>> Kathy McGuigan from the Library of Congress, and I'd like to welcome you to today's professional development educator webinar from the Library of Congress, "Reflecting on Using Primary Sources to Meet the Needs of Diverse Learners." So, some housekeeping items before we get started -- we will be recording this program, and we will serve the recording as soon as we are able. As the event is recorded, any questions or other participant contributions may be made publicly available as part of the Library's archives. Participants in the Live program are eligible for a certificate of participation certifying one hour, and more on that at the end of the program. So you'll have the opportunity to talk to each other and to the presenters via chat, which most of you are already doing. So I want to thank you for your active participation. These events are engaging, and they are engaging because you are participating in the chat. So if you haven't done so already, let's get started using the chat. While I'm introducing today's program, you can use the chat to tell us your name, where you're joining us from, and why you came here today. Please make sure you select all participants in the "to" box in the chat function. So, now onto today's program. As I mentioned before, this episode is called "Reflecting on Using Primary Sources to Meet the Needs of Diverse Learners." You will explore key moments across U.S. history at which individual advocacy and broad campaigns for civil rights enabled people with disabilities to move from the far margins of society into full citizenships. You will identify points in the typical U.S. history curriculum and infuse elements of this history. You'll access a wealth of primary sources, free curriculum, and communities of support. As a result of today's webinar, you'll gain practical strategies and tools to make history truly accessible to all learners, especially students with disabilities. This session is going to be facilitated by Rich Cairn and Alison Noyes from the Collaborative for Educational Services. I'm pleased now to turn the mike over to our first speaker, Rich Cairn. >> Hi. I am so excited to be here. This is Rich Cairn. I'm the director of Emerging America program at the Collaborative for Educational Services. >> And I'm Alison Noyes. I bring together experience teaching English learners, supporting student exploration, and making classrooms accessible and engaging in my work with Emerging America. >> I first became involved with the disability rights movement back in the 1990s. Like a lot of people, I got involved because of people who were good friends of mine or family members who themselves had disabilities. Then, in 2006 and '07, I began work with a woman named Laurie Block, who is a filmmaker, who was creating a website called the Disability History Museum. That's a fully online resource. It uses a lot of resources from the Library of Congress, and helping her put that together -- we'll take a look at that in a little bit here. She was also working on a biography of Helen Keller, a film that should be broadcast on public television, the "American Masters Series" soon. So we're looking forward to that. You'll notice on our slide here that we're active in Facebook and Twitter, and we've put our e-mail addresses there. So we encourage you to reach out to us after the webinar is over. During this presentation, we'll be looking at some key moments in disability history across United States history. >> Then we'll be looking specifically at strategies for access for students with disabilities, and for all students in your classroom, and we will introduce you to some teaching resources to support that. And we hope to leave some time for questions at the end. Next slide. Just a word about our process -- we are -- believe in using strategies and tools that support students with disabilities for all lessons, and in all classrooms, not just those with identified students with disabilities. Research is pretty clear that those methods benefit all learners, and anecdotal reports we have from our teachers who participated in workshops of the feedback they've gotten from students show us that these types of techniques engage all students in a wonderful way. >> So as we begin our investigation of disability history, I want to put a question out for all of us. We use these guiding questions to help frame thinking, and to help communicate to learners what it is we're going to be talking about. So the big-picture question is, "Who is responsible to take care of vulnerable people in society, including people with disabilities?" Now, as we look at disability history, we're going to focus on four points in the history where a history teacher who teaches U.S. history in a typical fashion, following state standards -- they may not have disability history explicitly mentioned. But we're going to find four places where you can integrate disability history into what is already in state standards. So those four points we're going to look at are antebellum reformers before the Civil War, the impacts of the American Civil War on society and the soldiers, the Progressive Era, couple of different elements, and then post-World War II movements for civil rights by African-Americans and a number of other groups. So the first of those, looking at antebellum or Second Great Awakening reformers -- one of the things that a typical history classroom would do is to look at the abolitionism movement. And to explain that the same -- very same people who were involved in abolitionism were also involved in women's rights, work to limit the consumption of alcohol, the Temperance Movement, and were the same people who, for example, started public education. So the place where that content in disability history matches up, and is easy to integrate into the standard curriculum, is to look at some of the reformers who created the institutions to support people with disabilities in that same antebellum period. So we're going to look at some of those reformers. Now, to put in context where the reforms were coming from, I've shown a screen cap here of an excellent article from the Disability History Museum, and I encourage you all to go there. This particular article explains that in the early days -- well, in colonial era, and then, in the early days of the United States, if you had a