Rebecca Newland and Tom Bober

Steve Thomas: Tom and Rebecca, welcome to Circulating Ideas.

Tom Bober: Glad to be here.

Steve Thomas: Thank you.

Before we get into your book, Literature and Primary Sources: the Perfect Pairing for Student Learning I was interested in what got you each interested in working in the library field in the first place?

Tom Bober: I was actually a classroom teacher for several years and loved that, teaching fourth and fifth grade and then moved into more of a technology integration support role for a while and enjoyed that, but ultimately, I was missing working with students and specifically talking about books. I wasn’t necessarily interested in going back into the classroom, so the library felt like a really good opportunity to not only get back to talking about books, but also to continue to have some influence around how students did research and what that looked like, because I was doing some of that with the technology role. So that brought me to libraries and I’ve been doing it for 14, 15 years now and love it.

Rebecca Newland: I had a somewhat similar path. I started as a high school English teacher, and after doing that for 15 years, I felt like I wanted something different. The library seemed like the greatest intersection of the things that I loved about the classroom, which was the books, of course. I also was very much interested in research and inquiry and getting kids to be curious, and so the library was another place where I could really move into that and talk to teachers about ways that that could work with students that I thought was really important. So yeah, the library just ended up being the perfect fit for all of those things that I thought I could really care about and really push with teachers.

Steve Thomas: And you each have experience as Teachers in Residence at the Library of Congress. Can you talk about that experience and how that influenced your work going forward?

Rebecca Newland: So I went to the Library of Congress for one of their Summer Teacher workshops in my first summer of being a librarian. I happened to find this opportunity online. I was like, “Oh, that sounds really interesting. I think I’ll go there.” And I was hooked at that point. I had worked with primary sources before that, just a little bit and not in the ways that really were like, wow, mind blowing as far as what you can get kids to think about and the inquiry pieces and the curiosity pieces. Once I was there, and I met the person who was the teacher in residence at that time, I talked to her about it and I said, “Hey, what is this all about? Like, I’m really, really interested in this.” She gave me some really good insights into the kind of work she was doing, and it really intrigued me, but she was going to be there for another year, so I had to wait until after that next year had passed before I could apply. And it just was, one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever done as far as just seeing how things can work and how you can talk to people on a much greater level. Like, I had been used to working with teachers in my school, of course, and even as far as in my district, but to be able to be on the national level and having these conversations with teachers about the relevance of primary sources was just life changing, honestly.

Tom Bober: I got there pretty much in the same way. I had attended the Summer Teacher Institute. Were you with Ernestine, Rebecca? Yeah. Okay. So I was there the year after you, and then Ernestine was there as well. Now I didn’t talk to her. I was like a little bit of a slower burn on this, but then I somehow snuck into another Summer Teacher institute the next year, which normally isn’t allowable, but they had like a special one that they allowed people to reapply for and Rebecca was there. She was a teacher in residence, so I asked her if I could pick her brain a little bit on it and after one of the Institute days, she’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to go run to…” Do you remember what we did? We ran to a comic book store. And we talked the whole way to the comic book store and back and Rebecca was great. She filled me in on what it looked like for her and, and a lot of the things that she just mentioned, then that got me to apply and was accepted. And I had a very similar experience. I mean, I felt like it was life changing because it’s some of the best professional development that you get to go to. You get this opportunity to think really deeply about some topic that is going to impact what you do professionally. Essentially this was getting to do this for an entire school year. And so it was yeah, just life changing, professionally changing opportunity.

Steve Thomas: Well, I have two follow ups to that. Number one is, is that common, like, do you feel like Tom, during your year, did you talk to somebody who then ended up being the person the next year?

Tom Bober: I did speak with someone, but they didn’t end up, I don’t know if they didn’t end up applying or didn’t end up making the position because they only have typically one spot a year for a teacher in residence that they’re filling, but I know other people have come in and just come into the Library of Congress’s purview in different ways. So I think that’s just something that Rebecca and I share as a unique way that we got in.

