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Past News & Events
Project LOCAL Workshop on Teaching with Primary Sources: Census Data
Held October 21, 2006
This was the first of two workshops to be held at Tufts University in which participating teachers
(grades 2-12) from Medford, Revere, Somerville, and Winthrop studied the use of primary sources of
local origin in teaching US history. Rather than simply listen to lectures by University faculty,
however, these teachers engaged in using a methodology the Project refers to as
"doing history" -
working as historians to investigate and unravel the history themselves. In this workshop,
participants worked with copies of the manuscript census from 1900 and 1930 from Jerome Street in West
Medford. They gathered information from the data, interpreted its meaning, drew preliminary conclusions
about the changing population of West Medford, and compared these hypotheses to the stories told by
their American history textbooks. The story told by these names, occupations, place of birth (and more)
was revealing of the unique historical character of West Medford. Each of the thirty teachers attending
the workshop will continue together to practice this work in their districts and ultimately lead their
students in lessons or units emphasizing the methods they used at this workshop.
Workshop Agenda
| 8:30 |
Welcome |
| 9:00-11:00 |
Doing History: The Case of West Medford |
| 11:00-11:30 |
Writing a Sentence of History |
| 11:30-12:00 |
Reflections on Doing History and How to adapt this approach to your classroom |
| 12:00-1:00 |
Lunch (Separate Lunch meeting for Trainers) |
| 1:00-2:00 |
Developing a Rubric for Writing History |
| 2:00-3:00 |
Local Experience and National Textbooks: The Politics of Writing History |
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