disability, probably you lived at home. Most people were farmers, and most farms had some kind of work for most people with disabilities. So if your family owned a farm, there was work that you could do, and you could stay at home. But if you were poor, or if your family didn't have a place for you, where you usually would end up is the local almshouse, or the poorhouse. Now, the quality of life in those almshouses varied enormously. In some communities, it was not a bad place to be, but in others, it was literally horrible. So the institutions that began to come up more formally to take care of people with disabilities, to give them skills, and help them to become more independent, first started in France in the late 18th century. And the first school in America was the -- what we call today the American School for the Deaf. Thomas Gallaudet, an American, went to France to recruit a deaf teacher named Laurent Clerc, and brought him here to help start that school. Now, I say it's called the American School for the Deaf today, but if you look at this lovely picture -- we've got a lot -- number of primary sources from the Library of Congress, and we'll show you how you can access all of these sources at the end of our presentation. You'll notice at the bottom of this lovely picture that it gives the original name for the institution which was the American Asylum for Deaf and Dumb. Okay, so I need to call a time-out here. If you're looking at the history of disability, you're looking at these institutions, one of the things you're going to find is that they used terminology that today anyone would find offensive. No one wants to be called dumb. It's a synonym for stupid today, and so, what we're saying is, don't avoid that. Don't ignore teaching about that. Instead, take it head-on, but it's important to set some ground rules with your class. It's important for students to understand that, if they're writing a paper about this asylum, and they want to use the original name, or they're giving a presentation, it might be perfectly acceptable to use a direct quote. But it is never okay to joke about such terms in history class, and it's not okay to them take them up and use them in casual conversation. Okay, back to our story. So after Gallaudet, the second of our reformers that we're going to look at is Samuel Gridley Howe, from Massachusetts. Samuel Gridley Howe founded the Perkins School for the Blind in 1832. He was, himself, a teacher there, and one of his students, a very famous student, was named Laura Bridgman. She was deaf and blind, and yet, Samuel Gridley Howe was able to teach her to read and write, and in this -- one of my favorite primary sources from the Library, she is teaching another student to read a raised-print book, like a Braille printing. I would mention that my mother-in-law is one of the strongest Braillers in the state of Wisconsin. I think she may be listening in today, so a shout-out to her. She's been doing that work for many years. So the Perkins School is still in the Boston area, but I want to point out that Samuel Gridley Howe, in addition to doing that work on behalf of the blind, was also an abolitionist. A couple of clear pieces of evidence that he was -- his wife, Julia Ward Howe, is the woman who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." So he was very publicly identified as an abolitionist. He was also secretly a funder of John Brown's attack on the U.S. armory at Harper's Ferry, which was designed to start a slave insurrection. It was secret because it was illegal, and so, my point is that Howe not only was an abolitionist, but was a militant abolitionist. And again, my larger point is that these people who were involved in the early institutions for people with disabilities were the very same people who were involved in the abolitionist movement, temperance, women's rights, and so forth. So another prominent disability supports activist was Dorothea Dix. Together, Dix and Howe founded the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth. Now, again, time-out -- you can see why I say that you have to address these terms as they come out. It was one of the first schools of its kind in the country. Dorothea Dix is mainly famous for her work advocating for asylums for people with mental illness -- again, a term we don't use anymore, lunatics -- and part of her goal was to keep those people out of almshouses. I point out -- this is an image of the Worcester State Hospital, which she was working with the legislature in Massachusetts, and she worked in other states with their legislatures to get money for. I have worked with teachers in the state hospitals. One of the things that our agency does is to teach students who are in the state hospital today. The clock tower in the middle is the only piece of that building that still remains today. So if we look at the rise of these institutions, I'm going to ask that question again -- who's responsible for this work? So I said the states have done so, and Dorothea Dix had great success getting states to take on responsibility for creating stronger, better hospitals for people with mental illness. And in 1854, she succeeded in getting Congress to pass a bill that would have authorized every state to raise money using federal lands to build hospitals across the country. However, President -- democratic President Franklin Pierce vetoed that bill, and Alison, would you read the quote from Pierce here, from his veto? >> Yes. "I cannot find any authority in the constitution for making the federal government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States." >> So Franklin Pierce was a states' rights advocate, and what he is saying is, if the states want to take responsibility, they can, but the federal government has no responsibility whatsoever. So before the Civil War, clearly, there's a stake in the ground that the federal government is not going to take responsibility for the care of any individuals, which brings us to our second point of overlap in the curriculum, the impacts of the American Civil War. So typically, a high school would look at the impact of the war on soldiers, and on state and U.S. government, and so, what is the impact on the federal government? Of course, during the war, the government expanded enormously, but let's look after the war. And a couple of