By Anne Cantrell, MSU News Service
12/10/2024 Contact: Hailey Hancock, [email protected] or [email protected]
Summary: The grant will be used to grow participation in the social studies and literacy program, particularly in small, rural schools.
BOZEMAN — A new $100,000 grant from the Library of Congress will provide opportunities for Montanans to participate in National History Day in Montana, a social studies and literacy contest for middle school and high school students across the state based at Montana State University.
The Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources grant will be used to grow participation in the program, particularly in small, rural schools. It will help equip 15 teachers across Montana with skills to teach historical analysis and argumentation and boost teachers' confidence and competence with the state's required Indian Education for All instruction.
Since 2006, Congress has appropriated funds to the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program to establish and fund a consortium of organizations working to incorporate "the digital collections of the Library of Congress into educational curricula." Each year, members of the TPS Consortium support tens of thousands of learners to build knowledge, engagement and critical thinking skills with items from the Library's collections.
National History Day in Montana is affiliated with National History Day, a nonprofit education organization. The state celebration is sponsored by Montana State University's Department of Education in the College of Education, Health and Human Development. Partners include the Montana Historical Society and Humanities Montana. The program is organized by Hailey Hancock, an assistant teaching professor in the MSU Department of Education, and Melissa Hibbard, interpretive historian with the Montana Historical Society.
Hancock said that more than a dozen of the 15 Montana teachers who'll learn from the grant programming work in rural parts of the state.
"One of our main goals is to increase the number of teachers and students conducting historical research, using Library of Congress resources and the National History Day project model," Hancock said.
Through the grant, teachers will complete professional development related to Indian Education for All offered through the Buffalo Bill Center for the West in Cody, Wyoming, and they will judge or participate in one of three regional history day contests. Teachers will also participate in quarterly meetings as a group and undergo assessments to measure what they are learning. Finally, they will attend a summer institute at MSU Billings in August.
"Supporting the secondary social studies teachers and giving them more tools and more content that they can use in their classroom will directly impact the secondary students," Hancock said. "Our aim is to help them learn how to do historical thinking and how to apply it. We think that will increase both the rigor and relevance of social studies in the classroom and in life."
National History Day is for students in grades 6-12. It reaches more than half a million students and tens of thousands of teachers each year via its international student history contest and its wide range of teacher professional development programs, curriculum tools and educational activities.
Hancock and Hibbard relaunched the National History Day in Montana program in 2023 as a way of offering teachers more training in historical thinking and primary source analysis. Recognizing the extensive primary source materials available through the Library of Congress that are aligned with the Indian Education for All program, Hancock and Hibbard chose Indian Education for All – a legal requirement in Montana – as an avenue to develop these skills.
"I've attended and taught in five of Montana's small schools," Hibbard said. "I feel a mixed sense of loss and envy that History Day wasn't available to me as a child, nor was it available to my students when I moved back to Montana during the pandemic. Hailey and I want to change that for Montana's teachers and students. This Library of Congress grant helps make that dream possible."
"Students need social studies education and skills, including historical thinking skills, in order to be engaged, informed citizens," Hancock said. "It's important to be able to form your own conclusions and take informed action."
National History Day in Montana is one of 23 first-time Teaching with Primary Sources grant recipients, along with 19 continuing grantee organizations located in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. The grant provides one year of funding, with the possibility of two additional one-year grants.
In addition to the Library of Congress grant, National History Day in Montana received a nearly $10,000 community grant from Humanities Montana this fall. The grant will help fund school teams' travel to regional and state contests.
"The title of that grant is literally 'History Day for all,'" Hancock said. "That is another passion of ours. We don't want location or economics to limit which students can participate in this program. We are very grateful to have the support of Humanities Montana."
The Library of Congress is the world's largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
For more information about National History Day in Montana, visit http://www.montana.edu/nhdmt or http://www.nationalhistorydaymt.org. More information about Humanities Montana is available at http://www.humanitiesmontana.org/.
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This story is available on the web at: http://www.montana.edu/news/24192
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