On this day in 1877, Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce people surrendered to the U.S. Army on the Bear Paw Battlefield after a 1,300 mile retreat — an event previously unknown to Jenn Raub and Sara Griffith‘s US History students at East Lyme High School in East Lyme, CT. Last summer, they journeyed across six states in 12 days — stopping at museums, schools, reservations and historical landmarks — to elevate Native American history above stereotypes.

“History is often told by the winners,” said Sara, “so often the ‘losers’ of this history were not heard. We designed this fellowship to promote and amplify the Native American experience.”

Their itinerary included:

• Fort Laramie, WY, which served as a Pony Express Station, a military post during the American Indian Wars and where The Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed there in both 1851 and 1868;
• Lander, WY, home of the Wind River Reservation of the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes, the burial site of Sacagawea  both the Shoshone and Arapaho cultural and historic centers;
• Lame Deer, MT, to visit the Northern Cheyenne reservation and the St. Labre Indian School;
• Garryowen, MT, the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn;
• Lapwai, ID, and the Nez Perce National Park from where the tribe fled in 1877;
• Lewiston, ID, home to the Nez Perce County Historical Museum that covers the
  tribe’s local history back to the Lewis and Clark Expedition; and,
• Oregon City, OR, famous for being the end of the Oregon Trail.

With each stop, Jenn realized that her students weren’t the only ones working with stereotypes.

“My impression of ‘The West’ had been all tumbleweeds and flat plains. I could not have been more wrong,” she said. “I hadn’t even thought about the landscape and its importance versus the content we would learn. The environment and my experience with the natural world actually added context to the history of the Great Plains region and helped me to make more sense of things.”

[minti_blockquote]Sara and Jenn exemplify how FFT Fellows seek opportunities to define a problem and identify solutions. According to the East Lyme Historical Society, the first recorded inhabitants of the area where East Lyme High School now sits were the Western Nehantics, an Algonkian-speaking tribe whose territory stretched from the mouth of the river now named for them, the Niantic River, westward to the Connecticut River. These teachers felt compelled to teach their students — .2% of whom have Native American heritage — about their community’s history and the larger story of Native Americans.[/minti_blockquote]

“On my fellowship we were able to gather rich resources that our students will be able to use to increase their knowledge base and improve their analysis skills,” said Jenn. “In particular, students now grapple with issues of perspective in history and how those historical perspectives and issues impact their modern world.”

The content their students learn is now infused with multiple perspectives. A research paper is written from the standpoint of both Custer and Crazy Horse regarding the Battle of Little Big Horn. And members of the local tribe Western Nehantics come to classes to share stories about the history and culture surrounding East Lyme, CT.

“On a large and broad scale, the importance of humanity within history is being emphasized due to this experience,” said Sara. “When teaching a survey course, it is easy to get lost in dates and patterns of events. But it is important to stress how history impacted, for good and bad, the lives of everyday people.

Abraham Lincoln High School, located on the west side of San Francisco, is far from the traditional ethnic neighborhoods of Chinatown and the Mission District; centers of the city’s Asian and Latinx communities. Eighty percent of Lincoln’s students identify with these ethnic groups so AP Human Geography teacher Leon Sultan decided to utilize his own city to design a research project in these well-known locations in order to help his students dig deeper into their own communities and see them in a new light.

“Concepts of identity, culture, language, ethnicity, nation and the concept of the ‘nation-state’ are all central to our course – as well as to the lives of my students,” said Sultan. “I sent students on field trips into their own communities to research these concepts through new lenses.”

And by lenses, Leon means figurative and literal. Mirroring  research he conducted on the Catalan independence movement in Barcelona last summer, Leon’s students took photographs, shot videos and recorded audio to document Sense of Place.  They then worked in mixed ability groups to produce Vlogs (video blogs) using a clear narrative structure, voice-over narration, text graphics, and montages of still photo/videos and interview footage. The result were research projects that effectively demonstrate course concepts, utilize academic vocabulary and connect learning to their lives.