the points that we're going to look at include care for injured and disabled soldiers, and veterans' pensions. So Dorothea Dix and Samuel Gridley Howe, along with some other famous people, author Louisa May Alcott, Red Cross -- American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, and the first woman doctor in America, Elizabeth Blackwell, the first officially certified doctor -- they and others started a thing during the Civil War called the U.S. Sanitary Commission. When the war started, the U.S. government had no real provision to take care of wounded soldiers, and certainly wasn't thinking about what to do with those soldiers after they got them away from the battlefront. And so, the Sanitary Commission inspected sites to make sure they were clean, hence the name -- but they also raised money for everything from bandages, to buildings, to wagons, to doctors. So again, my point that it's the same people who are doing this work, and are the same advocates, carries on into the Civil War, but the institution was initially a private institution, private money. It was taken over by the federal government, of course, during the war, and eventually continued on as the Veterans' Bureau. So after the Civil War, by the late 19th century -- this political cartoon is from 1898, and it says on it that there were nearly a million pensioners in that time by the -- between the war and the turn of the 19th century -- I'm sorry, the turn of the 20th century. And in this political cartoon, the union veterans are bloated because they're receiving so many -- so much money, and Uncle Sam is starving and skinny in the image. And again, calling out offensive language -- the word "Fatman" is used in the cartoon, and again, you would want to call that out. So now, we're going to do an activity where we're going to ask you to make a judgment here. This is an activity we would do as students with more than three primary sources, but we -- in an online format, we can make it work with three. And so, what you're going to do is to look at the three primary sources, and to put them in order. They're labeled as A, B, C. So if you think the best order is B, C, A, then you'll say that, and then, offer a sentence of explanation as to why you think that order of the documents explains what was going on with veterans and responsibilities of the government, and so forth. Now, we're going to look at each of these in turn, and as we go, if you decide you've made up your mind, and you want to put your case -- make your claim in the chat box, go ahead and do that. And then I'll give you a little bit of time, so everybody can think about it after we look at the sources. So our first source, I'm going to ask you all to put in the chat box -- what do you notice about this document? What kind of a document is it, and what can you tell about who wrote it? When did it come from? Does anybody see a date on here? What's it about? So you may notice that this was -- it's from an attorney. It's 1890. Thank you, to people posting that, and it's addressed to a veteran named Uriah Oblinger in Kansas, and it's telling him, yes, he's getting a pension of $12 a month. Now, some of you might not be able to read. I want to pull out -- at the bottom of this, it says that over time, if you believe yourself entitled to an increase of pension by reason of increasing or new disability -- so this document makes -- helps make my case that they weren't just giving pensions to people because they were veterans. They were also giving them more money if they had some sort of a disability, and they had to demonstrate that. Okay, our second primary source -- what do you notice about this primary source? What's the date on this? What's it a picture of? Some of you may be able to read it. 1862, and 1862 would've been relatively early in the Civil War. Bringing in wounded in Fredericksburg -- those who knows the details of the Civil War know that Fredericksburg was one of the bloodiest conflicts, particularly for the union side. And what's going on here is that this is a battlefield sketch of the city of Fredericksburg in the background, and union soldiers are carrying a wounded soldier away from the battlefield on a stretcher. All right. Let's look at our third primary source. What do you notice about the date here, and what's going on in this image? 1861 to 1880 -- now, when you put -- when you see a date in brackets, it means they're kind of guessing, and in this case, they gave themselves a lot of latitude. So this could be any time from the start of the Civil War up to 1880. For some reason -- they had some reason to know that it wasn't later than that. And it's a man who is playing a guitar. Someone suggests maybe he's using the guitar as a way of earning money. Someone suggests that he might be blind, as well as missing a leg, and we learned from the information from the Library of Congress that this man is a veteran. He's not wearing a uniform. So, okay. Now, I'm going to show you all three again, and I'd like you to put the order, A, B, C, B, C, A, C, B, A -- whatever it is, and then a sentence to say why do you think these are in the order they should be. Why do you want to put them in that order? So I'm going to be quiet for a little bit, and let you -- okay, we've got a B, A, C. Why do you think B, A, C? If you have a different order, just a sentence -- what's going on here? What's the story? Okay, so someone put them in the order -- strict order of the dates, and chronological order is certainly one possibility. You might put them -- someone said B, C, A, over the course of a lifetime. So that presumably would be the man's injured at Fredericksburg. That might be the person with the guitar. He -- after the war, he's trying to support himself, and so, he applies for a pension. So that's exactly the kind of argument that we're looking for. And by getting students to do this sort of a thing, where they're looking at the primary sources, part of what they're doing is, they're realizing that history is something that you've got to figure out and make your case. I'm seeing a lot of B, C, A's here, a B, A, C. So this person has it more in terms of how you would engage with it. So engage with the image, then you read a text, and then back to a visual. So that's great. Now, this is sort of a trick question in a way. There is no one