Steve Thomas: And then the other follow up is what comic books did you buy? If you remember now, it’s been a long time.

Rebecca Newland: I don’t remember. I think now that you say it, I remember it because there was a comic book store that has since moved to DuPont Circle, but was in Union Station in Washington, D. C. Right. So it was a really easy walk from the Library of Congress. And I must have been going to pick up my monthly subscription books, which was all kinds of things that I was reading at that time, but that is funny that that’s what you remember.

Tom Bober: I was a comic book kid when I was younger and I still kind of read graphics, but my stuff was all superhero stuff. I had a feeling you were reading something outside of that realm

Steve Thomas: It probably just lined up and Rebecca was like, “Oh, it’s Wednesday. Let’s go for a walk. Tom. Oh, look at the comic book store! Just happened to be able to pick up my monthly stash.” So we’ve talked about primary sources and I think most people understand, but can you just for baseline define what primary sources are and then why are they an important tool for learning for students?

Tom Bober: So I describe a primary source as an item or an object that’s directly connected to a topic that you’re studying, and that related time period. So if it’s not connected to that time period, then it’s a secondary source. And as far as their importance, I had similar experiences to what Rebecca shared, where I had tried using primary sources in my classroom prior to attending this workshop years ago failed miserably, and so I think really where you get the juice in this is you get a really great way for students to interact with the primary source. That’s really where you get your biggest bang for your buck. I think what it does is it puts students in charge of their own learning in ways that other kind of prepackaged materials don’t do. There’s a little bit of mystery there. There’s not every answer. It really encourages kids to ask their own questions. So I think there’s so many pluses to bringing these really authentic pieces into what students are interacting with.

Rebecca Newland: Yeah, from my point of view, working mainly with high school students, I think bringing the element of, like Tom said, mystery and curiosity back. Too often, high school students have been presented with the secondary sources and told this is the story that we are investigating and the primary sources when you bring those in and they understand that one, there are different perspectives to the story than maybe what they’ve been seeing, but also that those secondary pieces have come from somewhere, that those textbook writers or the book writers, they had to get their information from somewhere. They didn’t just know that information and that you as a regular student can go back to those original pieces to see where they constructed their story from is really powerful to understand that there’s so many sides to any story and to any way that we approach history in particular, but also like the pieces of literature, like what we wrote about that we thought was significant.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And so that leads to the book. What was the inspiration behind you all working together to put this book together?

Tom Bober: Part of this book was an idea from years earlier because after I left the Library of Congress, had started writing for AASL’s Knowledge Quest, and I was writing a blog called Picture Books and Primary Sources. I’ve taken a break from it since writing this book, but I’m hoping to get back to it, but that really explored that kind of interaction between that type of literature, and I’d had people say, oh, this would make a great book. But it was already out there in a blog, and what else needed to be said?

And then I started to dabble in utilizing graphic novels and primary sources and there started to be a bigger picture, but it was a picture that I certainly wasn’t able to tell on my own. Like, I didn’t have this K-12 view of not only literature, but at the highest level, like using primary sources with, with high school students. I’ve done it with elementary school in my school and with middle school students, but not nearly the exposure with high school students. I was just kind of pondering on this and then Rebecca and I, we keep in touch and we were actually on a meeting we met together for a podcast episode for my podcast, which is called the Primary Source Podcast, shameless plug, and…

Steve Thomas: We were going to get to it, Tom!

Tom Bober: And as I was getting ready to talk to Rebecca, I thought, well, she’d be the perfect person to write this book with because she’s been doing work with other kinds of literature that I haven’t and primary sources, and I’ve been doing these other pieces and we could come together and make this really cool book. So that’s where my piece came into it. And then Rebecca, you’ve got some really great background with all of this too.

Rebecca Newland: Yeah, when I was in my time at the Library of Congress, one of the things that they requested of me was to take a look at the resources that they already had to see where I thought my unique perspective could bring in something different, and the thing I thought that they were lacking was connecting primary sources to literature, so a lot of my work revolved around that while I was there. And that just kind of was the impetus for me to continue that work. So after I left, I continued for a while to write for the Poetry and Literature Center, a blog for them. Some of it involved primary sources, some of it didn’t but the pieces that did were connected mainly to poetry and showing that, that primary sources can really fit in any place.

