Open Access Educational Resources

We develop and make available flexible archive-based projects and curricula for learners from grade 3 to graduate levels. These open-source materials can be integrated in remote, hybrid, and traditional classrooms.

“One of the most striking effects of this education program is the way the students’ thinking skills deepen and expand. We do not feed them thoughts and conclusions. We feed them material and scaffolded thinking processes. We guide them through discovery learning, critical thinking exercises, and purposeful, directed questioning and searching. Our goal is to help the students develop an understanding of an issue from the point of view of where to go next, not finding the answer.”

Elisabeth Hickey, Washington Irving Intermediate School, Tarrytown, New York

The RAC’s open-source primary source projects, units, sets, and media literacy guides are available to download below. We also share them via OER Commons. These interdisciplinary educational resources incorporate documents from our archival collections and are developed in partnership with laboratory schools in Westchester County, New York. These resources address a range of topics and key moments and movements in American and global history. In whole or in part, they can connect topically to curricula or support targeted skill development in critical thinking, media literacy, and research methods.

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Archival Education

Voter Education: Audiovisual Media Literacy Video and Classroom Guide

This media literacy classroom activity centers on a video we developed with the RAC’s Audiovisual Archivist Brent Phillips. It includes clips of audiovisual documents related to voter education, which can serve as primary sources to view, analyze, and discuss in a classroom setting. The classroom activity guide below is available as a PDF download at…

Educational Resources To Download

Learning About and Creating Student Archives

Grades 3-6. Introduces students to archives, primary sources, and secondary sources. This flexible unit includes nine lessons in which students document their own learning experiences by creating, describing, and organizing primary sources. Each student’s personal papers are aggregated into a class archive that is then described in a mock finding aid. 

How To Do Research Primary Source Unit

Grades 4-8. This unit guide provides a lesson-to-lesson foundation for teaching about primary sources, and how to evaluate and cite sources, do document analysis, and formulate and find answers to a research question.

The War of the Worlds, Fake News, and Media Literacy Primary Source Unit

Grades 4-8. This unit offers multiple entry points into developing an understanding of media literacy around the War of the Worlds broadcast. It includes a midpoint writing assessment, whole class capstone debate, and final independent writing assessment.

Tenements and Immigration Primary Source Set

Grades 4-8. This set of curated primary sources can be used for inquiry-based learning exercises and projects. Each document falls under the umbrella topic of tenements and immigration. Suggested projects are included for the educator as a springboard for research-based projects.

Refugee Scholars Primary Source Workshop

Grades 9-16. This workshop presents selected primary sources from the Rockefeller Foundation holdings at the Rockefeller Archive Center. This is intended for use in facilitating a classroom exercise on the Rockefeller Foundation’s 1933-1945 refugee scholar program. This workshop enables students to imagine and grapple with the difficult choices RF officials had to make in one historical example of how foundation philanthropy has responded to humanitarian crisis.

Experimentation and Innovation: Building the Hale Telescope Primary Source STEAM Workshop

High school to graduate levels. The primary sources in this workshop can be used to strengthen critical reading skills, support inquiry-based learning exercises, and expose students to the stories of trial and error that lie behind most scientific or engineering breakthroughs.

Voter Education Media Literacy Exercise

Grades 4-8. The primary sources in this set can be used for inquiry-based learning exercises and projects. Each document falls under the umbrella topic of voter education. Suggested projects that make use of this set’s primary sources are included for the educator as a springboard for research-based projects.

From Dream to Reality: Building the Hale Telescope

Grades 8-12. This project describes to students the great hurdle in the Hale Telescope’s construction: successfully transporting the 40-ton, 200-inch mirror and its packing materials from upstate New York to the top of Palomar Mountain in southern California. Documents include shipping manifests, conversations regarding the movement of the mirror, and photographic documentation of the mirror’s journey up Palomar Mountain. These sources can be used for inquiry-based learning exercises.

The Cold War

High school to graduate levels. This workshop places students into the role of program officers during the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing on twenty-two records from the Rockefeller Archive Center collections, the project explores philanthropic activities during a period of ideological and geopolitical tensions.

Learning from the Panama Canal Yellow Fever Epidemic to Create a Public Health Campaign

Grades 4-8. The following unit engages students with archival material related to the yellow fever epidemic during the construction of the Panama Canal. Students will learn about archives, primary and secondary sources through the lens of the yellow fever. They will make connections to other public health campaigns such as tuberculosis and Covid. Applying present day awareness strategies, students will create their own public health campaigns for yellow fever in the form of “challenges,” hashtags, posters, billboard mockups, and bulletins. Support materials are integrated into the lessons, and the selected primary source documents can be found at the end of the unit.

HIV/AIDS in the 1980s

Grades 10 – Graduate level/Adult education. This audiovisual media literacy educational resource focuses on video media. Videographic materials often communicate messages visually. Articulating precisely how this is done, through both visual and narrative information, requires critical media literacy skills. Through watching and analyzing these videos, students will explain underlying messages and attitudes within the videos.

Near East Relief Document Analysis Websites

Grades 4 – 8. The following unit engages students with archival material related to Near East Relief. The unit framework, primary sources, and resources can be integrated into classrooms of grades 4-8. Each lesson has student objectives that can be accomplished within 40 minute periods over the course of several weeks. The final project will be student-created websites providing information about selected documents from the Near East Relief records. Support materials are integrated into the lessons, and the selected primary source documents can be found at the end of the primary source unit.