This multi-date residential institute introduces teachers to the intertwined issues of genocide and human rights. In the late spring participants will be sent a series of extensive text, article, and resource readings. Participants will begin the residential sessions by defining the terms and learning about the philosophical and historical antecedents and common characteristics of genocides and human rights violations. The seminar will then turn toward exploring the historical, political, sociological/anthropological, and contemporary dimensions of genocide and human rights by focusing on the causes, courses, and consequences of the events. The case studies include: Armenia, the Holocaust, Ukrainian famine-genocide, Cambodian, Cyprus, El Salvador, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan genocidal episodes. Other examples that will be integrated and considered include the Irish famine, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and the current status of human rights throughout the world.

The institute will also include a series of sessions on how to approach these subjects in the classroom, from the elementary to the high school level. Significant attention will be devoted to the complex methodological issues underlying the presentation of genocide in the classroom including the selection of teaching materials (secondary readings, primary sources, and documentary and entertainment films). Then participants will undertake the sharing of lesson plans developed as a part of the institute's program before concluding with a series of final sessions and considerations on the future prevention of genocide and an activist engagement with the subject.

As an ongoing part of the Institute and its mission, past participants and faculty will continue to function as a cohort after the institute is over by sharing completed lesson plans, developing additional curricular materials, and undertaking educational and public outreach programming.

This institute provides the opportunity to analyze and investigate the material culture and decorative arts of the early South. Each summer the institute focuses on one region of the early South, rotating its concentration from the Chesapeake to the Carolina Low Country to the southern Backcountry.

The 2009 Institute emphasizes the material culture of the early southern Backcountry, including the piedmont and western regions of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, as well as Tennessee and Kentucky. The program curriculum includes lectures, discussions, work­shops, artifact studies, research projects, and study trips.

Teachers of all levels and settings are invited to join Spertus Museum educators to tour the new exhibition "A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund" and participate in an interactive printmaking workshop with Master Printer Thomas Lucas.

Participants in this workshop will learn about the 1890s immigration experience on the Near West Side of Chicago through compelling historical fiction narratives and visits to Hull-House and the Taylor Street and Prairie Avenue neighborhoods. Based on the Museum's collection, these stories form the core of the Great Chicago Stories website, an award-winning educational resource.