Kelsey Beeghly wrote this "Timeless Stories from the Library of Congress" blog post at the end of her tenure as the 2023-2024 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow. As so many Einstein fellows have discovered, the Library has far more to offer than most science teachers might imagine. For example, Kelsey Beeghly writes:
STEM educators need to know about all of the amazing things the Library has to offer. My own past teaching in grades 6–12 and of preservice teachers would have greatly benefited from incorporating the Library’s primary sources.
I’m very confident that every topic taught in a science classroom can be made more engaging by including a piece of history related to it, the people involved with it and its impact on society.
She also suggests a few starting points for STEM educators interested in learning more about what the Library has to offer. One that caught my fancy was her link to a 1987 book titled The Tradition of Science that's a compilation of dozens and dozens of science-related treasures held by the Library of Congress (like the "Raphael of flowers" artist's print below).
https://www.loc.gov/resource/scd2015.00000935086/?sp=121&st=image
Kelsey Beeghly
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Very true! I'm connecting with an elementary STEAM teacher next week, and this was a timely reminder. Thank you.
Apparently you can tell the elementary STEAM teacher that having large or clumsy hands does not prevent people from becoming great artists. The last sentence in the beautiful rose illustration tells of a critic who paid the artist a unique tribute, saying, "He composed a bouquet with the intelligence and the happiness of a young girl at her first ball; and yet he brought about those delicate masterpieces with the thick hands which resembled the feet of some antediluvain animal." (Ouch! There IS humor in primary sources!)
I would like STEAM educators to know about Scientists and Inventors in Free to Use and Reuse and the Engineering in History Research Guide!
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