Teaching with Primary Sources: Looking at the Support Needs of Instructors

Abstract

s Teaching Support Services Program investigates the teaching practices and support needs of collegiate instructors.Our most recent project in this program, "Supporting Teaching with Primary Sources," focused on identifying how to effectively support instructors and their students find, access, and use primary sources in classroom environments.Encounters with primary sources-historical or contemporary artifacts that bear direct witness to a specific period or event-are central to the pedagogy of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.Their use in undergraduate instruction aligns with universities' commitments to experiential and inquiry-based learning and library initiatives focused on media and information literacy.Reflecting the importance of the topic within higher education, "Supporting Teaching with Primary Sources" attracted the largest cohort of any Ithaka S+R program to date.Research teams at 26 academic libraries in the United States and United Kingdom joined the program.ProQuest, which sponsored the project, conducted interviews with instructors at an additional 16 universities.Together, the 27 research teams interviewed 335 instructors, asking detailed questions about how instructors design courses and assignments utilizing primary sources, and where and how instructors and their students discover and access primary sources appropriate for classroom use.These transcripts yielded rich data about how stakeholders-including university libraries, faculty, administrators, publishers, and professional organizations-can best support undergraduate instruction using primary sources.Detailed findings and actionable recommendations can be found in the body of this report.Our findings and recommendations are grouped around the following important challenges and emerging best practices:▪ Identifying appropriate primary sources.While digitization has made a wide variety of primary sources available to instructors, discovery tools are rarely optimized to make it easy for instructors to locate resources appropriate for classroom use.▪ Students' skills at discovering and evaluating primary sources.Students often lack familiarity with relevant search tools and strategies to discover sources and struggle to evaluate the value of the sources they do find.Maximizing student learning requires instruction in both the technical knowledge of discovery and information literacy.▪ Integrating primary sources requires careful course design.Effective pedagogy often involves scaffolding exposure to primary sources both within courses and across curricula, but many instructors default towards proscribing which sources students use, especially in large introductory classes.▪ Students benefit from exposure to both physical and digital sources.Physical encounters with material sources are highly-valued by instructors for inspiring student curiosity, but digital sources expand student access and the depth of library collections.▪ Collaboration pays dividends.Teaching effectively with primary sources requires many forms of knowledge and expertise.Long-term relationships between instructors, librarians, archivists, and museum staff are particularly likely to lead to the scaffolded exposure to primary sources that seems best suited to optimal student learning outcomes.