Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking and Master of Arts in Teaching Program Receive Library of Congress Grant Award

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. —The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) and Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching Program (MAT) have been awarded their fourth grant to imbed digitized Library of Congress primary sources into their programming for teachers and students. Bard MAT and IWT are known for their innovative strategies in supporting literacy instruction across disciplines through writing-based, student-centered teaching practices. The latest grant of $74,911, awarded under the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program, supports their collaborative one-year project “Mapping Boundaries: Writing to Read Primary Sources in Middle School Classrooms.”

The Bard MAT/IWT project will make use of the vast archival resources of the Library of Congress in professional development workshops that model how to apply writing-to-read and writing-to-learn strategies to primary sources in ELA, Social Studies, and STEM classrooms. The project will develop a workshop series for teachers, teachers-in-training, and middle school and high school students, focused on an interdisciplinary collection of sources (historical surveys, maps, and representations of the American landscape). The primary goal of the workshops is to offer writing-based strategies to help students delve into texts that might feel daunting and inaccessible and to give them tools to slow down their reading and uncover surprising connections and meaning.
 
Proposed workshops include one-day events during the school year, programming in the MAT summer semester, and an intensive weeklong workshop that will be offered within IWT’s popular and long-running July Weeklong Workshop series. Some workshops will be held in person on Bard College’s campus in New York’s Hudson Valley; some will be held online.

The focus of the project is to revise and expand their current program of Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS)–centered training workshops and pre-service education courses and more fully circulate the materials created in these workshops for educators. IWT’s current Library of Congress–focused workshops will be revised specifically for middle school classrooms, with skills-building exercises in reading and writing critically, and the resources made widely available to middle school educators. Modeling classroom activities that stimulate middle school students’ engagement with language, ideas, and archival sources, these workshops will be held on the Bard campus, online, and in middle schools partnered with Bard MAT. Bard will use its established networks, promotional forums, and targeted advertising to attract middle school teachers as workshop participants. Newly-developed middle school lesson plans and primary source sets will be posted on a new section of the IWT website, as will videos from sixth through ninth grade teachers demonstrating writing-based teaching with primary sources inspired by the Bard workshops they’ve attended. In required laboratory classes, MAT will train education degree candidates in archival literacy instruction for middle school ELA and Social Studies classes. MAT history students will revise the chapter of a textbook, supplemented by a curated set of primary sources and archival materials. These primary source sets will be integral to Capstone Projects by MAT degree candidates, and archived in the Bard Library Digital Commons as searchable Open Educational Resources and cross-posted to the TPS Consortium Created Materials site: https://tpsconsortiumcreatedmaterials.org/
 
To inform this work, participants will draw on Library of Congress sources such as historical city maps, stereopticon photographs of Lower East Side street vendors, abolitionist posters, and 1920s Edison films. Sources might include Army Corps of Engineers maps and surveys of the Mississippi River flood plains, Native American paintings, and photographs of 19th-century utopian communities, for example. Reading primary sources poses particular literacy challenges for students—whether because of challenging language, unfamiliar visual conventions, or simply because (unlike many texts that students encounter in the classroom) primary sources were not written or produced with 21st-century students as their intended audiences. The writing-to-learn and writing-to-read strategies, modeled in the IWT and MAT workshops, help teachers guide students through encounters with challenging texts. Writing-to-learn and writing-to-read strategies are particularly empowering when students use them to navigate and decipher historical and primary sources, helping them to find unexpected layers of meaning and interpret unfamiliar data.

Bard College IWT/MAT have previously been awarded three TPS Regional grants in 2019, 2020, and 2021 for the projects “The World of the Poem: Teaching Poetry through Primary Sources,” “‘If Woman Upset the World’: Reading and Writing Women Activists of the Hudson Valley,” and the four-year “Mapping Unknowns: Writing to Read Primary Sources.” These successful projects operated through the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Regional Grant Program.
 
About Bard MAT
The Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) offers an intensive, one-year program that integrates courses in education, the candidate’s discipline (biology, history, literature, mathematics, and Spanish), a summer field experience, and two semesters of full-time, mentored student teaching in middle and high schools. From its inception in 2004, Bard MAT has prepared teachers for a wide range of educational settings, with an emphasis on inclusive pedagogy, diverse literacies, and subject-matter expertise. bard.edu/mat
 
About Bard IWT
The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) is a professional development institute within Bard College. Since its founding in 1982, IWT has offered writing-based teaching workshops to approximately 1100 educators a year, ranging from middle school to the graduate level. Workshops and conferences take place on the Bard College campus, online, and at various institutions in the United States and abroad, attracting teachers from across the United States and around the world. IWT also develops customized professional development workshops for schools and colleges that are tailored to their specific needs, and has partnered in this capacity with hundreds of institutions, both domestic and international. iwt.bard.edu
 
About the Teaching with Primary Sources Grant Program
Since 2006, Congress has appropriated funds to the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program to establish and fund a consortium of organizations working to incorporate “the digital collections of the Library of Congress into educational curricula.” Each year, members of the TPS Consortium support tens of thousands of learners to build knowledge, engagement and critical thinking skills with items from the Library’s collections.

About the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States—and extensive materials from around the world—both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year, residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,200 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in more than 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 13 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 164-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

This event was last updated on 11-18-2024

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