>> From the Library of Congress
in Washington, D.C.
>> Hello, again, everyone.
This is Cheryl Lederle from
the Library of Congress,
and welcome to this conference session
provoking inquiry through primary sources.
It is my terrific pleasure to introduce
our presenter, Barbara Stripling.
Barbara Stripling is a senior associate
dean and assistant professor in the school
of information studies at Syracuse University.
In her 35 year library career,
Stripling has been a school librarian,
a school district director of libraries, a
library program director, and most recently,
director of library services
for the New York City schools.
She was a past president of the
American Library Association.
She received her doctorate from
Syracuse University in May 2011.
Before I turn this over, a
couple of housekeeping bits.
We are recording this session, and it will be
able for viewing next week at LOC.gov/teachers.
So if you miss anything, or
you have friends who say wow,
I wish I could have heard that,
direct them to that recording.
We're also live Tweeting,
and if you care to follow it,
the information for that is up on the screen.
The last thing I need to tell you before I
mute myself and turn it over to Dr. Stripling,
is that we will be collecting questions for
a Q and A the last 10 minutes of this time.
So if you have questions for Dr. Stripling,
please enter them into the chat box
and we'll get to those at
the end of the session.
Thank you, so much, and Dr.
Stripling, this is all you now.
>> Hello. I'm so glad to be
with all of you all today.
What we're talking about today is
provoking inquiry through primary sources,
and I'm not talking about
just supporting inquire.
I'm talking about provoking inquiry.
But any time we start something that's
this important, we need to ask why.
Why do we do inquiry?
Certainly inquiry is driven by
our own passion and commitment,
but we need to convey that to our students.
And I will tell you that I came
by this passion very honestly.
Some of you may have heard me talk
about the brown bear is brown syndrome.
When I was a school librarian,
a fledgling school librarian,
I noticed that my students had developed what
I called the brown bear is brown syndrome.
First of all, if they had to do a research
project of any kind, they picked a topic
that they didn't really care a lot about,
because they didn't want to
invest too much time in it.
and they preferred to pick something that they
already knew about, because why would they want
to go through the effort
of learning anything new.
And then they would come into the library
and they would grab the easiest source they
could find, often it was a general encyclopedia.
And they would grab the B volume and
unfortunately it was B for brown, not bear.
Eventually they would find the brown
bear, and then they would start copying.
The brown bear is brown.
Well, I decided from that moment
that it was not good enough for me
to just let kids copy information,
and this has become my career.
But I want to build from information
to knowledge and to understanding.
But really understanding is
based on gathering information.
But we have to transform it, and we have to
teach students to build on that information,
to bring it into their own knowledge
so that it's internally connected
to what they already know, and then
to arrive at a deep understanding
so they can apply it to entirely
different subjects.
I developed a model of inquiry,
which some of you may have seen.
I'm not going to spend a lot of
time on that, but what I find is
that most students do much better when they
have an idea of the process that they need to go
through to achieve that deep understanding.
We know that any time we learn, we need
to connect to what do we already know?
What is background information that
gives me a context for this new learning?
And then, what questions do I have?
That's the beauty of inquiry, that
it's based on the student questions.
Certainly investigate is important.
And we know that our job is to teach
thinking skills during investigation
so they're not just grabbing up any information.
But then the magical stage of construct, where
students are expected to construct new ideas,
to pull the evidence together, to find
patterns, to form their own opinions
and base it on the evidence they have found.
Apply that information and express,
in a new way, create a product,
this is where the creative thinking
is built on the critical thinking.
And allow them to make that information
their own and express it to someone else.
And finally, to reflect on their learning.
What do they know now that
they didn't know before?
If we can lead students through this process,
we actually can build great understanding
and we have even greater, hmm,
the slide is not coming through,
so I will just tell you what was on this slide.
What we find is that students build
great engagement through the inquiry.
And they understand the content in a way that
they didn't before, that they develop the skills
so that they can learn independently
forever, for any subject.
And, so then, next [inaudible]
the final impact is
that inquiry based learning
actually allows our students
to engage, to connect and to understand.
So the next big question that
we have to arrive at is why?
Why are we saying that we can
provoke inquiry with primary sources?
Why do we use primary sources during inquiry?
