Over the past decade, the Educating with Evidence project at Southern Illinois University (SIU) has benefitted from several Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) grants. Curriculum developed in support from these grants range from over 140 primary-source assessments aligned with the disciplinary literacy skills found in the Common Core State Standards to 3D-scanned materials from local and international archaeological dig sites. All of these materials are free to the public and can be found at the project’s website: https://educatingwithevidence.siu.edu/.

The Educating with Evidence project’s most recent TPS grant was a unique collaboration that included the National Parks Service’s Lincoln Heritage Area in Springfield, IL as well as the Center for Archaeological Investigations, Touch of Nature Environmental Education Center, Southern Illinois University (SIU) Press, and the School of Education at SIU. The project engaged local secondary students and educators with the development, implementation, and evaluation of curricula using sources from the Library of Congress for topics that included: 1) local African American history and one communities’ suspected connections to the Underground Railroad, 2) President Lincoln’s Resilience and Leadership, and 3) Rhetoric in Propaganda. We used HTML5/H5P technology to develop these curricula to increase their accessibility for students with diverse learning needs and implemented these interactive online modules in traditional and non-traditional educational settings. The result of this work was over 20 interactive modules that focus on inquiry skills with sources from the Library of Congress and local collections and can be found on the modules’ webpage: https://educatingwithevidence.siu.edu/interactive-units/.