When Claire Osborne, middle school dean and history teacher at The Kinkaid School (TX), was searching for primary sources to help bring to life her unit on World War II, she had a place to go—her school’s archives. She and the school’s archivist, John Rovell, had worked together over the past couple of years to curate a collection of WWII artifacts, housed in the school’s archives, for students to touch and examine. Students were able to leaf through scrapbooks, journals, photos, and a book of ration stamps. They also looked through Kinkaid yearbooks from that time and saw photos of graduating seniors replacing their tasseled caps with military hats.
An archivist has maintained the school's historical collections for more than a decade. Rovell, the current archivist, describes it as a place for institutional memory. He's able to pull up land deeds, can name the first Black students who integrated the school in 1970, and shares collections from various time periods with classes, including photos of Margaret Kinkaid, who founded the school during the Progressive Era, and a soccer ball from the ’60s, which students thought was a volleyball.
This spring, students will conduct independent projects in which they will pick their own period of history to explore and use the skills of a historian to create a podcast.
(From top) Students explore primary documents, including photographs of Margaret Kinkaid’s family from the 1920s and 1930s; Archivist John Rovell introduces fifth graders to the school’s archives.
(From top) Students explore primary documents, including photographs of Margaret Kinkaid’s family from the 1920s and 1930s; Archivist John Rovell introduces fifth graders to the school’s archives.
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