Now all of us are celebrating the fact that the
Library of Congress, and so many other places,
are making valuable primary sources
available at our fingertips in every classroom
across the country and across the world.
We have opportunities now
that we have never had before.
So let's figure out why we want to
use primary sources during inquiry.
What's that going to do for us?
Well, I'm going to talk about three
main aspects that make the use
of primary sources so valuable
to provoke inquiry.
First of all, primary sources create an
intellectual space for student exploration.
Students have that room to
grow and think and discover.
The second, is that they form an
authentic connection to the real world.
And then authentic integration of inquiry
skills into the way that they learn.
And the third thing that I wanted to mention is,
how the use of primary sources
enables the development of empathy.
For me, that's pretty much of a bottom line.
I want my students to be able
to empathize with others.
And that can be achieved
through primary sources.
So let's look at the first aspect, that
primary sources create an intellectual space
for student exploration.
And I decided to pick an example,
just because it's easier to connect
to something when you have an example.
So I decided to pick woman's
suffrage for a number of reasons,
but one is that there are
many perspectives on that.
And that is actually the skill that I
want to talk about, that we would develop.
So if I were doing a unit on woman's suffrage,
I often start with the background, you know,
the connect, the background information.
I've condensed it here, but what we need to know
is that women didn't have the right to vote and,
but they started this push for enfranchisement
in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York.
After the Civil War, they increasingly
advocated for the right to vote
and became louder and joined forces.
But not until August 16, 1920
was the 19th Amendment passed
that granted the ballot to American women.
So get the context of the
time and how it was achieved.
And remember, 1920.
So that's a connection.
But what we're going to do then, is to
look at a couple of primary sources,
with the idea of thinking
about what inquiry questions?
We're talking about the intellectual space.
So how do the primary sources, then, provoke
us to ask interesting inquiry questions.
The Library of Congress has provided a wonderful
primary source analysis tool that starts
with observation, leads to reflection, and
that's inference, it's what is your own opinion
about that, what does your
observation make you think of?
And finally, to come up with some
questions that you might want to ask.
So we're going to short circuit this a little
bit, and I'm going to show you a couple
of sources on woman's suffrage and we'll
just work through the process a little bit
to see how it opens up the
space for questioning.
Because all the information isn't already there.
This particular photo comes from 1917.
Now remember, woman's suffrage came
through the 19th Amendment in 1920.
So this is part of the campaign that women
conducted across the country for their rights.
Notice the Kaiser Wilson, just point out that
one observation and think about the context
of World War I and what Kaiser
meant to people at that time.
So I'll give you just a moment to
think about what do you see there?
And what do you think about when you see that?
And what questions do you have?
The second primary source on woman's suffrage
that I wanted to show you is from 1925,
five years after the 19th Amendment.
We know this is the roaring 20's.
And, again, what is it that you observe
and what do you think about that
in the context of woman's suffrage?
And what questions does it make you think of?
I don't know, let's see, I guess I could.
I'm assuming that you all are writing
down questions and thinking about them.
When we get to the questions,
ah yes, great question,
is that a flask in the back
pocket of the second woman?
And yes, it is, actually.
But, what kind of a question
does that lead you to?
If women have changed and are carrying
flasks around, what does that mean
that woman's suffrage caused in society?
What kinds of changes emanated
from this idea of woman's suffrage
and women having the right to vote.
I think you can see that if you offered these
primary sources and you have enough time
to have a conversation with your students
about the whole context of the time period
and the context of woman's suffrage,
your kids would get pretty excited,
because there's not ext here.
They're going to have to
investigate, what's going on here?
How did women change?
Is this a typical representation?
And what did that mean for the way men reacted?
Were they sorry that the 19th Amendment passed?
And so, I think, by starting with primary
sources that what you're able to do is fill
in the gaps with student questions.
And ll of the sudden, the
questions are their own.
They're not just asking who, what, when, where
questions that they could capture in text,
but they're really asking why and how and yes.
You all are getting right into point of view,
and the point of view of the cartoonist as well
as the point of view of people
living at that time.
So I think it's extremely interesting
to start and to provoke kid's thinking
by giving them just enough information through
a primary source that there is space for them
to come up with their own questions, their
own piece that they're interested in pursuing.
