#  Library of Congress 2024-2025 

 



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## **Looking back on a momentous year... utilizing stories and primary sources to fuel classroom innovation** 

### Project Highlights 

In April, 2025 we've wrapped up our latest project funded by Library of Congress through the TPS Eastern Regional grant program. We set out to empower educators with new methods to captivate and assess student interest and engagement through strategic use of cross media methods, primary sources, humanizing stories, and the formative assessment tool developed by Dr. Robert L. Selman.

As one American educator, Edward Miller, the founder of Edward Elementary, once said:

*“Stories are our primary tools of learning and teaching, the repositories of our lore and legends. They bring order into our confusing world. Think about how many times a day you use stories to pass along data, insights, memories, or common-sense advice.”*

This project embraced that philosophy by equipping educators with tools to engage learners through rich, media-integrated narratives grounded in authentic sources. Building on the expanded cross media methodology (introduced in 2023) we added two enhancements:

- A new instructional move applying three epistemic lenses—**aesthetic, ethical, and academic**—to the analysis of primary source collections associated with humanistic stories and cross-media lesson plans.
- The integration of Dr. Robert L. Selman’s **Five Levels of Perspective Taking Complexity Model**, a formative assessment tool rooted in developmental science, providing educators with a research-based framework to assess students’ prosocial development and guide deeper reflection.

The Harvard X-Media Lab offered a new 4-week online professional development workshop, ***Primary Sources: The Catalyst for Deeper Learning Across Media*****,** in July-August 2024 to demonstrate the latest methods of analysis and assessment to support effective practice implementations. Once again, we collaborated with [Journeys in Film](https://journeysinfilm.org/) to develop new classroom resources. and demonstrate new cross-media story combinations to promote interdisciplinary learning.

The workshop and supplemental Zoom sessions attracted a diverse community of educators from Pre-K-12 and higher education, at all levels of experience. .Their responses were overwhelmingly enthusiastic -and inspiring. Online discussions were vibrant and deeply enriched by the lived experiences, reflections, and aspirations of our workshop participants.The cross-media action plans that emerged over the 4 weeks overflowed with creative application of cross media methods, primary source collections and humanizing stories in multiple media forms. We will be publishing new insights and ideas for utilizing the cross media methodology culled from these interactions and credited to the dedicated educators who joined us last summer from around the world!