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The purpose of Teaching with Primary Sources is to engage students in learning about Congress, representative democracy, and citizen participation. To accomplish this, we are developing an extensive suite of interactive online activities to help teachers access and use the digital primary source materials of the Library of Congress and the Center on Congress Web site.

On this page is a sample of activities from the lesson Congress in the Public Eye: A Look at American Political Cartoons. The purpose of this lesson is to facilitate students’ understanding of the relationship between citizens and government based on freedom of expression. It focuses on ways that citizens voice their views about government, and highlights freedom of expression as important to the health of our representative democracy. Students will investigate the artistic and persuasive techniques used by political cartoonists, evaluate the meaning of cartoons, and begin to formulate their own ideas about our government and how Congress works. Students will learn ways to become more informed, evaluate several ways that individuals can express opinions, discuss the effectiveness of various forms of communication, and practice communicating their own civic views.

These materials are designed to be easily incorporated into any social studies curriculum. All activities will come with comprehensive lesson plans aligned with state curriculum standards.

Nationally, TPS, funded through the Library of Congress, is managed and implemented by an educational consortium comprised of universities, libraries and K-12 school districts with the goal of helping teachers to embed digitized primary source materials from the Library of Congress into challenging, high-quality instruction. The Center on Congress at Indiana University has been a member of this consortium since 2004.

Watch here for more news about the TPS project!