correct answer. The whole point is for students to wrestle with these things, and make their own argument. So one could be that -- this is just a plausible argument that I came up with. In A, a veteran applies for a pension. In B, in those pension applications, you had to tell the story of your injury. So that's the story, and then C -- okay, I got my pension. Now, I can relax, and play my guitar. I'm taken care of. All right, so, again, this is particularly valuable with students with disabilities who -- just reading a lot of long documents may be difficult for them, and yet, they can address a really big question, like "Who's responsible for taking care of these people -- in this case, veterans -- and why, and when, and what were the changes?" Okay. We're going to move on. Thanks, everybody. That was really great. Your participation was quite lovely. We're going to look at the Progressive Era, and when teachers teach the Progressive Era, they -- standards usually address immigration, typically, the impact of World War I, the eugenics movement, and again, the growth of government. We're going to look at three of those topics. One that we could talk about is World War I veterans, but we've already talked about veterans. I encourage you to go to some of our resources and investigate that yourselves. But I want to look at the continual growth of involvement by the federal and state governments in helping to look out for people. So by the late 1800s, it turns out that Samuel Gridley Howe is not just running his own schools. Now, he's heading a state commission, and one of the things that they do is to go to those almshouses and investigate them. And they came out with a report saying that the conditions in this one, for example, Tewksbury, really were awful. Many, many of the inmates with disabilities were dying in those almshouses. This particular one is where Anne Sullivan, the teacher of Helen Keller, lived when she was a child, and Anne's brother died in Tewksbury. So he was one of those casualties of the horrible care there. So another element of how the reformers -- now a new crop of reformers, this one a woman named -- Nellie Bly was her pen name -- wrote an exposee of the lunatic asylum in New York City on Blackwell's Island, now called Roosevelt Island. What she did was, she got herself committed to the institution, and she was treated badly. And she wrote about those conditions in a book called "Ten Days in a Madhouse," and it was a bestseller. In fact, it kind of created a new genre of reporting that we certainly recognize today, but for a young woman to do that back then was really groundbreaking. And the point that she was making, and the progressives increasingly were making, was that the individual institutions weren't enough, that we needed government oversight monitoring rules and laws in order to make sure that these institutions were well-run. And you'll note, if you haven't before, that the URLs for these sources -- these -- the clip from -- of Nellie Bly comes from the "Chronicling America," which is my favorite thing at the Library of Congress. There's 160 years or something like that of newspapers there that you can go in and dig around. Okay, so at the same time that these institutions are having issues, but also, people are working to reform them, is the era of the greatest wave of immigrants to the United States up until the current era. And so, many teachers will be familiar with this image. It's a photograph of Ellis Island, of people who are trying to get into the United States being inspected by the immigration service officers. And so, you know, this is a story that everyone tells about immigration in their classes. What I'm suggesting is that you say, "Well, why were they looking at these people? They were looking at them to see if they had a disability, to see if they had an eye disease." And they were going to keep them out if they had that eye disease. In fact, the 1882 Immigration Act said that "any convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of him or herself" should be excluded -- again, the terms that we need to be careful about. But again, it doesn't even take any extra time to bring disability history into the story when you're talking about immigration history. So part of the reason why there was a move to exclude immigrants -- by the early 20th century, the people who believed that there was a superior northern European genotype, and they were arguing that we should keep out all others from the United States, had taken on the name of eugenicists. So the eugenicists were not only pushing to exclude immigrants, but they also were arguing to sterilize people with disabilities, including the people in some of these institutions that we've been looking at. So to understand their thinking a little bit, this article is from, again, "Chronicling America," from a newspaper clipping from 1912. And it says right in the middle, "Menaces to Society," and they're talking about sterilizing these people. And so, what is it that these people have done that's so horrible? I'll read what you probably can't, because the text is really tiny. The man on the right, it says, "This man, 37 years old, has only the mentality of a child of eight-and-one-half years." So that's the way they looked at people, and so, that movement, of course, was taken up by the Nazis, and taken to a much, much bloodier conclusion. But it's a story that -- again, you may be teaching that -- elements of that, but you can tell it as a disability history story, and that's what we're advocating for. So now, we're going to move ahead to after World War II, in a period when there were a number of campaigns for civil rights. And we're going to look at a couple of facets of the disability rights movement, where there -- we can see how those movements connect. So this photograph is from 1972. It's actually a screen cap from the current Netflix film, "Crip Camp." And the woman in the middle, Judy Heumann, was a disability rights activist from the late '60s. She's still out there working, and what this image says to me -- there's two kind of key things. One is that the disability rights movement was really learning from all of these other civil rights movements. So here they are, staging a sit-in and blocking traffic in New York City, and so, the fact that they're using some of