Project 1: “What is the impact of gentrification in the Mission” and “Is Chinatown Authentic?”

Project 2: “Chinatown district through the lens of Human Geography”

“Students benefit from seeing their teachers as role models and life-long learners,” said Sultan. “This summer, they watched me conduct field research through Vlogs I produced on my fellowship. When I arrived back to school this fall, students I had never met before were already well acquainted with me, and with key course concepts. Then, they engaged in the same type of learning that I did. Ultimately I want this project to serve as a template for other teachers to follow as our school moves towards more technology integration and interactive project-based learning.”

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In celebration of Lunar New Year, we are also proud to highlight the learning of a few additional
2019 FFT Fellows:

 

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In November 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism. We choose to do so by sharing the story of Kimberly McCabe, social studies teacher at Gulf Coast Middle School, Spring Hill, FL. With her Fund for Teachers grant, Kimberly joined a professional learning tour in Finland to explore that country’s model of Phenomenon-Based education practices, then researched historical sites and landmarks in Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic to create a Phenomenon-Based unit on the Jewish Holocaust.

On January 27, 1945, the Soviets liberated the largest of the Nazi death camps which was located in German-occupied Poland. By this point Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau had an estimated death toll of over 1.1 million people and although it had originally been a detention center for political prisoners, it had turned into a death camp for Jews, Roma, and others who were deemed enemies of the Nazi state.

As we memorialize the beginning of the end of Auschwitz, I am brought back to this summer when, through Fund for Teachers, my colleague and I stood inside the gates of Auschwitz and took part in a six-hour educational tour of the camps. Our purpose? To more deeply understand life inside a concentration camp, to have the opportunity to speak directly to the very highly trained guides at Auschwitz and ask them the questions we still had, and to bring back resources to our classroom. Although we left Auschwitz with our arms full of books, professional photos, and other resources, the biggest resource we brought back to our classroom was our memories of that day and the feeling of walking through history.

As a Social Studies teacher, standing in a place where history has taken place always has a particular reverence to it. Touching a piece of the past always feels transportive and surreal. Auschwitz was no exception; in fact it may have been even truer there. I took a few moments during the tour to sit in one of the memorials and reflect on the sheer number of lives lost there and what could be taken from that ash and turned into beauty in the future generations, and what role I would play in that as a teacher. The six-hour educational tour is the longest tour that Auschwitz provides. It covers both Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, and while I recommend the experience if you are visiting, I cannot stress enough how taxing it is both physically and emotionally. We left the location completely drained. Our evening was spent silently reflecting on our day. My thoughts kept returning to the fact that I had spent less than a workday in Auschwitz under voluntary circumstances, on a beautiful day in mid-summer. How could I possibly ever understand what life in Auschwitz was like for those who lived it? How could anyone survive that? Moreover, how could any human inflict that on another? The thoughts seemed too heavy for that day, and even today, months after my visit I feel the same when I reflect back. Now, even more than ever, it is my goal to honor the victims and celebrate the survivors of the Holocaust while also empowering the future generation to create a world in which discrimination no longer exists and differences are embraced.

Each year I am humbled by the task of teaching the Holocaust to my 7th grade students. For weeks prior to the unit I begin to feel the weight that comes with that responsibility. My ultimate goal is always to honor the victims and survivors as well as their families, while at the same time opening up my classroom to discussions of how this applies to them today. If I could choose one thing that every student would take away from this unit, it would be that we should always stand up for those being persecuted among us. This will not always mean large groups of people who are being persecuted by their government; it may be as simple as standing up for the kid being bullied on the playground-or more likely via social media. It may mean reaching out to those who are different from you in order to better understand their perspective. It may mean choosing to vote with other groups in mind.

Whatever form it takes, being an upstander is worth the temporary discomfort that may accompany it because if we don’t stick together as members of the human race, we will eventually look around us to find that there is no one there to support us in our time of need. 

