Funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Queens Immigration Project employs inquiry-based approaches to family history for New York City Public School grade 10 teachers who wish to inspire their students to employ historical methods and thinking, while learning research and digital literacy skills. The goal of the project is to develop curricula and resources to inspire inquiry-based that addresses questions of globalization and immigration and to engage teachers and students in the research and re-use of extant, freely available digital historical records.

Over the past two years, teachers have employed the project to collect students’ immigration stories about their families and their neighborhoods. Students have documented the push and pull factors of immigration, and they have documented how their neighborhoods have changed over time by capturing oral histories of neighbors, friends, and family and researching the events that people described and creating an artifact to share through EngageNY, New York’s open educational resource platform.

In this practicum, the two Principal Investigators (Kathy Shaughnessy and Elaine Carey) and the grant project assistant, John Ronzino, will present the NHPRC platform as a tool for teachers.