the same techniques and tools of the other civil rights movements, Chicano-American movement, Native American movement, LGBTQ movement, and the disability rights movement began to take up some of those tools as well. The other thing I'll point is that this is really the first time in American history where all of the people with disabilities were speaking up for themselves across disability. So they were identifying not just as deaf, or blind, or having had polio, but they're -- or cerebral palsy, they're saying, "We are together. There are certain things we share. We deserve the right to be treated as full citizens, and we deserve full access." So again, as you're looking at civil rights movements after World War II, it doesn't take any extra time to say, "There were -- in addition to all these other groups adopting these tactics, so were the disability rights movement." So the work of those activists really came to the fore in 1990 with the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. In this photo, President George H.W. Bush is signing the Americans With Disabilities Act, ADA, which focused on prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, but also in government services, in public accommodations, commercial facilities like restaurants and movie theaters, transportation, buses, curb cuts, and some of those kinds of things. And the -- one of the things that's really important, though, is the ADA didn't just look at employment. It also was concerned to deal with disabilities that caused a limitation of one or more major life activities, such as education, or being able to bear and raise children, for example. So getting a law passed, as anybody who's ever worked on one knows, is just kind of the beginning of the action in some ways. And so, I want to look at one of the activists of the disability rights movement, a Vietnam veteran who was wounded in the Vietnam War, Arthur Lee Guerrero. Another of my favorite resources at the Library of Congress is the Veterans History Project. There are hundreds and hundreds of interviews with veterans, including a selection of those people who have -- veterans who have disabilities. And so, I'm going to ask Alison to again read the quote from Guerrero, where he's talking about his activism. >> "I accept the responsibility for advocating for those who can't, because I've already paid the price, and I have that right." >> So as you ponder what Mr. Guerrero said, let's come back to the question we began with. Who is responsible to take care of vulnerable people in society, including people with disabilities? And I won't answer the question other than to say that clearly, the times have changed, and that the answer to that changes with time, which is one of the reasons why I like the question. So I've been advocating for teaching about disability history. Okay, why? What's so important about disability history? Well, when you're thinking about students with disabilities, which is what our agency, the Collaborative for Educational Services, was begun to do, one of the things you want to do is to engage learners in history so that they see themselves in it. And a second reason to teach disability history is to correct some of those demeaning views and so forth that we dealt with when we're looking at insulting terms, to explain the history of those. We want to model putting primary sources in the context of disability history and understanding them, and we want to expand the historical record to include all people, including people with disabilities. And I'm proud to say that the Massachusetts state standards now do that. Other states are also beginning to do that. California's one where I've worked with them, and so, that concludes my portion. Alison? >> Great. Well, I want to talk a little bit more now about why we emphasize primary sources in our work teaching methods of making teaching and learning accessible for students with disabilities. Primary sources are a terrific way to offer many means of engagement, many ways to present the information that we're trying to convey about a particular time in history, and to involve students in active learning. And these three principles are ones that are foundational to the universal design for learning movement, which has -- undergirds our work, and increasingly is part of teacher training around the United States, and I think to some extent around the world. And the Library of Congress and resources from archives in many places is well situated to help in this process. Can we move to the next slide, Rich? Great. Thank you. The set here is an example of putting together a set of primary sources to offer multiple paths to presenting information, and also engaging students. In this set for the slide, we have a print article from "Chronicling America." We have a photograph. We have an editorial cartoon, and in fact, there's an enlarged excerpt from the print article. We might also, in the classroom, have a newsreel, a video interview with a polio survivor, and something that people could touch, whether that might be a brace, or a crutch, or -- many kinds of ways to use primary sources from the time being studied to engage students. Let's look at the next slide. All of you, I think, are here at our Library of Congress workshop, because you know primary sources are great ways to engage students. They make human stories vivid, whether it's a Civil War diary, or a photograph. They can also, particularly in looking for all students, but especially students who may have disabilities or other barriers, offer alternatives to the written word. They can offer visual points, interviews, something that's tangible, that you can touch and hold, and all of those increase the access of the history that you're teaching. They also offer students the source information used by the people who write the history books. And so, rather than solely reading a summary of what happened, seeing the sources that those historians used to write that history lets students themselves write and sometimes rewrite the history. Which is a form of engagement that, once again, rather than focusing on limitations some students may have in taking in text or only one type of information, is particularly in engaging students. And notably, using primary sources in addition to what other resources you're using when teaching