Kaitlin Holt And Jen Hoyer 2018-01-19 14:15:06
Archives and special collections are uniquely positioned to play an instrumental role in student achievement. Brooklyn Connections, the outreach arm of Brooklyn Public Library’s archives, is one program that has sought to leverage this role by cultivating learning skills in students as they complete customized, standards-aligned projects about Brooklyn’s dynamic history and by supporting teachers through state-approved training on the incorporation of archival materials into curricula. Brooklyn Connections was founded in 2007, the same year the archives, the Brooklyn Collection, opened its public reading room. With the goal of encouraging students and teachers to use our archives, the archives manager teamed up with Brooklyn Public Library’s forward-thinking development team to raise funding for a school partnership program. Over the last decade, the program has grown from 400 students in ten schools to 2,000 in thirty-five, with nearly 15,000 students served since 2007. This year, the Brooklyn Connections team includes four fulltime staff: a program manager, two educators, and a program administrator. In September 2017, we presented a half-day workshop for SAA members on how other archives and archivists could use their collections to support similar school outreach initiatives. Running an education outreach program in an archives recognizes that today’s students lack knowledge on how to access, synthesize, and use primary and secondary sources to complete school research projects and meet academic standards. Brooklyn Connections guides students through the research process, using local archival resources to teach skills like document analysis, argument development, and effective online research. Brooklyn Connections demystifies archives and the research process by contextualizing major historical themes through a local history lens. Connecting to Local History Brooklyn Connections functions primarily as a school residency program for fourth through twelfth grade classes. Educators, including classroom teachers and school librarians, apply each summer to partner with the program over the following academic year. Once accepted, partners work with a program educator to determine the topics, research skills, and final projects the students will work on. Program educators see each class an average of six times, almost exclusively at schools with the exception of one research session in the archives and a final presentation of students’ work at Brooklyn Public Library. This model of school outreach, in which the archivist travels to the classroom, enables participation by underserved schools that lack the resources to leave their buildings and don’t have access to archival collections at their home institutions. The most successful partnerships combine a familiarity of school curriculum and culture alongside sensitive engagement with local history. At PS 189—The Bilingual Center, an eighth grade class of ESL students researched the Civil Rights Movement on the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant, a historically black neighborhood in Brooklyn north of their school. Learning from history that individuals can play significant roles in making a difference within their communities was a meaningful way for these students to connect history to self. Students in this class, many of them new immigrants to the United States, described in both English and Spanish the connections between this research and their own process of settling into a new country during their final presentations. A surprising discovery at PS 131, a Title 1 school in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, inspired a group of fifth grade students to volunteer their lunch break every other week to research their school’s history. Armed with a 100-year-old photo album and stack of attendance books from the 1920s and 1940s found in a classroom closet, students visited the Brooklyn Collection to see what else they could uncover about their school. Five years later, generations of PS 131 fifth graders continue to add scholarship to the evolving story of their school’s history, with greater plans each year for disseminating this information further within their school and neighborhood communities. The 2016–2017 school year was particularly meaningful for this partnership as students exhibited their research at the school’s 115th birthday weekend soirée and community festival. Although our team doesn’t have the resources to work with every classroom at every school in Brooklyn, our series of professional development workshops equips teachers to do this work on their own, outside the parameters of a partnership. Focusing on curricula-adjacent themes such as the American Revolution in Brooklyn, Immigration to Brooklyn, and Industrialization in Brooklyn, these workshops provide resources and classroom activities that leave teachers confident to engage their students with archival material while teaching their regular curriculum. Teaching Critical Thinking Skills Over the last decade, Brooklyn Connections has explored how archives can best support Common Core Standards as well as inquiry and project-based learning. The Common Core, a set of standards outlining what students are expected to know and do in math, social studies, and language arts by the end of each grade, has now been adopted by forty-two states. Although these standards have been somewhat controversial in their adaptability for various learning needs, their widespread prevalence means students will interact with them not only throughout grade school, but also in higher education and the job market as expectations for core competencies become reliant on outcomes prescribed by these standards. Rooted in students’ ability to demonstrate information literacy, media literacy, and the “Four C’s” (critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity), the Common Core presents requirements that we believe archives collections are ideally positioned to meet. Primary source analysis activities require students to think critically about how they can build inferences from observations, how claims and counterclaims have been constructed and supported through history, and how archives are a resource for gathering evidence to support an argument. As researchers themselves, Brooklyn Connections students learn to communicate scholarly reflections about history, working with their peers to present arguments that they support with archival sources. Prompting Inquiry At the crux of this is the way archival collections prompt inquiry. Allowing students to peruse photographs, newspaper clippings, and ephemera files invites them to ask more questions about a topic, creating a self-motivated agenda to guide their research rather than imposing a prescriptive framework for study. Teachers benefit as well: Inquiry-based learning, which encourages students to pose questions rather than simply regurgitate facts, has become a model required by many school administrators. Brooklyn Connections’ partnership program presents a series of in-class inquiry-focused lessons, and the final research project invites students to pursue their questions further. Finally, Brooklyn Connections creates a tangible way for teachers and students to engage with local history. Although these themes fall outside the scope of most curricula, Brooklyn Connections creates links between local history and national themes, providing an easy path for students to connect with the community they live in while achieving national education standards. We know an archives collection is making an impact when school educators and students alike see connections between the past and the present, and between history and themselves.
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