Philadelphia Writing Project

Supporting Civically Engaged Argument Writing with Primary Sources

Planning a Civic Argument Writing Unit the Integrates Primary Sources

The resources on our site draw heavily from the National Writing Project's (NWP) College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP; Arshan & Park, 2021; Friedrich et al., 2018). Prior to this project by Philadelphia Writng Project teacher consultants, NWP teacher consultants assembled resources for supporting routine argument writing, instructional resources with text sets that could be used to support students with particular argument writing skills, a formative assessment tool for teachers to collaboratively analyze student writing and plan next steps, and intensive professional development to support shifts in the teaching of argument writing. 

C3WP encourages teachers to use a mini unit on connecting claims with evidence based on formative assessments of student writing carried out in collaboration with a community of teachers. The C3WP mini units, then, are responsive to the particular needs of students in a class.

In contrast, our PhilWP team has organized the curriculum collections on this site by topic or issue (e.g., "Road Rules," "Space Junk"). As we created our resources, we found that organizing them by topic—rather than by skill as is done with C3WP resources—helped us demonstrate how historical primary sources can support civic argument writing. This means, though, that our resources may obscure that any instructional unit should ideally be grounded in skills students need to learn that teachers have identified through formative assessment.


Why and How We Create Text Sets

Teachers may use text sets for a variety of purposes to support civic argument writing:

Each of our curriculum collections includes a text set that can be used and modified for classroom use to support civic argument writing. Our team of teachers has combined three approaches for creating text sets:

With these three strands of work as guides, our teachers weave together current news articles and videos, informational texts and infographics, historical primary sources in a range of formats (e.g., photos, prints, legislation, maps), and other sources like picture books and even novels. In our text set on child labor, we include images and other primary sources from the Library of Congress that shed light on the history of child labor and laws. We combine these texts with recent news stories about recent changes to child labor laws across the country.

In this webinar recording, Philadelphia Writing Project teacher consultants Javaha Ross and Trey Smith describe a process for creating a text set that supports civic argument writing. Use this text set planning tool to get started.


 

Where We Search for Primary Sources for Text Sets

Our project is funded by a Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) grant from the Library of Congress, and our early work was supported by two TPS Eastern Region grants. Therefore, we feature primary sources that have been digitized by the Library of Congress and its affiliates.

We encourage teachers to search for primary sources using the following Library portals:

Additionally, we have found that the Digital Public Library of America is a powerful search portal, connected to digital records from the Smithsonian, National Archives, PA Digital (e.g., Free Library of Philadelphia, Temple University, Historical Society of Pennsylvania), and other archives. Philadelphia teachers may also be interested in the photo archive at PhillyHistory.org.

 

This website features resources created by educators affiliated with the Philadelphia Writing Project (PhilWP), supported by a Teaching with Primary Sources grant from the Library of Congress.