So when Tom suggested and said, “Hey, what do you think about doing this work together?” I thought, “Oh, here’s my chance!” You know, these are the things like Classic works of literature poetry some of the other YA pieces that really did have good segues or good connections to primary sources that just weren’t being explored in any other way, that think that teachers, particularly English teachers, would find it exciting to bring those to their students with the idea that they’re not just for history. Primary sources can be integrated into so many different areas of literature again, as that way of prompting and poking that curiosity in their students.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And that’s what I was I was thinking is that usually when you think primary sources, it’s, Oh, it’s the history class. They’re the ones that are doing it, that they need to read the actual Declaration of Independence and it’s like that stuff like that, but bringing it into literature. Really, you could take this model and take it into other areas as well. I mean, you could get into art, you could get into other things, but you’re using literature as the example, but you are giving a structure, almost, to how to use primary sources, and then instead of Great Gatsby, you could plug in Picasso or whatever, now let’s look at his stuff through this, and we need to read his letters that he wrote to people and he needs to read the actual correspondence and look at the actual art itself.

So I think it’s a good structure, and that’s what I was going to ask about, how you came to that structure for each of the chapters because you start out giving a kind of basic overview of, here’s what primary sources are, and a couple other things we’ll mention in a second, but the chapters were each laid out in a special way of like giving a specific example and walking through it. So can you talk about how you came to that structure for each chapter?

Tom Bober: I think part of the structure was really looking at what was already out in the world from both of us, from Rebecca and I, and what wasn’t already out in the world, like what we hadn’t really spoken on yet. Rebecca mentioned working and writing during her time at the library of Congress, she’s got some amazing blog posts out. I’m thinking of your Kate DiCamillo posts. I’m thinking of all your posts that have to do with poetry that you mentioned. I mentioned my posts for ASL. And I’ve written blog posts when I was at the Library of Congress too. I’m trying to remember if I have any that are kind of literature focused. And then I had an opportunity to write another book that was focused a little bit more on like elementary, middle school with regard to using primary sources, and I felt like I said some things there, but there were aspects of this that at least Rebecca and I, we felt like we really hadn’t shared in writing before.

So this idea, like, what does it specifically look like when you’re working with students? Like, what’s that interaction back and forth and revealing those snippets and that more nuance because I think when I talk to teachers and librarians, one thing that they get overwhelmed by is like, how do I find the primary sources? How do I figure out what sources to pick and how they fit into whatever piece of curriculum I’m working with? So we really tried to reveal those elements in detail to, as you kind of mentioned, have that pattern out there that then you can apply to other places, whether it’s other literature or other curriculum content areas.

Rebecca Newland: Yeah, I think one of the pieces, structurally speaking, in each of the chapters that was important was to walk teachers through the thinking, as Tom was just alluding to, saying, like, there is a wealth of primary sources, more than you would necessarily think there were once you start doing the digging, and how do you make those decisions about what is going to work well, what is going to pair best? You can’t use them all. I mean, you could, but that would take up your entire school year, but I think that’s important, particularly for people who haven’t worked extensively with primary sources, to be overwhelmed by the choices and to be able to think through, what do I want the outcomes to be? What are my goals for bringing in these primary sources and to move past “here’s this really cool thing” to “what story is this really cool thing telling and how does that story connect back to the piece of literature that we’re reading?”

I think that thinking isn’t something that comes naturally. It’s something that teachers need to practice and to work towards. And I think that the way that we set up the book really helps enhance that for the readers to say, “Oh, okay, now I understand the role that each of these different kinds of things.” And that’s why when Tom and I talked about it, we made a conscious effort to include lots of different types of primary sources, so that it wasn’t just photographs, but lots of different things that kids would be able to connect with not only for the learning piece of it, like map skills and reading old timey handwriting skills, but all the other elements that can come along with that when you’re looking at these, these key pieces of primary sources.

