RRCHNM is excited to announce a new grant award from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program. As part of the grant, RRCHNM will develop teaching resources on difficult to teach topics with a focus on teaching the history of religion in the United States in K-12 schools. Teachers, especially if they are new to the profession, are often reticent to approach topics that might potentially be controversial or give rise emotional reactions. As a result, important themes for understanding history can receive less attention than they deserve in K-12 education.

One proven way to approach these topics is to incorporate into lessons and activities primary source evidence for students to analyze directly, and the Library of Congress fortunately has a wealth of engaging primary sources related to the theme of religion in the United States freely available as part of their many digital collections. Working from this base of incredible resources, the project team will collaborate with scholar advisors, Lincoln Mullen, John Turner, and Jannelle Legg to determine topics for the teaching resources. We will also collaborate with social studies education scholars, Mark Helmsing here at Mason, Stewart Waters at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and Karen Kortecamp at George Washington University. These scholars will provide feedback and guidance on incorporating techniques for teaching emotional topics and work with pre-service to get their feedback on the resources as well.

These teaching resources will be published on the center’s popular teachinghistory.org website in time for the 2022-2023 school year.