Dr. James Schul, assistant professor of education at Ohio Northern University, has received a Teaching with Primary Sources Midwest Region grant to fund the “Fostering Historical Thinking and Imagination through Primary Source Instruction” project.

Schul, along with Russ Crawford, ONU associate professor of history, will work with 20 teachers in North Central Ohio school districts to oversee the program, which will consist of six workshops designed to instruct participants on how to navigate the Library of Congress website and how to teach historical inquiry through written documents, political cartoons, audio clips and desktop documentary making. The program also will facilitate the design of lesson plans and provide teachers with a useful web-based resource.

The workshops are planned to begin in late spring 2013 at ONU.

“It is a great privilege to provide opportunities for meaningful professional development for teachers in North Central Ohio and to enable Ohio Northern University to extend its reach throughout local communities,” Schul said. “The purpose of this series of workshops is to bring together practicing teachers to collaborate with one another, all focused on how they can better teach history as a verb, where the students are constructing their own narratives of the past and discussing those narratives with one another.”

This is the second award from the Teaching with Primary Sources Midwest Region that Schul has received.

The Teaching with Primary Sources Regional program works with colleges and other educational organizations to deliver professional development programs that help teachers use the Library of Congress’ rich reservoir of digitized primary source materials to design challenging, high-quality instruction.