Tom Bober: I think one thing too that Rebecca has reminded me of that we were really intentional in doing is making sure that we were showing not only different formats of primary sources and how those work with students, but also different entry points with the primary sources. So instead of just saying, hey, here’s the one way that primary sources work or the one way primary sources work with literature, we’re going to look at all kinds of different ways, and it definitely gets down to exactly what Rebecca said. Where are we trying to get to with the use of this primary source? Usually that piece of literature is going to be the driver, right? That’s going to be the reason that we’re seeking out the source, but in some way, that source has to enhance the literature has to enhance that experience that the student is having with the literature, and that might mean bringing that primary source in prior to reading the literature, during reading the literature, after reading the literature, and then interacting with it in a variety of different ways, potentially, to have that enhanced experience that the educator is hoping for.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, definitely the interaction piece, I think, is really important. Like you can’t just give a kid Romeo and Juliet and say read this. You need to understand the world that was happening around that time. Also, interaction-wise, you need to watch a production of Romeo and Juliet. That was not designed for a student to sit down and just read. There are things you’re not going to know unless you’ve said it out loud, you go oh I can hear the wordplay that they’re making…

So, with primary sources in particular, you’ve mentioned a couple of them, but what are some of the other common challenges that educators run into when trying to incorporate primary sources into their teaching?

Rebecca Newland: Besides the finding of the primary sources that are going to make the best connections for your students, which is a huge piece of it, and I’m proud of the way that we incorporated that into the book for sure with lots and lots and lots of examples of where to look, how to look, and how to narrow things down. Another challenge for educators is time. It takes a lot of time, and too often we’re all in a rush to cover the content or to make sure the kids know this and convincing them that the outcome on the other side is more worth it than you can possibly know until you do it.

 The investment of time will multiply in leaps and bounds. By the time that the kids get to, they will not only get the understandings that you want them to, but they’re going to go above and beyond that is great to see. The first time that click happens in your classroom or your library, you’re like, Oh my gosh, it worked. It really worked. Like they got it. And I got like, you really can feel that. And it’s that time factor being able to work in the time, not only to find the things that you want, but to take the time in the reading of the literature to say, we’re going to take this day. We’re not going to talk about that. We’re going to look at this map and connect it, or we’re going to read this newspaper article, or we’re going to do those things, which are going to take some time, but like I said, the, the back end of that is so powerful that it makes it worth it.

Tom Bober: I’m going to build off of what you said. I agree the finding is tough. It’s something that I think that I’m glad again, like you said, we explored in the book, but part of the reason that the time piece is so essential is another element that I think is challenging and that is that so often educators, whether we’re librarians or teachers, we’re the givers of information sometimes and when students are working and analyzing a primary source, there are going to be stumbles and misconceptions and slow reveals of exactly all the things we’ve just been talking about, about like the contextual reality of the time period and what something represented and all of these things and, while students are analyzing a primary source, I think it’s so critical for us to kind of stand back and just be that true facilitator and allow students to have that experience and then build in those other opportunities to kind of help students along that learning journey.

So, for example, there are stories in the book around primary sources being used on the front end of the piece of literature where the student has that mystery. We’ve talked about questions and it’s not my job as the educator to answer those questions. It’s my job then to bring us to the piece of literature, which is going to ultimately answer those questions, and so kind of knowing your role, I think, is the other hard piece that is something that, for me at least, took some practice.

Steve Thomas: It’s the old library school gem of, you know, teach them to fish. You’re showing them how to do the work and then they do it and get that joy of discovery of, oh, I found the answer when the student, they find the answer and it’s not just, here’s the answer when the teacher gives it to you. It’s helping them learn themselves and that discovery is just wonderful.

You go through lots of different genres. You have graphic novels, you have poetry, you have everything. Can you talk through one of the specific examples of how you pair literature with primary sources? What is that structure that we talked about?