The next piece that I wanted to talk
about is the idea of primary sources
as an authentic connection to the real world
and authentic integration of inquiry skills.
Now, to me, authentic means that it is real
life, but it also means that it's complex.
Because we know real life, there's not just
one right answer, there's not just one way
to interpret something, not
just one source of information.
And it's amazingly complex as we live in our
authentic life, and then sometimes history,
for example, gets boiled down to
three causes for the Civil War.
But we know it's much more complex than
that, and we can bring out that complexity
by giving a variety of primary sources
showing different perspectives.
Through primary sources, we can show that it
wasn't bottled down into three bullet points.
But another piece, which is almost the opposite
side, which drives kids to do even more inquiry,
is that they may not understand what's
going on, because they lack a context.
And so they are driven to figure
out, well what is going on here?
I see this photo, I see this document, but
what's the context that this occurred in?
And, of course, the best part of this is
that there's not just one right answer.
I will tell you that my experience is
that sometimes the best students
need the most practice with inquiry.
Because they are used to finding that
best answer, that one right answer,
and they're so good at it that it's very
frustrating to them that we turn it around
and say you discover what you think is the best
right answer and defend it with the evidence
that you'd find and that's
what we want you to do.
They're so used to getting an A on a test
because they're spouting back the answer
that their teacher wanted them to give.
There's a, it's a really a
transformation of the learning process.
And very much more authentic, because
in real life, they are going to have
to discover their own answers and find
evidence to help them form opinions.
Another way that primary
sources bring authenticity is
by providing access to multiple perspectives.
We know, and our kids understand that the
real world everybody has a slightly different
opinion, and we have reasons for those opinions.
Often those opinions are
conflicting with one another.
We can determine that people have a
specific point of view and that actually
when you have a specific point of view, that
causes you to put a slant on information,
to interpret it in a certain way, to leave
out certain information or
to add certain information.
That is so valuable for our
students to understand.
And we can do that by presenting them
multiple perspectives through primary sources.
So I'm going to give us an example
of that and see how it works.
These are four different perspectives
from the woman's suffrage movement.
And I've bolded the main idea.
And I think you'll be able to see the four
different points of view pretty easily.
This is Reverend Anna H. Shaw, and she said by
perfect equality of opportunities, privileges,
and responsibilities of man, that's
how we conserve the ability of women.
Perfect equality.
The first symbol and seal of
inequality is in franchisement.
I think the perspective is very clear here.
But then we have Miss Margaret
Dongardner [assumed spelling] who says,
has it occurred to you why man so frequently
breaks the law and women so infrequently?
It's because the law chiefly
concerns the affairs of men,
and that this is an excellent reason
why men should have the making of laws.
Someone else who lived at that time,
John Macy, let us be done forever
with this nonsense about
the equality of the sexes.
They are not equal in nature and never can be.
Now, of course, I've excerpted this
and there are longer arguments,
but that's the crux of what he was saying.
And Mrs. Pankhurst said, is this whole
woman's suffrage movement worthwhile?
Some of us think it is worth dying for
if it is going to give future generations
for all time the right to govern themselves.
Well, think how interesting it would be to
present excerpts of four different perspectives
and allow your students to see the difference
of the effect of those perspectives.
And one way that I do that, actually, in my
own teaching is to give a graphic organizer
where they have to capture the essence of
perspective and why that is the perspective.
And then a different perspective and
why that's that perspective arose.
I think it really helps students when
they actually have to write down,
evaluate and compare the different perspectives.
It's a great way to provoke thinking and
to get them to the authentic understanding
of the effects of different perspectives.
Another graphic organizer that I might use
at this point is how do you draw
conclusions from information?
Certainly there are facts.
But already we saw that primary sources are
a combination of facts, of what you observe,
what you actually see in the text
or the photo or video or whatever,
and then the inferences that you make.
Both can have value.
Students need to understand the difference
and how both contribute,
then, to drawing a conclusion.
It's a pretty exciting way to draw them
into the thinking process and then be able
to see their thinking process
through graphic organizers.
So whenever we're doing it, we would think
about what other skills would we teach?
Not that you'd have to teach
skills at ever phase of inquiries.
Sometimes you scaffold it, sometimes you
just supply sources or whatever else.
