Plan to Attend Archival Futures: Community Persistence through Learning Locally

Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) is the Library of Congress’ premier educational program, focused on helping educators enhance students’ critical thinking, analysis skills, and content knowledge using primary sources. The Local Learning project team offers teaching tools and materials that engage the digitally available archival holdings of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress alongside local and regional collections, bringing them into conversation with each other to create a fuller, more complex narrative of American communities, history, and people.

This specialLocal Learning workshop acknowledges the powerful opportunities for learning that archives hold–particularly for communities navigating transformation stemming from a variety of disasters, including natural, cultural, and social disruptions. Over the past five years, Local Learning has worked collaboratively with partners across the nation to use American Folklife Center (AFC) collections of the Library of Congress to engage, inspire, and inform learners of all ages through their significant Teaching with Primary Sources education program. This workshop offers an intimate and intentional space to work closely with the core partners of this nationally recognized project. 

Participants will:

• Examine case studies of primary source sets developed through Local Learning initiatives 
• Engage directly with digitized and physical archival materials 
• Learn strategies for ethical curation, contextualization, and classroom integration 
• Collaboratively begin designing their own primary source sets grounded in local or regional materials
• Listen closely to the sounds and music around them and explore their importance and meaning to cultural identity and place-making

The workshop will also offer practical frameworks for building similar resources within participants’ own institutional and community contexts.

This interactive workshop highlights the work of Local Learning in partnership with the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) grant program, funded through the Library of Congress. Participants will explore how educators, archivists, and community partners collaboratively develop primary source sets that center regional histories, local knowledge systems, and underrepresented voices. This session demonstrates how place-based pedagogy can serve as a tool for both historical reckoning and future imagining. 

Content created and featured in partnership with the TPS program does not indicate an endorsement by the Library of Congress.