Primary Source

Mission

Primary Source educates global citizens by working with teachers to foster students’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions for thoughtful and engaged citizenship. With our guidance and resources, teachers cultivate students’ civic-mindedness, cultural awareness, and global competence, preparing them for our increasingly diverse and interconnected world.

Teachers are the key

Our visionary founders realized that educators are vital to shaping the way children see the world and to understand their roles as thoughtful and engaged citizens— to make the humanities culturally responsive and exciting to students, they needed to inspire and empower educators. We continue this important work every day by providing high-quality, dynamic resources and learning opportunities for K-12 teachers. 

Interacting with Primary Sources

Primary Source, the organization, takes its name from the same term used by historians to distinguish original, uninterpreted material from secondary or third-hand accounts. Making Freedom utilizes a range of primary and secondary sources including photographs, letters, census records, speeches, advertisements and maps used over time. 

Students may initially have some difficulty interacting with primary sources. Though our student resources/primary sources have been retyped, no changes have been made to the original language. As a result, the documents contain syntax with which students may not be familiar, as well as vocabulary no longer in active use or the meaning of which has shifted.  Sometimes words are also spelled differently.  Though each teacher knows best how to adapt a lesson to the students’ skill level, we have included suggestions, such as having students work in pairs or small groups, reading the documents aloud to the class, and/or providing vocabulary definitions before students tackle the documents in order to make it easier to navigate use. 

When using Primary Sources, there is a wonderful opportunity for students to engage in the inquiry process beyond what they would normally reach by simply reading about an event in a typical textbook. Introducing students to original sources allows students the opportunity to get a true glimpse into the past as well as to the desires, beliefs and experiences of people in other times and places. 

We encourage teachers to resist the urge to provide students with a set narrative of facts and instead prompt students to use primary sources to create that narrative themselves.  While students may initially need the context and background knowledge provided, in the student content section, to the extent possible, prompt them to ask questions that help them to build their own understanding. Steering students to begin to notice and unravel complexities as well as recognize the bias in the sources that have even been preserved will support their critical analysis and lead to richers discussion and understanding.