By Graduate Assistant Heather Bailey

This Spring, I took some Gore Center collections on the road to local high school classrooms.  Dr. Vanzant of Blackman High and Mrs. Alsup of Oakland High accepted the invitation to let me teach a workshop to their Honors U.S. History students.  There were three classes at each school and most of the students were in their Junior year.

The workshop, adapted from primary source workshop developed last summer for the Teaching American History Grant, used Gore Center materials pertaining to the era of history that the students were studying at that moment.  At Blackman, the students were learning about WWII, while Oaklands’ students were focusing on the Great Depression.  Dividing the students into groups, I distributed folders containing a wide range of primary sources: documents, photos, posters, songbooks, phone books, postcards, etc.  Students then used worksheets downloaded from the National Archive’s Digital Classroom to analyze the items in their folders.  Afterwards, each group presented what they had learned from their items and how they could use them in studying history.  Some of the items focused on events happening nationally, but the students’ most enjoyed working with documents from and about Rutherford County.

The Gore Center hopes to return to these classrooms and possibly take this workshop to Riverdale and Siegel High Schools.  Our goal was to connect the Gore Center into the local community, make our resources more accessible to the public, and attempt to make history come alive for high school students through the use of primary source materials.  The students enjoyed the workshop, and I had a great time and appreciated the opportunity.

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