But picking out two or three
essential skills that you want to focus
on for a particular unit allows
the students to go deeply into it
and to develop those essential
and authentic skills.
And the last thing that I wanted to talk
about was the development of empathy.
Now I'm particularly interesting in this aspect.
I did my doctoral work, as
you heard, I just did it,
so that's proof that it's never
too late to get your doctorate.
But what I've researched was the use of
primary sources during historical inquiry.
And I had the opportunity to go into
humanities block classrooms in New York City
where they were studying slave
narratives in both their social studies
and their English language arts classroom.
And so they were related, what
they did in the two classrooms.
Now what I told the teachers, as any
time you do research you don't want
to tell them what you want to find out at the
beginning, so what I told them was I was looking
at their use of primary sources
during historical inquiry,
and indeed I observed the classes for
a month and dug into it very deeply.
What I was really looking at, though, was did
primary sources enable to develop empathy.
Now this was particularly interesting
because most of the kids were of color.
There were only three white high
school students in those classes.
And one of them was from Russia, so it wasn't
even from, she was a recent immigrant, actually,
although her English was pretty good.
So it was interesting, they were studying slave
narratives, could they actually develop empathy
for the slave owners as well as the slaves?
And it was a good test to see if primary sources
helped leverage the development of empathy.
So let's just go back a little bit and
talk a little bit about what empathy is.
Sometimes it's confused with
sympathy, feeling sorry for someone.
But really, empathy is the ability
to make sense of what someone did,
a decision that somebody made, a
perspective that somebody held,
and action that somebody took, based
on the actual context of the situation.
Can you understand why that person made
that decision or performed that action,
even though you may not agree with it,
but you understand the pressures that were
on that person and why that decision was made.
It's a very important aspect, I think, of
the dispositional learning for our students.
It is my hope that inquiry will be a way in to
help them develop the attitudes and dispositions
that enable them to participate actively
in the world, to understand others,
to keep on learning, to understand
the human connection of learning.
And so I'm finding that empathy is even
more important than I ever realized it was,
when I think about social media and
about connections across the globe.
One of the issues with social media is
that our students are reading Twitter feeds
and grabbing short blog entries, etcetera,
from places that are beyond the scope
of the context that they understand.
And they're making judgments
without understanding the context.
So this is something we really need to
help students understand what it means
to really empathize and not just
make judgments or sympathize.
And I also find important when we have access
to so many other cultures
through our global connections.
I don't believe we can actually understand
other cultures unless we can empathize,
unless we can develop that deep
understanding that comes through empathy.
And so it's not just the primary sources, but
it's understanding how to use primary sources
to develop empathy that I think
is important for our students.
There's another reason why I
think empathy is so important.
Students honestly cannot really know
themselves until they understand others.
That by stretching themselves to understand why
others made a decision in a particular context,
that enables them to understand themselves
and why they make their own decisions.
Now I don't know how many of you all
are working with high school students,
but I wold say that middle school and high
school students, that's what they're all about.
They need to understand themselves.
And when we can use primary sources and
inquiry to provide a way in for them
to understand themselves and
others, that's pretty powerful.
There are a couple of kinds of
empathy that we need to be aware of.
And the first is cognitive empathy, and that's
really, largely what I've been talking about,
certainly with the slave narrative unit.
They had to start out by understanding
what was the economic climate,
what was the political climate, what were the
forces that drove both slaves and slave owners,
the facts and the context, the
cognitive pieces that surrounded those,
the decisions that all of them made.
And our students needed, then, to
find the multiple perspectives.
At some point they needed to
read things from slave owners,
they needed to not just read slave narratives,
but to get that other side, or
those other sides, actually.
And one of the things that was so interesting
that the teacher did was to pull quotes
from Thomas Jefferson over a series of year, and
to see how the perspective of Thomas Jefferson
on slavery changed based on the context, the
political climate and the pressures that were
on him at those different points.
That cognitive ability to put them into a
time line, to understand all the other pieces
that were in play, was pretty
important for the students.
And they actually did develop empathy for
the slave owners, and it was very much a lot
of it was based in this cognitive
understanding of the political
and economic climate of the time.
But there, and cognitive empathy is
actually the first type of empathy
that I think we are responsible
for helping our students develop.
