Education

Schedule

The institute will run virtually for two weeks over the summer, with an in-person intensive in January of 2022 at the New-York Historical Society. Synchronous sessions will run from noon to 5 pm ET on Zoom with an hour break. Participants will also be expected to engage in asynchronous activites each day on Moodle. The first full day of the Institute will introduce participants to major topics and themes and lay the foundation for the course content to come. Subsequent days will be devoted to each of the four colonies under study, with two days of content dedicated to each colony. The final day of the Institute will be devoted to synthesis, applications, and reflection.

Synchronous sessions will take the form of either pedagogy workshops, seminar conversations with guest lecturers, or virtual field trips. Days will begin with a warm-up discussion that will synthesize and connect learning and asynchronous activities from each day to the next.  Classroom application discussions will culminate the study of each colony. In these sessions, participants will brainstorm and workshop strategies to fold institute learning into their teaching. They will be guided in this work by the Project Directors and the Teacher Advisor.

Project

As a culminating project, participants will create a plan for furthering the discovery and dissemination of women’s history in K-12 education. Projects could include: a revised curriculum map indicating when and how to incorporate more women; a teacher professional development program plan and lessons to train colleagues; a professional conference proposal and session plan to share best practices and Institute resources to a broad network of professionals; a plan for engaging with local history repositories to mine collections through a women’s history lens; a series of student-facing lesson plans; a podcast proposal; etc.

Participants will have latitude to design a project that they feel will have the most impact in their circumstances, but all must reach beyond the students in their specific classroom. The Project Directors and Teacher Advisor will be able to provide guidance.

In the academic year following the Institute, Summer Scholars will be expected to implement their projects. Project dissemination will consist of two phases:

• Phase 1: Participants will be expected to test the viability of their projects by teaching lessons in their classrooms using materials and knowledge acquired during the Institute. The Project Co-Directors will provide feedback and work with participants to hone their plans. Two cohort webinars will enable the group to share progress and seek feedback from one another.
• Phase 2: Participants will implement their projects. Two additional cohort check-ins will allow participants to share the lessons they learn as they take their work to a broader audience.

An in-person January intensive, held January 15-17, 2022, will help participants transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of project dissemination. Over the course of the long weekend, the cohort will gather to reflect on bringing women’s history to their classrooms throughout the fall, engage in workshops about best practices for peer-to-peer professional development, and hear from scholars and public history professionals about teaching colonial history to wide audiences in the 21st century.

As part of the dissemination process, participants will have the opportunity to work with the Project Co-Directors on submitting proposals for national teacher conferences and facilitating distance learning sessions based on Institute content and pedagogy. New-York Historical will use data from the dissemination phase to document project dissemination.

Reading List
All readings will be sent to participants in advance of the Institute. Two books, Eric Foner and Alan Taylor’s American Colonies: The Settling of North America and Thomas A. Foster’s Women in Early America will be used as course readers that will anchor institute learning. Chapters from both books will be assigned as an introduction to the course and participants will be encouraged to refer to the texts throughout the program. Additional chapters and articles will be assigned and referenced by guest lecturers during their sessions. These will be shared digitally with all participants before the institute begins.

Curriculum Materials
In addition to assigned readings, participants will also use and receive New-York Historical Society curriculum materials in pedagogy sessions, including: Women & the American Story (WAMS) and New World—New Netherland—New York. The Early Encounters, 1492-1734 unit of WAMS will serve as a foundation for many of the Institute’s pedagogy sessions. 
 

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.