This blog post has been written by Danielle Porter, a student teacher at Temple University who has used our collections as part of the National History Day Philly Cultural Collaboration Initiative. We wish Danielle well with the rest of her studies!

My name is Danielle Porter. I am a student from Temple University taking a methods course that required an internship that expected us to complete around thirty hours of field placement. I decided to do my internship at Bryn Mawr College. What I hoped to get out of the experience was a better understanding of how to read and translate primary documents and how to use them in lessons.

My time at Bryn Mawr College, Special Collections was a rewarding and educational experience. I was able to work first hand with primary sources and write a lesson plan. The primary sources were both digitized and on paper and both provided a wealth of information. I really liked looking at the primary sources and seeing how women lived and thought back in the early twentieth-century. I used these primary sources to create an original lesson plan on Women in War. I looked through the documents that Bryn Mawr had and chose newspaper clippings and pictures that I though best represented what I was trying to get across in the lesson. The pictures were taken from a scrapbook created on the Red Cross training program initiated on campus during World War II. The lesson has students look at the primary documents and decide whether gender bias was present or not, and if they feel as if women had progressed in society.

I really enjoyed my internship at Bryn Mawr. The documents that were provided were very interesting and informational. I feel as if my time was well spent here because it provided me with insight as to how use primary documents in lessons and the importance of research.