For this I rely on a particular quote by Martin Neimöller that always makes an impact on me regardless of the number of times I have read it.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

To me this quote embodies everything that went wrong during the Holocaust while at the same time allowing me to give honor to those who chose to stand up and do what they could to help others during the Holocaust.

Each week students are shown the biography of a different upstander. They are highlighted as the true heroes of the Holocaust, regular people who did extraordinary things to help strangers. To encourage this sense of empathy in my students, I hand-select a person for them to follow through the Holocaust. I talk to them about how each one of the people they will follow was someone’s child, sibling, parent, or friend. That just like all of us, they were a real individual with hopes and dreams, with fears and insecurities, with a whole future in front of them. I let them know that I am counting on them to take care of this person during our journey. To care about them, to become invested in their life story. Some even take time to research the person on their own time to learn more about them. Throughout the unit they find out more about the person they are following. They learn about their lives and families prior to the 1933. They hear about their family’s businesses and work, their home life, their country. As we move through the timeline of events they witness the changes in their individual’s life. Finally at the conclusion of the unit they find out whether or not their individual was a victim of a survivor of the Holocaust. It is a very somber class period because by this point the students have realized that no matter what the outcome, their individual has faced years of anguish that we can’t even imagine today. It is eye-opening to students that life can change so quickly because of one idea.

This year as a capstone to the unit, our students took part in a project which memorialized the victims and survivors of the Holocaust by creating a memorial quilt. Our local Holocaust museum is to credit for the idea behind the project as it is one they have done with visiting classrooms and have displayed in their learning center. Our students had the opportunity to visit the museum, hear from a survivor, view the quilt designed by past students, as well as take a guided tour of the museum. This visit created many questions for them which we explored during our unit. At the end of the unit they each created a felt quilt square. Each individual also wrote an accompanying essay explaining the symbolism present in their quilt square. The pieces were then combined to make one large class quilt as a memorial to the lives lost in the Holocaust and display in the school as a way to remember the lessons that can be learned from this tragedy.

Although there is nothing we can do to change the horrifying things that occurred during the Holocaust, the quilt project allowed our students to feel as though they were able to give something back to those who suffered by remembering and honoring them.  Rather than focus solely on the horrible things that were done, it allows us to focus on the beauty of the individuals and the hope that future generations will never allow this to happen again.

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Kimberly (pictured on the right with a member of their group at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam) is a middle school Social Studies teacher in the Tampa Bay Area. She is a mom of 3 and enjoys learning as much as she enjoys teaching. She is always looking for new ways to learn through experiences, and traveling to historic sites is her preferred way to learn. She has been awarded with 3 NEH teacher grants, is a graduate of the Florida Justice Teaching Institute, and a member of the 2019 iCivics Teacher Network.

 

This month, 230 prek-12 teachers are learning around the world with Fund for Teachers grants, making this our busiest “Fellow Season.” Highlighting one teacher for our weekly Friday Fellow post is tough, as our exemplary grant recipients are checking in from near and far with updates that inspire wanderlust from behind our computers. In light of this holiday weekend, however, Jean Molloy‘s learning seems most timely.

Jean teaches American History at Robbins Middle School in Farmington, CT. She is currently in the middle of her fellowship exploring Civil War landmarks, monuments, and museums in four southern states to document how historians preserve and honor the past while maintaining values respectful to all Americans. We caught up with Jean to see how the research is going…

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Why this fellowship? Why now?

As a U.S. history teacher, I need to develop the critical thinking and reasoning skills of my 8th graders. Students tend to accept non-fiction text without questioning or extending their thinking and they struggle when reading primary sources. Middle school students sometimes have difficulty understanding the perspectives of others. One of the social studies standards that we want them to master in my district is the ability to analyze both primary and secondary sources to determine claims, evidence, and perspective. One of my goals is to help them improve this skill which is imperative to creating lifelong learners as students navigate through controversial issues throughout their education and beyond.

My fellowship will help me frame the following key questions for my U.S. History course:

1. How should Americans preserve history and at the same time be respectful to all humanity?
2. How do decisions about preserving our past impact how we live today? And,
3. What actions can we as citizens of a democracy take to make sure we preserve our history and learn from the past?

