Teachers in our Philadelphia Writing Project network are engaging in inquiries and creating curriculum resources to support civically engaged argument writing in K-12 classrooms. This work is supported by a Teaching with Primary Sources grant from the Library of Congress*.

Our emerging resources draw upon:

1. primary sources from the Library of Congress;

2. argument writing approaches from the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community Writers Program (Arshan & Park, 2021; Friedrich et al., 2018); and

3. Gholdy Muhammad’s (2020, 2021) Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy Framework.

Our Beliefs About Teaching with Primary Sources

• Members of communities create and share texts across generations for a range of purposes and audiences. In school, we should explore with students how, why, and when those texts were created and also contribute our own texts to what is an ongoing conversation.

• Reading  and rewriting texts (“the word”) is bound up with “reading the world” (Freire, 1983). In school, we should learn alongside students to critically examine and remake our communities.

• Digital technologies have opened up opportunities to explore texts from our past that otherwise would have only been available in libraries and archives. In school, we should position students as constructors of knowledge who can learn with these texts as they construct knowledge and engage in inquiries.

• Collecting, curating, and digitizing the texts available to us was likely shaped by settler colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism and may not fully represent the range of experiences of members of our communities and their ancestors. In school, we should ensure that students engage with texts created by all of our ancestors (particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color), texts that show the full range of humanity, including in resistance, joy, and self-determination.

• Young people are already actively participating in ongoing, intergenerational dialogue through which they remember, reestablish, and reimagine what makes communities just and joyful. In school, we should recognize students' experiences, expertise, and agency outside of school.

References

Arshan, N. L. & Park, C. J. (2021). Research brief: SRI finds positive effects of the College, Career, and Community Writer’s Program on student achievement. SRI International. https://www.sri.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/C3WP-Scale-Up-Research-Brief-April-2021_Acc.pdf

Friedrich, L., Bear, R., & Fox, T. (2018). For the sake of argument: An approach to teaching evidence-based writing. American Educator, 42(1), 18-40.

Freire, P. (1983). The importance of the act of reading. Journal of Education, 165(1), 5-11.

Graff, G., & Birkenstein, C. (2021). They say, I say: The moves that matter in academic writing (5th ed.). W. W. Norton.

Harris, J. (2017). Rewriting: How to do things with texts. University Press of Colorado.

Lytle, S., Portnoy, P., Waff, D., & Buckley, M. (2009). Teacher research in urban Philadelphia: Twenty years working within, against, and beyond the system. Educational Action Research, 17(1): 23-42.

Mirra, N. (2018). Educating for empathy: Literacy learning and civic engagement. Teachers College Press.

Muhammad, G. (2021). 12 questions to ask when designing culturally and historically responsive curriculum. Association for Middle Level Education. https://www.amle.org/12-questions-to-ask-when-designing-culturally-and-historically-responsive-curriculum

Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic.

*Content created and featured in partnership with the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program does not indicate an endorsement by the Library of Congress.