Using Primary Sources to Encourage Culturally Responsive Inquiry

Last week, I spend the first half of the week in Washington DC at the Library of Congress and the end of the week at the Colorado Association of Libraries conference in Denver. In my efforts to process such a busy week, I thought it would be instructive to find some ties between the two. One of the ties that clearly stands out in my mind is related to media literacy.

I was able to attend a session on creating culturally responsive school librarians. Generally, the term “culturally responsive” is used in relation to teaching practices. The Intime website has the following definition/characteristics of culturally responsive teaching:

• It uses the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them
• It teaches to and through the strengths of these students.
• It acknowledges the legitimacy of the cultural heritages of different ethnic groups, both as legacies that affect students' dispositions, attitudes, and approaches to learning and as worthy content to be taught in the formal curriculum.
• It builds bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences as well as between academic abstractions and lived sociocultural realities.
• It uses a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to different learning styles.
• It teaches students to know and praise their own and each others' cultural heritages.
• It incorporates multicultural information, resources, and materials in all the subjects and skills routinely taught in schools.
  
  http://www.intime.uni.edu/multiculture/curriculum/culture/Teaching.htm
  

When these concepts are put into the context of a school library, librarians need to be conscious of their collection on top of the teaching practices they are employing. Throughout the school, the school librarian is in a key position to advocate or the use of sources other than the typical textbook. These sources can be used to tell the stories of those who are not generally mentioned in the official channels – such as a textbook.

Using Primary Sources, such as those that can be found on www.loc.gov, introduce these alternative voices into the typical class curriculum. The primary sources can also give all of your students a greater understanding of their own history and of the contributions that their culture has contributed to our current society today.

Not only do primary sources introduce a culturally responsive content to the school curriculum, but they tend to bring different forms of learning and meaning into the classroom. Other learning styles are addressed and students are led to critically think about the sources.
As an example, immigration is a huge concern and for some of our student. The immigration debate is not just a political conversational piece, but it actually may directly affect family members. Consider the following source:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/rbpebib:@field%28NUMBER+@band%28rbpe+07902500%29%29

It gives data on the state of immigration in 1903. It highlights the dangers of letting these uneducated Irish, Italians, and other Europeans into the United States. [For this and other immigration primary sources, check out the Immigration Primary Source Set at http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/immigration/.]

By using a source such as this, students understand that this is not a new debate and that all American’s may have had their own families targeted in the debate at one point or another. This not only provides greater understanding for students being affected by immigration debates now, but, it allows all of our students the opportunity to be more culturally responsive within their own community.