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What’s on the itinerary?

A great focus of the fellowship is on National Parks where significant events took place, but I’m also visiting some state- and privately-funded museums and engaging in conversations with curators, docents, and volunteers to help in my evaluation of how Americans are preserving our history.  In Gettysburg, I’m participating in two professional workshops for teachers: What was the Civil War really about? and Why do we preserve and protect Battlefields? In Richmond, I plan to meet with a member of the City Historic Preservation Committee to discuss the five Confederate statues on Monument Avenue. I hope to secure an interview with representatives of a movement to remove the statues as well.  According to a survey conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2017, “…our schools are failing to teach the hard history of African enslavement.” I chose destinations that will inform my teaching of this history in a balanced and coherent manner and also help students see the connections between our past and our society today.

Have you experienced any “A Ha!” moments you particularly want to share with students?

I am about half-way through my Civil War exploration and it is hard to process all that I have learned so far! Speaking with park rangers, museum docents and volunteers has deepened my understanding of this great conflict in American history and especially of the key people who were making critical decisions on each side. I have also learned that Virginians are very proud of their history and they want to talk about it. In addition to interacting with professional historians, I have been speaking with people in restaurants, B&Bs, and with other tourists at historical locations. I would have walked right by a slave auction block on a Fredericksburg street corner if I had not been chatting with my waitress at dinner. She explained how the city council recently voted to remove the block to a museum. I had to stop and think about what it must be like to walk by this every day which prompted me to dig a little deeper. The Fredericksburg website states that, “It is important to recognize that the City Council decision-making process, specific to the future of the auction block, has been taking place within the larger context of a community dialogue about race, history, and memory.”

In most of the Civil War Museums, there have been exhibits that also document the story of slavery in America, its role in the Civil War, and in American economics. Although I have grappled with how this story should be preserved, what I have seen so far in Virginia has helped me learn and is helping me frame questions for my students.

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Jean teaches 8th grade U.S. History, which includes a project based learning event on local history. Previously, she taught 7th grade Asian studies and participated in a teacher exchange program with the Republic of Korea organized by the East-West Center for UNESCO and also a teacher study tour in China with the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. You can follow Jean’s FFT fellowship on Twitter @IARMolloy.

The primary distinction of Fund for Teachers grants is the freedom we give teachers to design fellowships THEY consider most vital to students’ learning. That can be across the world or across the state, which is the case for Nathalie Lee and Janet DeMarco, teachers at Cedar Ridge Elementary School in Tulsa, OK. They are currently embarking on day trips (collecting video, pictures, and artifacts at historic and cultural sites) to re-prioritize the intellectual art of social studies and help students understand and analyze the state’s history and government. We checked in with them on the road…

On Why They Designed This Fellowship

Social Studies provides a context in which to fit all other learning, but we believe the intellectual art of social studies has been de-prioritized in the wake of No Child Left Behind and its great emphasis on reading and math. Because Social Studies isn’t an academic priority, teachers don’t receive
as much professional development on the subject — so we used a Fund for Teachers grant to create our own.

Together, we represent generations of native Oklahomans, and one of us is a member of two Native American tribes. We are proud of the people and the history of Oklahoma and want our students to be as well. For two weeks, we’re acquiring resources and insight that will give students a chance to identify with their history as Oklahomans and also provide opportunities to analyze what good citizenship looks like.

What’s On the Itinerary?