It's so easy to blend that in as we use primary
sources to help our teachers use primary sources
in their units, no matter
what subject they're in.
There is another side to empathy,
and some people discount it,
and other people think this is what
empathy means, is that you just,
you understand the feelings of people.
But really a motive does mean the feelings,
but if you've started with the cognitive,
you have the facts and the
evidence to start out with,
and then you can understand
also how that made people feel.
Now I will say that very often, in school,
my experience, what I usually have done
when I have used primary sources, is I
have just paid attention to the cognitive.
What were people doing, and why did they do
that, and do we understand their perspectives?
I didn't ever really give kids a chance
to at least imagine what people
were feeling at that time.
And there's really a lot for
our students to understand.
Now we have to be careful that they don't jump
over into sympathy and oh,
well, I feel so sorry.
That's not what we're talking about.
But if you base it on cognitive first,
you can get students to understand what,
and they're really making inferences.
Sometimes you can find actual text that
lets you know what people are feeling,
but sometimes students are making inference
based on the evidence that they see.
But it adds a whole other layer to
understanding why people made certain decisions.
I think it's worthwhile to do this.
I think it's also very useful for students
to understand that they need to have reasons
for decisions that they make
themselves, but also to recognize
that they have emotional reactions
to things and to recognize
that that also impacts the
way that we all behave.
One of the examples that is recent,
that shows the importance of context,
of understanding what was going on
for the development of empathy, arose,
it really hit home with me when I saw some
of the early videos about the common core,
where the example was that we would use Martin
Luther King Jr.'s letter from a Birmingham jail.
And what was stressed in all of the
videos I saw, and the model lessons,
was that students needed to do
close reading of this letter
and not pay attention to anything else.
That the meaning was held in the text
and we needed to hold them to that text.
Well, my librarian brain immediately went, um,
no, because I know how important context is.
And I started thinking about all the things
that our kids would need to understand in order
to understand the impact and the
whole rationale for this letter.
They would need to understand the lunch
counter sit ins, and not only the facts,
but also what were those young
people thinking and feeling
when they were sitting at the lunch counter?
They need to understand the
whole realm of the 1960s.
What was going on?
Very different time, and our students
won't understand that necessarily,
unless we help them have that context.
If they don't know anything
about the Civil Rights Movement,
there's no way that they can actually
understand anything about this letter.
The Mississippi Freedom Summer,
the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Now you can't do everything, but I would
pick some of the pivotal context jewel items,
and make sure that students could
understand this primary source based
on their understanding of the context.
And what we'll find is that they then develop
a much deeper sense of what was going on.
And they develop empathy for all the
players here, not just Martin Luther King,
but some of these other clergy men, maybe
even the police who put him in jail.
We have a role to mediate
this development of empathy.
And I've listed some of the
strategies that we can use.
You all have your own strategies and we
develop those over time, certainly questioning
where we probe, what students are thinking
and help them ask critical
questions of the text or the photo.
One of the pieces that I wanted to point
out that turns out to be very important,
a lot of times we poo poo the idea of
vocabulary and how important it is,
but I encountered some primary sources
that have what you might call
politically incorrect vocabulary.
And one of them was available, it was a photo
available through the New York Public Library
and the caption of the photo of
people in the photo was Idiot Asylum.
And I find that very offensive.
However, what I had to recognize is that was the
common vocabulary that was used at that time.
And it was not meant to inflict
horrible political incorrectness.
Our students need to understand that
language changes over time and that
when they're encountering
primary sources from other eras,
they may actually encounter something,
and that's part of developing empathy,
is understanding the context of the
time and how that vocabulary was used
in that time, and what was really meant by it.
So that's just one of the
mediation things that we may find
that we really have to help students develop.
So we need to probably end with
so why, why do we provoke inquiry
with primary sources and use secondary sources?
And the answer, I think, is in all of us.
I think we all develop a passion.
The passion is, of course, based on students.
It is enabling and empowering our students
to reach the highest levels that they can
through their own independent investigations.
I have one example that I wanted to share
that was so profound for me that I just,
I can't put it aside, because to me it
encapsulated every reason why we would want
to provoke inquiry and enable our kids.
I was in an elementary library in New York
City that had been renovated through a grant,
sitting next to a second grade boy
who was there for the celebration.
