I’ll admit to having an affinity for true stories that focus on high stakes and high rewards as well as ones that focus on changing perceptions of women around the turn of the 20th century. So it was no surprise that Pedal, Balance Steer caught my eye as well as my imagination in how to use it with primary sources.
About the Story
Pedal, Balance, Steer is the story of Annie Londonderry, a woman who had come to America as a young girl and, at the time of the story, found herself in a wager to travel not just across the country but around the world by bicycle. The biggest problem wasn’t the rules of the race but that she made the wager not knowing how to ride a bicycle.
Pedal, Balance, Steer
Letting the Picture Book Lead to the Primary Sources
Kirkfield and Jay’s picture book leaves plenty of hints for the reader that could lead to primary sources. There are quotes from Londonderry throughout the book. Text and illustrations showed people reading about Annie in the newspaper. There was mention of autographed photos and a decorated bicycle that surely someone took a photo of.
Finding an Entry Point for Primary Sources
The Herald, May 19, 1895
Any of these primary sources could have been an entry point. Sometimes though, the primary source only repeats the story. A question I sometimes ask when pairing primary sources with a picture book is how can those sources expand the story for students. With this story, the experiences of all of the women (and men) reading about Annie traveling the world was one that I thought would resonate with students.
That would mean identifying newspaper articles focused on Annie’s travels. This also seemed like a great opportunity to have students search for the primary sources. Londonderry was likely traveling from small town to small town to earn money and make her way. And with the number of small newspapers at the time, there was likely lots of coverage of the event.
Keeping things accessible for the majority of my upper-elementary students, I thought utilizing Chronicling America, a free database of over 21 million pages of digitized newspapers from across the US, would be the best option. It may limit the coverage to the US portion of Annie’s journey, but could still yield many results.
Testing and Anticipating Student Learning
Even though I wanted my students to search for the primary sources, I also wanted to see what their experience would be like. It would help me teach the search techniques for this particular topic and understand their likely results better. My searching for articles to inform student searches helped me identify search terms that could help students as well as have a preview of students’ findings. Those findings lead me to solidifying next steps in how students would interact with the sources.
The articles I found were revealing in how they described Londonderry as a woman as well as they quotes they chose to use, a revelation of how the traveler described herself. Ultimately, I thought that not only were there geographic elements to be revealed, but also decisions about how a person is portrayed in the news.
Map of part of Annie’s US Journey with Links to Articles
Those findings lead to me making a map of the US portion of Annie’s travels along with two focus questions for students to explore as they found their own reporting. The map of my initial findings were captured in a Google My Maps page with links back to the original articles.
- How is Annie portrayed?
- How does Annie portray herself?
These questions can be explored not only through the newspaper articles, but also through Kirkfield and Jay’s picture book and give students a more nuanced perspective of both how we present ourselves and how others present us.
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