For Native people, identity—who you are, how you dress, what you think, and how you see yourself in the world—has been shaped by many factors. This workshop reveals Native people in the 21st century whose stories reflect the deliberate and often difficult choices made to save languages from extinction, preserve cultural integrity, and keep traditional arts.

This professional development opportunity will bring Texas teachers together with leading scholars to explore important constitutional issues in our nation's history. The program offers teachers the opportunity to work with leading scholars of U.S. history, political science, and law and share strategies for teaching with primary sources.

Participants celebrate Women's History Month at the National Museum of Women in the Arts by discovering ways its collection can be a resource for integrating the arts—and women artists—into the classroom. Through interactive gallery discussions and activities, participants will explore techniques for discussing and interpreting art with their students.

This seminar focuses on North Carolina's rich textile heritage as told through the stories, songs, and images of the people who worked in the mills. Using the backdrop of the Louis Hine's National Child Labor Committee Photography, Gaston County, 1908, "Standing on a Box," seminar participants will explore the experiences of mill workers in communities across North Carolina with particular attention to the life and work of families and children. In addition, participants will learn about notable individuals in the North Carolina textile story, such as union songstress and mill worker Ella May Wiggins, who was murdered for her organizing efforts during the Gastonia mill strike of 1929.

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.