Tom Bober: So one of the books that I explored was a middle grade book called Attacked, and it was looking at the bombing at Pearl Harbor, and it starts a little bit prior to that, walks through that that whole event. It’s a wonderful book. It’s vivid. There’s just so much there, and I think that one thing that we’ve been working on in different ways and at different times in my school, when you have those longer form books is when students already have some experience interacting with primary sources, how can we take those rich pieces and incorporate them more independently? With that particular write up and what we’ve done with that particular book is students do their own independent reading groups with that, so they get together and they have discussions and they chat about the book. But what we’ve done is essentially create bookmarks where when they hit certain points in the book, they are asked to stop and analyze a primary source. There’s a couple of very simple questions because they’re doing this independently. They’ve already been working with primary sources for years, and the goal is to give a more rich experience and then allow them to bring that more rich experience into not only their understanding of the book itself, but then the discussion about the book. So that would be one way that we explore the use of primary sources in one of those chapters.

Steve Thomas: A lot of the digital culture of today is fleeting, I guess, is a good word. So we’re not capturing a lot of what’s happening now. Do you feel like things like Snapchat, that it just disappears after 24 hours or digital files that just degrade and they’re not being kept up somewhere. Is that gonna affect the future of using primary sources in a negative way? There’s also the positive side of digitization is that it expands access and that people have access to things that they never had before too. So I think it probably balances out on the positive end. But how do you see that?

Rebecca Newland: I think that there are both sides of it. I think it’s interesting in that everybody can create primary sources in ways that they didn’t necessarily have the ability to before because of digitization. And so before, while we might have had a Lewis Hine, a very famous photographer who was creating the story in the things that he was capturing. Now, everyday people are capturing those and I think the future piece of that will be the access to that, that if we’re relying a bit on personal stories and people’s personal collections, how do we get those out there into everybody’s hands 25, 35, 55 years from now, where will they reside? Well, maybe it’ll be in Instagram or Facebook and we will have better access to that, but maybe it will be in the proverbial shoeboxes of photographs, like we all have at home from our grandparents and great grandparents.

So I think those are going to be the trickier pieces is where are those things residing and are the only things that are accessible to everyone like the things at the Library of Congress or the National Archives or the other repositories that we go to regularly. Whose work is that? And again, that forces a perspective that those are the perspectives that are being preserved when there are so many other perspectives out there being captured, and so I think the tricky part will be getting all of the perspectives into a place where people will be able to access them in the future.

Tom Bober: Yeah, I think you’re 100 percent right that that will be an element. You know, we’re not going to have the handwritten letters that we look at now from the 20th century, right? But we’re going to have text threads with filled with emojis and shortened script and all that kind of stuff that will also have to be deciphered five decades from now, as people are looking through some of this stuff. I think that one example though to your question that I was really heartened by was that our local history museum really for the state of Missouri, but it resides in St. Louis where I am and it’s right down the street from me, they had reached out and we actually, a year or a year and a half into the pandemic donated several writings from our students that they created right at the beginning of the pandemic. So institutions are still out there capturing and gathering and holding. But to Rebecca’s point, there’s so much more being created and making decisions around whose voices are being preserved is really one that I’m glad I don’t have to wrestle with because I think it’s a really hard question.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I’m trying to imagine my iCloud photo library being a shoebox in an attic or something somewhere, basically.

You all have been teachers before and you’re librarians now and that collaboration is always very important between teachers and librarians. What advice do you have to the librarians and teachers out there on how to foster good collaboration, particularly using primary sources, but just in general?

Tom Bober: So I’d say two things. If I’m talking to teachers. I say, figure out what you can’t do because you’re time pressed, and we all know that, and see how you can lean on your librarian. I think the biggest time suck is the curation of all of the primary sources. That takes so much time. So if they can lean on librarians to do that, that’s great. Of course, you have to be lucky enough to have a librarian in your school for that to happen, but if that’s the case, then I want you to lean on your librarian.

