders discussed photos and diary entries from Virginia’s history.

Miranda Lyle: They’re not just sitting back and being passive listeners to a story. They’re seeing the actual actions and the consequences of those actions.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: Those critical thinking skills also help students wrestle with the complexity of the past. Like the fact that schools did not immediately integrate after Brown v. Board of Education.

Nimah Gobir: In Virginia, local and state officials actively defied the court ruling. They even closed schools in several counties instead of integrating.

Kara Newhouse: It took more protests and more court cases, for schools to actually integrate in Virginia. Carrie says the fourth graders learn about all of that.

Carrie Lillard: Approaching history from ‘we are we are a combination of all of the choices we make’ helps when we get to this point. I’m like, OK, so, you know, think about the same people who weren’t just automatically okay with the Civil War being over, they still harbor a lot of anger and resentment the same way, just because you’re forced to apologize to a friend doesn’t automatically fix it.

Kara Newhouse: For their final assignment, the fourth graders write a letter to Barbara Johns’ sister, Joan Johns Cobbs. She participated in the Moton student strike and is still alive today.

Leigha: Dear Mrs. Johns Cobbs. We have been learning about your sister Barbara Johns’ legacy in my history class and the impacts she has made in our lives. She was brave by doing what is right because she felt like she had to do something.

Kara Newhouse: That’s Leigha, now a fifth grader. She’s reading the letter she wrote a year earlier in Carrie’s class.

Leigha: … I’m going to defend girls because she inspired me to say ‘no’ when boys say girls can’t run or play sports, but they can. Barbara Johns has inspired me to stand up for what I believe in. Thank you for making the USA what it is today. Thanks for everything.

[Music]

Kara Newhouse: We just heard about an entire social studies unit centered around primary sources. But teachers don’t have to overhaul the whole curriculum to get started teaching this way.

Nimah Gobir: Lee Ann Potter’s team at the Library of Congress recommends picking one primary source that complements the secondary sources schools are using. Teachers can invite students to observe, reflect and ask questions about the primary source.

Kara Newhouse: The Library of Congress’s website for teachers has a one-page worksheet to walk students through that observe-reflect-question cycle. The website also has curated sets of primary sources related to popular curriculum topics. And lots of tips for how to use those resources.

Nimah Gobir: History is rich with stories. Primary sources can unlock those stories by humanizing the people who came before us.

Kara Newhouse: When young people form connections with the past, it helps them understand our world today and determine the future they want to create.

Kara Newhouse: Thank you to Miranda Lyle, Carrie Lillard and all of their fourth grade students. The students you heard in this episode were:

Levi, Abigail, Alex, Lily D., Lilly J., Emery and Leigha.

Thanks also to Lee Ann Potter at the Library of Congress and Beau Dickenson at Rockingham County Public Schools.

If you want to learn more about Barbara Johns, you can visit the Robert Russa Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia.

I’m Kara Newhouse.

Nimah Gobir: And I’m Nimah Gobir.

Kara Newhouse: The rest of the MindShift team includes Ki Sung, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Jennifer Ng.

Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer.

Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, and Holly Kernan.

Nimah Gobir: MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.

Kara Newhouse: If you love MindShift, and enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. We really appreciate it. You can also read more or subscribe to our newsletter at K-Q-E-D-dot-org-slash-MindShift.

Thanks for listening!