Event Title
Digital History Toolkit: K-12 Students and Online Primary Sources
Speaker Bio
Melissa Mandell is the Project Manager for Education and Interpretation at the Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center. Prior to joining the Legacy Center, she was the editor and coordinator for the PhilaPlace.org neighborhood history project at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), and before that served as editorial assistant for two HSP publications, Pennsylvania Legacies magazine and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. She worked in education and development at the Rosenbach Museum & Library and the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance before receiving her MA in American and Public History from Temple University in 2007.
Abstract
Archivists know that K-12 students and teachers are underserved audiences that benefit from learning with primary sources. The Legacy Center will redefine how this audience accesses our digital Women in Medicine collection by creating the Digital History Toolkit, an online resource that will use interpretive metadata and guided inquiry to make the collection truly accessible to young learners. Using the Toolkit to work with digitized documents, students will discover women's histories within the broader scope of American history while building historical thinking and critical analysis skills. Since 2010, we have worked with students and their teachers to evaluate students' experiences with primary sources and identify their support needs. We found that high school students care deeply about issues of gender inequality and social justice and are eager to work with authentic historic documents and photographs, but need context and guidance to "do history" using primary sources. The Toolkit will feature contextualized "stories" composed of primary source documents with enhanced item-level metadata that will help students create meaning and make their own informed interpretations. This metadata will go beyond standard archival description to answer the question, "why should I care about this?
Digital History Toolkit: K-12 Students and Online Primary Sources
Archivists know that K-12 students and teachers are underserved audiences that benefit from learning with primary sources. The Legacy Center will redefine how this audience accesses our digital Women in Medicine collection by creating the Digital History Toolkit, an online resource that will use interpretive metadata and guided inquiry to make the collection truly accessible to young learners. Using the Toolkit to work with digitized documents, students will discover women's histories within the broader scope of American history while building historical thinking and critical analysis skills. Since 2010, we have worked with students and their teachers to evaluate students' experiences with primary sources and identify their support needs. We found that high school students care deeply about issues of gender inequality and social justice and are eager to work with authentic historic documents and photographs, but need context and guidance to "do history" using primary sources. The Toolkit will feature contextualized "stories" composed of primary source documents with enhanced item-level metadata that will help students create meaning and make their own informed interpretations. This metadata will go beyond standard archival description to answer the question, "why should I care about this?