Hendry, Julia. “Primary Sources in K-12 Education: Opportunities for Archives.” (2007)

Julia Hendry’s 2007 article enthusiastically advocates for the use of archival documents to be used as primary sources in the K-12 curriculum, but she also discusses some of the problems associated with using these materials. One of these is the fact that acquiring appropriate primary documents and designing good lesson plans are very time consuming activities that may be difficult for educators who may have no experience using archival materials themselves. The second problem Hendry draws attention to is that while K-12 teachers understand the value of using primary sources in classrooms, teachers are not asking “sophisticated” questions about the teaching materials they select. For example, Hendry explains that most of the articles from the education field suggest using one or two largely decontextualized historic documents in their lessons. Hendy maintains that the problem with this approach is that educators are not considering individual documents in relation to the archival collection as a whole, or even considering the archival collection as unit of study altogether. The third problem Hendry introduces about the use of archival resources in K-12 classrooms is that education literature stresses the importance of looking for biases in documents, yet this approach really only focuses on the intentions of the document’s author. Hendry believes educators need to ask more “archival questions,” such as: Who is the intended audience for this document? Why did someone need to record this information? Why did the author choose to record this information in this manner?

Hendry’s article is a critical assessment on the level of engagement between educators and archivists. Not only does she advocate for a closer relationship, she observes the current problems educators face when using primary sources without guidance. In addition, Hendry outlines steps to incorporate archival records into K-12 classrooms. Hendry uses examples from the Library of Congress Memory Project, which is a library of primary sources aimed at K-12 students, and the National Archives in Washington, DC, in efforts at engaging students.