lets you, as the teacher or the educator, select sources that connect history to students' own experience, remedying omissions if your state doesn't have disability history but you want to have students see themselves. The 504 protests, another part of the disability civil rights movement that Rich mentioned, is how the rights that students who have 504 plans and individual educational plans in public schools across the country have, and selecting sources can connect to students' own experience. Next slide. Let's take a moment for a second. I selected -- I thought about this presentation, and I selected a current -- a primary source to use in introducing primary sources. If you could, write in the text box what might be some points of connections in thinking about disability history that you imagine your students might have, or you have in this selection of a primary source. People might note -- how might a source like this make a connection between the history of the 20th century to the present moment? So certainly, the big word "quarantine" would connect to students' current experience. Talking about feelings -- "Every parent should read this" is across the top, and the question of panic. This introduces ideas of vaccination, public health, and people's own family members, where in some families, we have an older relative who suffered from polio. So you can use primary sources to connect one set of -- that you're teaching to your students' lived experience, or their particular curiosities and interests. Let's go to the next slide. Here's an example of using an excerpt. That piece of text was relatively accessible and engaging, but it could be a lot for some students, depending on the range of abilities of reading that you have in your classroom. We really recommend that you take excerpts to provide a focus point for readers of all levels, rather than giving different students different readings, which is one approach that sometimes is useful in ELA classes, English language arts. But there's good research to say that having all students learn the same central messages and look at the central key historical questions is important for students with disabilities. Rich, would you be willing to read this excerpt? >> Sure. "If my child gets polio, what are his chances for recovery?" And the doctor answers, "Excellent. Roughly one-half of all diagnosed polio cases suffer no paralysis at all. Another 25% recover with only mild physical limitations. 15% are severely paralyzed, and about 8% die." >> Okay, that would be neat to discuss with this. We're not going to take the time now, but even in the -- of this article, only a short section can carry a tremendous amount of material for discussion that addresses the central issue. Next slide. One thing about primary source sets is that when they include visual sources, they not only offer ways of communicating to students who have difficulty with large bodies of reading, but they offer testimony that the power of images to convey ideas is validated by society. So those students who may use written -- brief writing and graphic ways of communicating their learning can see examples before them. So we're going to come back to this idea that there's more than one way to show what you know, and to influence others, than mastering complex text. Next slide. So a few strategies that we use when we're working with teachers for designing lessons to meet the needs of all learners -- moving ahead -- incorporating strategies for access in the planning stage of your lessons. This is a checklist that was published in the Social Studies and Exceptional Learners volume of a National Council of the Social Studies, talking about -- offering a guideline for incorporating universal design for learning principles at the planning stage of your lessons. So how many modes of representation are you using in a given lesson? In this one, we filled it out for the Civil War veterans lesson, of which the sorting exercise was a part, and there were artifacts, and pictures, and graphic organizers. How are you engaging student interests? We looked at cooperative work in -- when we would do this, working together in the chat, and in a classroom where students are actually putting copies of primary sources in order, they can manipulate and move things. Again, expression is an important part of this, as I was just mentioning, and students could have a lesson designed with both a written response, an illustrated response, and an oral response. Finally, although it's not part of universal design for learning, cultural considerations are an important part to think ahead about in a lesson. We talked about the language of historical studies of disability, which might involve words like "cripple," or "imbecile," but there are also resources to think about that may be present in your class in the study of any topic. In the case of veterans, there may be students in the class whose family members are veterans. It's also important, when you think about the considerations -- what may be sensitivities where you need to build in safety and extra sensitivity for students? Will there be an area that you want to be attentive to having to do with trauma, or mocking? So we encourage teachers to do this. Not every lesson has to have every kind of strategy, but to recognize that there are choices in each lesson. Let me move ahead. We encourage all teachers to working with diverse levels in their classrooms, and recognizing that diversity that you may not be aware of might exist in your classrooms, to focus on the essential vocabulary. Teachers are often -- when we ask, "What's the vocabulary you need for this lesson," in trying to give us 10 words, and we urge people to narrow it down to what are the really critical words you need to understand, to understand the point of the lesson, and to teach those explicitly, and make a look-up list of the other words. Sanitary, commission, collectibles, furlough, almshouse -- those are not necessarily words that need to enter a student's vocabulary. But you want to make an easy way for students to access what those words mean in the course of doing a class reading or a piece of homework, so that the attention is not lost and energy is not lost on something that's not essential. It's also important -- in the center of this grid is a mortar word. We