RRCHNM Launches New Teaching Guides for Pre-Service History Teachers 

Funded by the Library of Congress, these four teaching guides will support new prospective teachers teaching post-1970s U.S. history and civics and will be available on Teachinghistory.org.

RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on post-1970s history in the United States. The guides were made possible with generous funding from the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the Library of Congress. These free online resources feature activities for students to engage with rich Library of Congress primary sources to better understand topics in history that can be especially challenging for teachers new to the profession.

Now more than ever teaching history is fraught and these resources acknowledge the particular difficulty prospective history teachers face in teaching potentially emotional topics. The guides provide activities centered on analyzing primary sources and model the historian’s approach of understanding people in the past through evidence they left behind — including photographs, material objects, monuments, memorials, buildings, landscapes, newspapers, posters, and more.

The guides were developed by Nate Sleeter, Director of Educational Projects at RRCHNM and Amber Pelham, former graduate research assistant and current graduate affiliate with assistance from Hannah Lecomte and Annabelle Spencer. The RRCHNM team consulted with scholars with historical and teaching expertise including Dr. Brittany Jones, Dr. Maia Sheppard, Dr. Sara Levy, Dr. Kathleen Steeves, Dr. Stewart Waters, and Dr. Justin Broubalow.

The topics of the guides are Housing and Houselessness, September 11 and Commemoration, Post-1970 Immigration from Asia, and Higher Education.