We were making small talk before the
celebration started and he turned to me,
I said hi or something, and he turned to me
and he said ask me anything
about American presidents.
And I went uh, okay.
It took me aback a little.
And he said, I've read every book
in the library on U.S. Presidents.
You can ask me anything, I'm an expert.
And I thought, that's it.
That's exactly why I do inquiry.
I want every one of my students to
feel like he or she is an expert.
So I think we now have time for questions.
I would, oh, I just wanted to give you one link
of, we have developed a continuum of skills
in New York that has a lot of these
inquiry skills, and it's organized
by inquiry phases, that you may want to go into.
There are graphic organizers
already done in Word
for the priority skills at each grade level.
And you should feel free to come in
and adapt or adopt or pick anything
that you want and use it however you want.
So now we have time for questions.
>> Thanks so much, Barbara.
This is Cheryl again.
I have been harvesting questions.
And Margaret asked if you can identify any
resources, particularly charts or tables,
that show developmentally, what would inquiry
look like as students moved from kindergarten
through fifth grade, so looking at
the inquiry in the lower grades.
I'm going to mute myself and let you answer.
>> Yeah, I think we wall struggle with it,
and the idea is that we don't put off inquiry,
that you can start it in first grade.
I recommend that information fluency
continuum that I just showed you
at that link, it is K through 12.
And so we tried to define the specific skills.
But I'll give you an example of, first
grader, and I was working with a librarian
who was doing an authored unit with the
students, and they were talking about the books
and one of them was, one of the
authors was Patricia Polacco.
So she had read for two or three weeks,
a book by Patricia Polacco,
and they would talk about it.
And about the third week,
shes tarted reading the story
and one little first grader said wait a
minute, and he went running over to the shelf,
pulled off the book they had read the
week before, went through the book
and he said, here, it's the same quilt.
And she said well, yes, great.
And he said why is this quilt
faded and the other one isn't.
Now that's an example of inquiry
in action, at first grade.
And so she kind of waited,
and he said, I know why.
She's trying to tell us that we need
to tell the stories of our families
or they will fade like the quilt.
Now that's a first grader who's been given
permission to ask questions and to think
and it was provoked, actually, by a piece
of literature and by an author study.
So we don't always have to do inquiry units
to provoke the thinking that
is so valuable in inquiry.
And I think we build it up over time.
Certainly the idea of what do you see
and what does it make you think fits
with picture books all the way
through elementary schools.
So it doesn't just have to
be around academic subjects.
>> We have time for just one more
question before we need to wrap things up.
There is a survey on the slide, because I ask
the question, if you are really needing to dash,
if you would take a moment to answer
the three questions on this survey.
We have a special survey for each
session, so take a moment to answer
for this what you learned from Dr. Stripling.
And the last question that we have time for
today asks how, if you've given any thought
to how Carol [Inaudible] and others guided
inquiry model fits with your approach?
>> It fits very well.
Carol and I have talked a lot.
We've talked for years.
We've been colleagues for, I don't
know, I don't want to say how long.
Yes. It's very much the same.
One of the pieces that Carol adds that I
actually have come to very much appreciate,
is the emotional aspect to inquiry.
And I think it's really important
that we think about that.
There are pieces during the inquiry cycle when
students get really down, they get overwhelmed,
and we need to pay attention
to that and to support them.
But also, the whole guided inquiry approach
means that we're working with teachers
and we are developing this together,
and you don't just throw it at somebody,
but that you can build this over
time, and build a whole program
that integrates inquiry throughout the school
and supports the collaboration
between teachers and librarians.
I think it's a wonderful model.
>> One last time, I think
I've said this a dozen times.
Thank you so much.
Thanks to the participants, for the
lengthy participation in the chat.
Thank you, Dr. Stripling,
for sharing your wisdom.
And the last thing I need to say to you to wrap
this up, is again, a plea that you take a minute
to answer this three question survey.
We have a special survey
monkey link for each session
and it does help us shape future
programmings, to get your input.
Also, for completing this session, you have
earned a certificate for one instructional hour
and you will receive an email within 5 business
days with directions to access that certificate.
So, thank you very much.
I am going to end this meeting now.
Again, thank you so much.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us a LOC.gov