gave people a task of putting things in order, and making sure that the words to do any task in the classroom are also explicitly taught is important. Moving ahead. We also advocate practicing close reading steps together. Although emphasizing visual resources in primary sources is important, teachers of students with disabilities underscore that being able to work with text is a valuable skill for all students. And the importance in helping students who may face barriers is not to remove rigor, but to support everyone in accessing important information and important skills, including working with what can be very dense historical documents. So explicitly teaching -- how do you do that? How do you look at a document, come up with a key first pieces of information? Who wrote it? When was it written? What was it written for? And teaching the skills to scan a document, figure out how it's set up, and then to go through maybe more than once, to find the key and most important sentences, and let students work on what is the excerpting that you might do to get the core of this document, if you were going to teach one part of it. Next slide. When you're working with difficult text, we encourage teachers to make use of digital tools available now to translate difficult text. You can, in many cases, copy and paste from some PDF sources. I did this with a recent Supreme Court decision. Or you might need to text -- sorry, to type yourself into your reader. There's a free program called Rewordify.com that will take a piece of text and either offer a glossary on the side, or in this screen shot, you can see the yellow parts are subbing in simpler words where -- instead of "the almoner of" -- oh, actually, this one's on charity. But anyway, the specifics of this slide are not important, but simply to know that there are tools, and that as long as you introduce the original source, helping people with translations is no more cheating than it would be if you were in a country where English was not spoken to insist that everyone read Shakespeare in the original English. Translations are sometimes valuable, to allow everyone to learn. Next slide. I talked earlier about offering more than one way to show understanding. This is an example we have on our website, blanks of cartoon strips you could use to encourage students to show what they learned in a visual format that may be more accessible, and indeed, might speak to students at a number of levels of learning and ability. Next slide. Instead of a five-paragraph essay, you might offer the choice of doing a five-slide presentation, and allow students to use oral skills to explain their learning. The key is to challenge students to show what they know to the best of their ability, and build on their greatest strengths. Next slide. Overall, we want teachers to invite students to engage the primary sources, and to engage their imagination and empathy as they consider whatever the topic is that is being studied. In this activity, we give people Post-Its in the shape of speech bubbles, but they could be anything, and ask participants to select a person in the photo and give them a voice. What might they be saying? Sometimes, it's helpful to have movement. In fact, I'm going to ask people to -- we might have people move by moving up to the front of the classroom to put their sticker on the primary source, but we might have people move right in their seats. As you sit watching this, if you put your arms into the positions that the inspector is in, as that inspector puts his hand on the face of the immigrant to examine the eyes -- that action of moving your body into the place or shape of a visual image is involving, in a visceral way, that is another form of using all of the sense in your teaching. And we encourage teachers to think creatively, to ways you can offer movement that may not put people on the spot, or may give people a chance to stand up and shine through acting something out in ways they may not have done before in other roles in class. Next slide. Finally, we really want to encourage teachers to not reserve conducting original research for your most advanced, most capable students. Research is not just for the super-prepared. It is a terrific way to involve students of all abilities in seeking out things that interest them, that are at a level that speak to them, and bringing back to the class insights that you -- that are new, that are fresh, and that are important and meaningful to them. So collections at the Library of Congress, particularly ones that have video interviews and multi-media opportunities, but they can really be searches at any time. And you can provide some of the materials and sources for conducting research to make it manageable to your students. Next slide. All right, we're going to turn it to Rich for showing some of the teaching resources that we have available. >> Yeah, thank you, Alison. So where I really want to send you is to emergingamerica.org, which is our website, and the -- if you want to throw questions up in the chat box, we'll start addressing those in about a minute here, soon as I'm done sort of pointing to some resources. One of the things that's on our site is a collection of accessible lesson plans on disability history all written by teachers in our courses. We had something like 700 teachers complete a graduate course called "Accessing Inquiries for Students with Disabilities," and a parallel course on teaching English learners. And so, we have primary source sets, including one on polio, and the one that includes all the primary sources in this presentation, a number of others, and again, lesson plans on a number of these topics and more. And also on our site, we offer classroom activities, strategies, things like using Post-It notes to get students' thinking right up on the screen and so forth. And so, very practical stuff, as well as a really pertinent discussion of universal design for learning, and more. You also can enroll in our classes. I'll put in a plug for those. We are supported by the Library of Congress to offer high-quality professional development at very low cost, and often even free. So do go to our site and check out the professional development resources there. So, questions? We would love to take any questions. We've still got a couple of minutes here. And again, I'll