In 1999, the Library of Congress funded the Adventure of the American Mind project within western North Carolina. The AAM Project, the predecessor to the TPS Program, was designed to help K-12 teachers, college education students, and higher education faculty to access, use, and produce curriculum utilizing the digitized primary source materials from the collections of the Library of Congress. The project continued to grow to expand to several states throughout the United States.

In 2005, Senator Dick Durbin acquired the funding that brought the AAM Project to Quincy University. Sister Donna Bebensee, BVM started developing the project at Quincy University as the founding director. In 2007, Byron Holdiman came to Quincy University as the director of the AAM project after working on the AAM project for three years at California University of Pennsylvania.

To demonstrate the stronger focus of assisting educators in using primary sources with a multi-disciplinary approach as a tool to enhance the learning experience of their students, the name of the AAM Project has changed to Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS).

The TPS Program provides professional development workshops for K-12 teachers on accessing and using the over 11 million primary source items digitized on the Library of Congress Web site. Being a federal government resource, the Library of Congress Web site is available to everyone at no charge. 

Mission

As part of the Quincy University mission "We prepare men and women for leadership and for the transformation of the world by educating them to seek knowledge that leads to wisdom", the TPS Project takes this mission out to the learning community within the area. The use of primary sources is a very effective tool in developing critical thinking skills with the students. By studying primary sources, students learn that there are diverse perspectives on any given situation. They learn to respect all people by being able to view various perspectives. It also provides the students with skills to apply the content being taught in the classroom with real life situations outside of the classroom. In using primary sources, students learn to analyze beyond the written word of the text book and develop skills that will help them to continue expand their knowledge beyond their educational stage of life. As the mission of the TPS project at Quincy University, we assist educators in using primary source materials with their students to prepare the students "for leadership and for transformation of the world by educating them [the students] to seek knowledge that leads to wisdom."

The Project

The project will provide professional development training with the use of primary source materials in the classroom to community schools at no cost to the institution. Each teacher will have the opportunity to transfer the professional development training hours to graduate level college credit through Quincy University for a fee. Incentive funding may be available to the institution to help provide equipment for participating teachers to use so they can make effective use of primary sources with in their classroom.

eachers are encourage to applying the knowledge obtained from the workshops by creating a lesson based on the use of primary sources and to use lessons based on primary sources created by other teachers providing feedback on how the lesson was taught and how it was adapted for their classroom. The teachers are also encouraged to be an advocate by sharing with other teachers through either giving a professional presentation on using primary sources in the classroom or by publishing an article through a peer-reviewed publication.

QU TPS Contact Information

Francis Hall (FRH) 313 & 315
1800 College Avenue
Quincy, IL 62301

 

Director
	Byron D. Holdiman Phone: (217) 228-5432 ext. 3091 Email: holdiby@quincy.edu
Technical Assistant
	Jennifer Campbell Phone: (217) 228-5432 ext. 3090 Email: campbje@quincy.edu.