The Oklahoma Standards direct us to “Describe the connection between the historic significance of past events and people and the symbols of Oklahoma’s history” and “Describe relationships between people and events of the past.”  To do that, we’re experiencing:

• The Great Salt Plains
  The Great Salt Plains is one of Oklahoma’s major land forms that students need to be able to identify on a physical map. We will teach that, in the early 1800s, whichever tribe controlled the Great Salt Plains knew that it would have to fight to protect this valuable resource (salt).
• Pioneer Woman Museum & Conoco Museum
  The former will help demonstrate to how pioneers  adapted to and modified their environment including sod houses, windmills, and crops.  The latter displays the growth of a company from the “early days of a kerosene distributor and the wildcat days of the Cherokee Outlet, to an international energy empire.”
• Nellie Johnstone No. 1 and The Woolaroc Museum
  Nellie Johnstone No. 1 was the first commercially productive oil well in Oklahoma, opening oil exploration and development in Oklahoma.  The Woolaroc Museum relates the story of Oklahoman’s cultural development in the New World.
• Tahlequah’s Cherokee Heritage Centerand Muskogee’s Five Tribes Museum
  The Cherokee Heritage Center is a historical society and museum that has preserved the historical and cultural artifacts, language, and traditional crafts of the Cherokee.  The Five Civilized Tribes Museum  houses the art, history and culture of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole tribes.
• Oklahoma City’s History Center, Oklahoma City Memorial, National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum & State Capitol
• The Woody Guthrie Museum – for learning about the Dust Bowl, Woody Guthrie, and the meaning of song lyrics such as “This Land is My Land.”
• The Creek Council Oak Tree – the landmark that showed the Creek Indians where to stop after a journey to their new home along the Arkansas River). We will also visit the Muscogee (Creek Nation) Cultural Center in Okmulgee where we will learn from a Creek tribe member to hear tales of the tree’s significance and stories from Creek heritage.
• Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum (which houses authentic Oklahoman art, artifacts from the American West, and collections of Native American art and materials); Philbrook Museum and, finally,
• The Will Rogers Museum to learn about Oklahoma’s favorite son.

What Hasn’t Been on the Itinerary?

While the Great Salt Plains used to be an ocean millions of years ago, it’s now a five-mile, sandy ocean bed in the middle of Oklahoma. Except when it rains! The area received 10 inches of rain in the past 30 days, making one of the state’s most valuable natural resources unreachable by car. After learning to maneuver a drone, we captured footage of the area that historically was an important asset — not only for salt’s preservation purposes, but also as a hunting ground for animals. We also learned that the salt bed is the only place in the world where selenite crystals with an embedded hourglass formation are found.”

“I know we’re not pursuing fellowships in Italy or France, but we love Oklahoma and our educational standards are based here,” Janet and Nathalie said during their phone call. “We really get excited about teaching our students who our people are! We are all Oklahomans — with wonders of nature, the beauty of architecture, and profound culture history and heritage all around us. We want students to realize they don’t have to travel across an ocean or even across the country to learn rich history about the people and places that came before us. It’s right under our feet in what we Okies like to call ‘our stomping grounds.'”

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You can follow the remainder of Nathalie and Janet’s fellowship on Instagram @okiesteachfft.

 

 

 

Pixar’s Coco familiarized many with the tradition of Dia de los Muertos, or “Day of the Dead.” And before Nancy MacBride‘s fellowship to Oaxaca, Mexico, the annual holiday inspired Voluntown Elementary’s singular art project honoring Latin American history and culture. Now, the celebration honoring life and death is just one in a series of year-long art opportunities linked with Latin culture in a preK-8 school that only offers 60 hours of social studies instruction annually.

“Voluntown, CT, is a rural, homogenous community with only one school (ours) where only 1% of students have other languages spoken at home,” explained Nancy. “The insular culture creates challenges for children to learn about different cultures and accept the differences in others. I felt our students needed cultures, not walls, so I designed a fellowship to make it happen.”

Usually Fellows’ implementation of their summer grants begins upon their return to the classroom, but Nancy started the learning when she applied for her FFT grant in the fall of 2017.

• Through the school’s PTO and a local Mexican restaurant’s sponsorship, three groups of Mexican folk artists visited the school.
• Older students read Esperanza Rising in English and created ofrendas, or altars, for loved ones who’ve passed away.
• Kindergarteners created multi-media collages of a Mexican desert landscape.
• Second graders learned Zapotec weaving techniques.
• Fourth graders read and illustrated a Mexican legend and painted portraits of Frida Kahlo.
• Fifth graders created metallic masks inspired by Pre-Columbian versions.
• Multiple grades watched PBS’ “Craft in America” episodes on Mexican art and were introduced to an artisan Nancy would meet on her fellowship.

