RRCHNM Launches Next Round of Teaching Guides for Pre-Service History Teachers

Funded by the Library of Congress, the four teaching guides support new prospective teachers teaching Indigenous history and will be available on Teachinghistory.org.

RRCHNM is proud to announce the launch of four new resources for pre-service teachers on Indigenous 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 personal narratives, material objects, newspaper articles, photographs, posters, video interviews, and more.

The guides were developed by Nate Sleeter, Director of Educational Projects at RRCHNM, with assistance in researching and locating primary sources from PhD students Hayley Madl, Amber Pelham, and Rachel Whyte. The RRCHNM team consulted with scholars with expertise in Indigenous history — Dr. Tiffany Hale and Dr. Farina King— to determine appropriate topics for the guides that matched current scholarship. Additionally, feedback was sought from social studies methods scholars Dr. Stewart Waters of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Dr. Andrew Porter, and Dr. Lynda Herrera from Mason who provided ideas on how to frame the guides for an audience of pre-service teachers and solicited feedback from teachers in training.

The topics of the guides are the History of Education and Indigenous Americans, Native Women and Suffrage – Beyond the 19th Amendment, Comanche Nation and “Manifest Destiny”, and Rethinking “Westward Expansion”.