Over the course of several year, David Hicks (Professor at VT) and Amy Allen (Associate Professor at VT) have had a variety of projects with TPS.

Amy’s project, Meeting Virginia Standards of Learning While Engaging Elementary Students with Library of Congress Primary Sources, worked directly with rural fourth-grade teachers, drawing on what is known about quality professional development to equip teachers to use Library of Congress documents to teach Virginia SOL’s, primarily through pairing picture books and visual thinking strategies with primary sources. As part of this three-day workshop, teachers visited local historical sites to interrogate place as a primary source while participating in workshops where presenters model teaching strategies that can be paired with Library of Congress Primary Source Sets. Teachers were also provided with resources to create their own lessons, then model/share these lessons with other participants. Teachers left the workshop with a stipend and resources to implement the model lessons and their created lessons in their own classrooms.

David’s project, Dining of Washington: Using the Chronicling America Historic Newspaper Collection was created to facilitate the doing of history in a standards-based environment. On October 20th 1901, the Richmond Times shared with its readers a series of headlines from several southern newspapers reacting to an event held at the White House that was organized and attended by President Theodore Roosevelt and his family. The Memphis Scimitar called the event a “Damnable outrage”. The Augusta Chronicle (Georgia) described it as “a distinct shock”. The Nashville Banner suggested the occurrence would “chill southern favor.” While the Nashville American asserted that “His mother would have rebelled.” But what action by a sitting President could have created such a groundswell of consternation and dismay from the southern press? Was this dismay/anger confined to the Southern Press? Such questions emerged from locating news articles from the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database of historic newspapers. Importantly, insights to the above questions can be gleaned through continuing to locate and analyze the historical newspapers in the collection. In doing so, it becomes clear that the southern press’ furor was a result of Roosevelt’s invitation to Booker T. Washington to have dinner with him at the White House. By accepting the invitation, Washington became the first African American to dine at the White House in an era described as the “nadir of race relations in the United States”.

Using the “Dining of Washington” and its coverage in the Southern, Northern and African American newspapers as the key focal point, the goal of this project is to develop materials and organize teacher workshops that examine and model how to harness the potential of the Chronicling America Historic Newspaper Collection to facilitate the teaching and learning of historical inquiry, analysis, and enhance content understanding of late 19th century and early 20th century social and political American history in standards-based history and social science classrooms.

More recently, David and Amy have been working together to experiment with how Generative AI might be used to support work with primary sources. To that end, they developed a framwork for working with AI, technocuriosity, and they have co-written a book, Teaching History with Chatty Geeps, which is available as an online educational resource. They also host regular workshops for preservice and inservice teachers about working with GenAI in history classrooms.