remind you that you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter. If you want to send us a more complicated question, you can email it to us, and we'd be happy to respond to that. I'd also like to thank -- I have enjoyed doing this. It's really been fun for me. So, Kathy, do you want to answer the questions about the audio and the recording and so forth? >> So, thank you so much. Yep, I will get to some of those questions. I have a few housekeeping items before we wind up the event. We are two minutes before the hour, so I want to make sure that you give us your feedback on today's event at the survey link that Cheryl is going to be sending out in a second. These events are successful because you give us feedback and let us know what's working for you and what is not. So thank you about that, or thank you in advance for doing that. The other thing that I want to point out -- and Cheryl has already put the URLs in the feed -- is Rich mentioned the Teaching with Primary Sources Consortium. And I wanted to make sure that you were aware of all of the organizations, including the Collaborative for Education Services, and make sure that you are aware of all the programs throughout the U.S. that might be of interest to you. Additionally, there is a link to our regional grant program. Grants are available up to $20,000 for organizations who deliver professional development and want to infuse our methods and resources, so something for you to take and look at. For those who are interested in receiving a certificate for the Live participation, please e-mail me your first and last name as you would like it to appear on the certificate. You can e-mail me at kmcg@loc.gov, and Cheryl will be putting that into the chat. She already has, and we'll make sure that we keep feeding those URLs out to you. Okay, so, that is some of the housekeeping items. I want to get to the one question that -- about the transcription for the event itself. So as you saw in Rich's and Alison's slides, there is a -- it is captioned, and that caption will be in the video. We are required to then caption the video and post it to the Library of Congress website. That takes us a little bit of time, so that the caption files can be hand-transcribed. The chat from today's presentation will be saved, along with the presentation, and we will post that as soon as we are able. Inside scoop is really -- it takes us a little over two weeks to be able to get those posted, once things are in production. So there was a question early on, Rich, that I wanted to bring up. It was -- Lee asked about the institutions, and how the institutions were funded back in the day. Alison gave a response, but I wanted to see if you could expand a little bit upon that. >> So it was -- usually, it was -- quite wealthy. Dix was not, but she knew people who did have money. But then, they began to get the states to put up money for them, and that was really Dix's work in the 1830s, was to get the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to pay for expanding hospitals. And then she went to several other states all over the eastern seaboard. Somebody had asked how we got the closed captioning at the top of the screen. We do that in Google Slides. When you go to present mode, there's a little button at the bottom that allows you to do closed captioning. I should add that the Library does a much-higher grade quality of captioning for their productions, but we went ahead and ran with what we always use during the presentation. >> We try when we can to model the tools that make things more accessible to students in the presentations that we do, and this is a relatively new addition to our toolkit, to use the captioning on Google Slides. Also, when we do a Zoom presentation, we have learned that we can turn on a service that adds captions to the recording. We're not doing that today, but those of you who are doing remote teaching with students where you record things in advance and send them out might like to know about that. >> Someone had asked about using the term "disability," and yes, it can be uncomfortable for some people to use. It is most commonly used by disability rights activists and the disability rights movement, but, you know, it's always a dialogue. It's always -- ask people what they're comfortable with. Some people don't want to have their disability called attention to at all, and I always respect that when it comes up. And for others, they're very proud to be able to say, "Hey, I'm a member of the deaf community," or whatever. So, good question. >> We had a question about where these resources can be found, and the emergingamerica.org web page, which is on the logo at the bottom of this slide that's showing you -- there happens to be the slash for our teaching with primary sources page on this logo. But on that web page, we have links to primary source sets. We have links to lesson plans that use the checklist grid that we showed you, and we have a lot of resources explicitly on the pedagogy that has been shown to be useful for reaching all students, and a lot more on universal design for learning. >> So, thank you very much to Rich and Alison for an incredibly jam-packed informative session today. This has been terrific, and lot of really great resources for us to look through. And I will make sure to save the chat, so that we have a record of all of this. I want to thank you very much for joining us this afternoon for our audience. Thank you so much for spending this hour with us. You can contact Rich and Alison with the e-mail addresses that they've put onto the screen. You can also contact me, Kathleen McGuigan, for a certificate of completion for the Live participation only. Send me your first and last name, and we will get those certificates out to you within the week. And I know that Cheryl had also put in a link to the other webinars that we are hosting this summer. We are running webinars every Wednesday now through August 5th. So we have a wide array of different programs for you to take a look at. Please make sure that you take a look at the schedule for our webinar Wednesdays. So without further ado, I will say thank you again to our presenters, thank you to Cheryl for feeding the URLs, and thank you to our audience for attending. We hope to see you back here next week. Thank you. >> Thanks, everybody.