Project Overview

Teaching with Primary Sources – Colorado Rural Partnership is here to serve educators in the outlying and rural areas of Colorado.  We are part of a consortium of similar programs funded through the Library of Congress which offer free professional development. These workshops and seminars are designed to encourage and support educators in the use the Library’s vast collection of digitized primary sources and to provide strategies to enrich classroom instruction.

See Get Involved to learn how you and your school can participate!

Project Mission

The mission of the Teaching with Primary Sources program from the Library of Congress is to:

• equip teachers to embed digital primary sources from the Library of Congress into standards-based curricula
• support teachers in curriculum-driven meaningful technology integration
• encourage and empower teachers to deepen students’ content understanding and enhance critical thinking and literacy skills through the integration of primary source investigations into instruction

Colorado Rural Partnership, based at University of Northern Colorado, extends this mission locally to provide Teaching with Primary Sources professional development, resources and support to K-12 educators in rural and outlying areas of Colorado and to support faculty instruction for pre-service teachers.

Colorado’s 184 school districts serve approximately 800,000 students, with the top 20 districts educating 75% of those students. The goal of the Teaching with Primary Sources - Colorado Rural Partnership is to reach the smaller outlying 164 districts which educate the remaining 25% of students.

About the Library of Congress

As the nation's oldest federal cultural institution, the Library of Congress was originally founded to meet the research needs of Congress and later the scholarly interests of researchers. It is the largest library in the world, with more than 130 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves.
The Library's mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people. The Library seeks to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.  Teachers and schools are a primary avenue through which this mission of wider dissemination is being accomplished.  Access for those outside the Washington, D.C. area is made possible through the ongoing digitization of these primary sources, with more than 13 million currently available free online.

Over the years, more than 10,000 teachers have benefitted from educational outreach programs of the Library of Congress.  Teaching with Primary Sources is the latest initiative that builds on the success of the previous Library programs, including the American Memory Fellows and An Adventure of the American Mind programs.  We are pleased to be bringing these rich resources to schools and districts within Colorado who are often underserved in program such as this.