The “pre-learning” culminated in a community Noche Mexicana last spring, attended by students, their families and government dignitaries.

This summer, students followed Nancy (a working artist herself) via Instagram as she lived out the learning they shared the year before. Nancy spent a month in Oaxaca, staying in a community that caters to local artisans, taking language classes, sketching World Heritage Sites and experiencing Pre-Columbian and folk art in surrounding museums and cultural centers. She practiced weaving through the Weaving Oaxaca initiative alongside a twelve-year-old teacher whose family has dyed natural wools and created art for generations; she also worked with Zapotec ceramist Adrian Martinez for a week. The highlight was visiting the artist studio of Magdalena Pedro Martinez, whom students came to know through the “Craft in America” series.

 

This fall, Nancy’s experiences in Mexico continue to inspire projects and discussions with students. Fifth graders are preparing to create wooden assembled animals inspired by Mexican alebrijes. Sixth graders are creating their own versions of sculptures modeled after artifacts Nancy brought back from Josefina’s Oaxacan workshop. And beginning this week, students of all ages will have the opportunity to join a new Spanish Club Nancy initiated as an elective.

Perhaps more importantly, students have a new appreciation for “our neighbors to the south,” according to Nancy. As a volunteer with the Voluntown Peace Trust, she collaborates with the Hartford Catholic Worker to bring urban minority children out of the city to enjoy the surrounding nature. Nancy’s leadership as a role model through this effort, combined with the cross-disciplinary learning she provides, is creating a new culture in the school community.

“My admiration of artists from other cultures helps break down the walls and build bridges to other cultures for students,” she said. “My Fund for Teachers fellowship wasn’t just about the place visited, or knowledge, skills and capabilities I gained; it also moved appreciation of Mexican culture from my head to my heart and that passion is now spreading to my students.”

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Nancy (pictured with a state selectman and superintendent at Noche Mexicana) has taught art for 31 years, a career that has included teaching sculpture to widows and orphans in Zambia and earned her Connecticut’s Outstanding Elementary Art Teacher award. She frequently exhibits her own work in galleries and museums, which you can see on her website. (Top picture of students dressed as Frida and her fawn at the Noche Mexicana.)

The majority of Lori Lyn’s students at Hicks Elementary in Houston are new to America and, thus, new to Texas. Therefore, in addition to providing the fundamentals of an education, she’s also tasked with teaching state history in accordance with state standards. This responsibility inspired her to assume the role of tour guide AND teacher this summer as an FFT Fellow. In a Toyota Sienna minivan, Lori is logging 3,000+ miles driving across the Lone Star State to help her second graders students not only “Remember the Alamo,” but also master complex academic content and become active participants in their own learning.

The four-week itinerary includes:

• Fort Worth Stock Yards National Historic District
• Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, detailing information about John F. Kennedy’s life and assassination
• Texas State Capitol, Bullock Museum and Governor’s Mansion in Austin
• Alamo and Institute of Texas Cultures in San Antonio
• Brazoria County (“Where Texas Began”), NASA and the Texas Seaport Museum on the Gulf Coast
• Battleship Texas moored in the Houston Ship Channel, and
• Big Bend National Park.

“My students are curious about their community’s history, eager to explore their world, and enjoy learning about every place that is new to them,” said Lori. “This fellowship is helping me help students understand how landmarks, monuments, and historical buildings represent and influence current events, as well as the people, places, and ideas that are important to the society in which they now live.”

This fall, her new curriculum will address state symbols, mapping skills, and state celebrations, landmarks, monuments, museums and government buildings. Geography units will also help students to begin developing an understanding of where they are located in the state and nation.

You can follow Lori’s progress on Twitter at @_MrsLyn and enjoy Lyle Lovett’s snappy anthem to Texas and its newest residents!