The Power of Historical Knowledge | History Matters Podcast

Oct 14, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Angela Barfoot, a second-grade teacher, and Lauren Cascio, a fifth-grade teacher, share their transformative experiences using the Bayou Bridges curriculum in Louisiana classrooms. They highlight how rich, content-driven social studies enhances student engagement and inquiry. Both teachers recount thrilling moments, like students eagerly anticipating field trips to historical sites. They also discuss how integrating ELA with history boosts student reading skills and sparks a passion for learning about the past.

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INSIGHT

Curriculum Transformed Teaching Experience

Teachers describe the Bayou Bridges curriculum as transforming dull materials into interactive, story-rich lessons that make teaching enjoyable.
Strong teacher notes and visuals boost teacher confidence and student engagement during instruction.

ADVICE

Prep Deeply And Align ELA With Social Studies

Prep with teacher notes to build your own content knowledge before teaching a unit.
Use aligned ELA materials to reinforce social studies concepts across subjects for deeper learning.

INSIGHT

History Builds Literacy And Reading Choices

Building background knowledge in history supports reading and genre transfer in ELA.
Students choose related nonfiction and historical fiction in the library, increasing literacy practice and content depth.

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The more history young students know, the more they want to know. That’s one of the joyful discoveries that elementary teachers are making in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana. In this episode, guests Angela Barfoot and Lauren Cascio describe the rewards of using Bayou Bridges, a content-rich, knowledge-building social studies curriculum, in combination with a high-quality ELA curriculum, Louisiana Guidebooks.

Extensive teacher notes, rich texts, engaging visuals, and tie-ins to virtual field trips make for exciting history study in the elementary grades, the teachers tell host Barbara Davidson. For example, after studying Native American communities in class, students visited the nearby Poverty Point World Heritage Site and were cheering with excitement on the bus, Barfoot says.

“We’re not even there yet, and the kids start screaming, ‘The bird mound! Mound A!’ And they’re just—they can see it and they are just thrilled out of their minds. . . they were just beyond thrilled that they knew all this!”

Students are also choosing to read about historical topics at the school library, Cascio reports. They are reaching for historical fiction and non-fiction texts about what they’ve learned in social studies.

“Fifth graders love a fact,” she says. “It excites me because I want them to read different genres, and because that’s part of what I need them to do.”

Learning about different people, places, and times is enriching in multiple ways. Between knowledge-building instruction and engaging texts in their social studies and ELA curricula, students are being shown “a world that they’ve never seen before,” Cascio says.

“It is teaching them to think,” Barfoot says. “And to not take things at face value, but to really dive deep.”

Ouachita Parish was recently featured by the Knowledge Matters School Tour; visit our website for more information, including videos of lessons and interviews with students and teachers.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork, on behalf of the History Matters Campaign. Follow the History Matters Campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X. Search #historymatters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.