The Constitution in Action.

Question: What do the following historical documents have in common? * An 1847 credential certificate naming Sam Houston as an elected Senator from Texas; * A 1904 patent drawing for a game board; and * A 1958 letter to President Dwight Eisenhower suggesting a new design for the American flag following the admission of Alaska to the Union. Answer: The Constitution, of course! Student visitors to the new Constitution in Action Learning Lab in the Boeing Learning Center at the National Archives would have little trouble coming up with this correct answer. Middle school students take on the roles of archivists and researchers collecting and analyzing primary sources from the holdings of the National Archives. Through this experience they gain a greater understanding of the importance of the Constitution to the operation of our government and to our daily lives. The Constitution in Action Lab is the latest addition to the National Archives Experience in the agency's flagship building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Tested during the spring of 2007, the lab will open for regular sessions this month, providing a whole new definition to the words "field trip." The trip to the National Archives really begins back in the classroom. There, groups of up to 36 students are divided into 6 teams, and each team is assigned a particular segment of the Constitution about which they will become experts. In class, prior to the fieldtrip experience, students study the charter document and become familiar with its organization, content, and significance. Before they get on the bus, they know they are going to be participating in a 2-hour activity that has something to do with the Constitution, but exact details are deliberately kept a mystery. So when the students are ushered into the "briefing room," there is an air of expectation. An education specialist sets the scene and starts the film that takes the students on a journey inside the Oval Office (filming was made possible thanks to the re-creation of the Oval Office located in the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Georgia). A fictitious president, whose face is never shown on camera, is meeting with "Bob," his historically-challenged communications director. In one hour, Bob is scheduled to announce the administration's Constitution Day campaign, but Bob reports that he is not ready. The president helps Bob understand the key message of the campaign: that the Constitution is not simply an old document, but that it has been, and continues to be, an active document in all of our lives. Bob and the president discuss a number of instances of the Constitution in action, but Bob needs more examples, and he hasn't got much time. So the president tells him to relax, that there is likely to be a group of young researchers at the National Archives who can help him locate more examples of the Constitution in action. The film ends with the president picking up the telephone receiver, as if to call on the students watching the film. In the lab, the student teams, comprised of one archivist and up to five researchers each, begin their work. The student archivists are taken into a mock-up of an archival stack area, invited to wear stack coats, and briefed on records management issues. They are also reminded of the responsibilities of an archivist--to both preserve documents and make them accessible. The student archivists are to locate documents and deliver them to their researcher classmates. At the same time, the student researchers are taken to a mock up of the Archives central reading room, complete with cork floors, where they are briefed on strategies for effectively analyzing primary source documents. When the student archivists have located their documents, contained among dozens of acid-free archival boxes, they place their boxes on carts and wheel them into the reading room for their teammates. …