And if you’re a librarian and specifically if you want to really support the use of primary sources, I’d say understand what’s already happening with regard to primary sources and how students are using them in classes and then figure out where the gaps are, so from my perspective, the gaps were all over the place. If they were being used, they weren’t being really analyzed. They were just being kind of shown and talked about. I’m lucky enough that my classroom teachers have to stick with me when they bring their kids to the library at my elementary school. So while I was doing lessons with students, I was also giving lessons to teachers in a sense. And I sometimes have teachers come to me afterwards and say, “well, why did you do this? Or why did you say that? Or I saw you do this. And then the students do this.” Like they were sometimes asking me questions around all the pedagogy and so that became an area where I’ve really provided support with my teachers, but it’s finding those gaps. What do the teachers need? And sometimes all they need is the sources and sometimes they need more than that so that they can find the value in the teaching with the sources.

Rebecca Newland: Yeah, I would say from a librarian perspective at the secondary level, I don’t have a captive audience. My students and teachers don’t have to come to the library unless the teacher chooses that, so one thing that I have found has worked really well is, as Tom said, find out what they’re doing and create something that will align with what they’re already doing. So if I know that they’re teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God, to say, “Hey, I have this idea for a way you can incorporate some primary sources. What do you think? Let me run some ideas by you!”, to make the collaboration come from me. I’m the impetus for it, but then show them how it can seamlessly work with what they’re already doing, and by going with ideas already formed, not just saying, “Hey, let’s work with primary sources!” I have found usually isn’t very successful, but to go in with a very specific idea, “I know in the next few months, you will be teaching this. These are some primary sources that I think would work well. What do you think about coming into the library for a period? And let’s see if we can, we can work something out.”

Tom Bober: And then if you do that, and I 100 percent agree with Rebecca, the holy grail, from a librarian’s point of view, is then the teacher coming to you and saying, “I think there’s something to be done here with primary sources, but I can’t quite figure it out. Can you help?” But that’s dependent on them understanding the expertise that you bring to the table,

Steve Thomas: And I can feel that from the public library’s perspective, too, because a lot of times we’ll just reach out and say, “Oh, let us know how you can, how we can help you” just generally, and they’re like, “Well, you’re giving me more work. I’ve got to come up with how you can help me?” But if I can come up to you and say, “I can do give this to your students like we have this that we can provide. Is that something you’re interested in?” They’re, like, “Oh, something in my lap? Okay. Thank you. Thank you.” And that goes back to that standards thing again, like they’re so busy trying to get through their stuff.

Can you talk about some of the other things that you all are doing outside of the book like what areas that you’re researching that you like write papers on or you just write blogs on or I heard something about somebody does a podcast or something, maybe they wanted to mention that they work on like other personal things like that or writing for like school library journal or things like that. Is there subjects in particular that you, besides this book focus in on when you’re doing that kind of work?

Tom Bober: I’ve mentioned the podcast already, right? Primary Source Podcast. And I’ve got some new episodes coming out this season. I’m not as consistent with it as I should be. It was like a pandemic project, and I just keep it going. And I’m picking back up writing for AASL’s Knowledge Quest, and I’m excited about that. And then the other piece that I’ve been dabbling in, which really kind of falls outside of primary sources, but it’s connected is, it’s really that all this work with historically based nonfiction literature has really got me thinking so deeply around the way that nonfiction is curated and circulates and our student’s interest in it in our library. So I’ve been doing a study right now, a circulation study. And it’s kind of repeating and updating one from decades ago, but with the author, Melissa Stewart, she writes for educators and also writes for young readers. And so we are working on that together and later this calendar year, we’ll have some results of our findings, which I think are going to be really revealing for elementary librarians and hopefully helping others think about their nonfiction collection. It certainly has helped me think about mine quite a bit. So that’s an area where we’ll have some more stuff out later this year.

Rebecca Newland: Outside of primary sources, one of my passions is poetry, and when I first got to the Library of Congress, I had the opportunity to have lunch with people from across the library in lots of different divisions, and one of the people I talked to was the head of the Poetry and Literature Center, and he asked the question, “Why are teachers scared to teach poetry? Why doesn’t poetry get taught more often?” And we had a big long philosophical conversation about that. And that was the beginning of me writing some blog posts about teaching poetry for them when I was still there and then continuing after I left. And that is something that I’ve been revolving in my brain of, “Do I have a book in me about that, about teaching poetry?” because I think it’s like primary sources. It’s one of the things where even English teachers aren’t 100 percent sure where to start and how to get kids to not groan when you say we’re going to read some poetry to bring it to them and show the ways in which it’s so powerful of expressing our humanity in the way that novels do also, but the poetry does in a really special way.

So that’s something I’ve been working with. And I have a teacher friend now who I’ve planted some seeds of, ” Hey, would you let me come in and kind of experiment on your class and use them as some guinea pigs to come up with some ideas and workshop some things that I’m thinking about as far as teaching poetry to maybe start writing something?”

Steve Thomas: That’s cool. So to wrap up, I’ve got a new little segment, just want to ask a few little lightning round questions. Don’t worry. They’re all book related. What is the first book that you remember reading on your own?

Tom Bober: Something about “Tommy Goes to the Doctor” or something like that. It was a Little Golden Book.

Rebecca Newland: Mine was the Star Wars Storybook. When I was young, Star Wars had just come out, and I had this book. I was forbidden to get out of bed till 8am in the morning, so if I was awake before that, I would just get that out, and it had been read to me a couple of times, but then I just read, read, read that book.

Steve Thomas: Name a book genre that you have never read.

Tom Bober: I don’t read any romance.

Rebecca Newland: And I don’t read horror.

Steve Thomas: When people ask you what your favorite book is, what is your answer?

Tom Bober: I make them give me a genre and then I give it.

Rebecca Newland: I usually answer The Scarlet Letter because it pretty much is my favorite book, and then they’re shocked by that because they usually have had a bad experience with it, and so I can tell them why actually you should revisit it because it shouldn’t have been a bad experience because it’s a wonderful book.

Steve Thomas: What are you reading right now?

Tom Bober: I’m chairing the 2025 Notables Committee, so I’m reading for Notables. But I don’t think I can say what I’m reading.

Steve Thomas: It’s secret. Yeah, I think it’s all secret.

Rebecca Newland: I’m reading Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. Two other people who I know and trust read it and liked it so I’m giving it a shot and so far, I like it.

Steve Thomas: And the last one is, give me three words to describe why you love libraries.

Tom Bober: Rebecca, you better go first on this. I’m still thinking.

Rebecca Newland: Okay three things that I love about… books, safe space, and curiosity.

Tom Bober: I’m going to go inclusive, stories, and community.

Steve Thomas: Excellent, thank you. See, that wasn’t so bad, was it? I mean, Tom had many pained looks on his face throughout, but….

So what do you hope people educators will take away from reading the book?

Rebecca Newland: I’m hoping that they will see the relevance of what we’re talking about. We put a lot of work into choosing specific pieces of literature to talk about and choosing particular primary sources. So I’d love to see people replicate the exact things that we did to see how it works in different ways, but also, I hope they will take away the idea that you can apply this in science. so many broad ways and that it’s not just about those specific pieces and that the way we structured as we talked about earlier, everything, it should be able to be replicated in a lot of different genres with a lot of different kinds of books with lots of different students and see that it is broad based, which I think is why it’s so good that we did make a concerted effort to make sure that we were covering K through 12 kinds of literature so that educators, librarians, English teachers, elementary school teachers, they can find an entry point that works for them, and once they’re comfortable there can expand to the other elements as well.

Tom Bober: And I’ll just add that. I hope that anyone who’s reading this book who’s never used primary sources, this gives them the confidence to try something. And those who have used primary sources with students, I hope this gives them new ideas and fresh takes on how to do something a little bit different.

Steve Thomas: Well, the book again is Literature and Primary Sources: the Perfect Pairing for Student Learning. Rebecca and Tom, thank you so much for coming on to talk about the book. And I hope lots of people go out there and pick it up.

Tom Bober: Thanks, Steve.

Rebecca Newland: Thank you so much. Great to talk to you.

Steve Thomas: Right. Bye bye.