Congress in the Classroom® is a national, award-winning education program now in its 16th year. Developed and sponsored by The Dirksen Congressional Center, the workshop is dedicated to the exchange of ideas and information on teaching about Congress. The Center joins with the new Institute for Principled Leadership in Public Service to conduct the workshop.

The 2008 program pays special attention to the upcoming congressional and presidential elections. Participants will gain experience with The Dirksen Center website which features online access to lesson plans, student activities, historical materials, related Web sites, and subject matter experts. The workshop consists of two types of sessions: those that focus on recent research and scholarship about Congress or elections and those geared to specific ways to teach students about Congress or elections.

Drawing upon practitioners, scholars, and educators, the Summer Institute will examine the sources of global conflict and different approaches to peacemaking and peacebuilding in the current global environment, which presents unique challenges and opportunities for teachers striving to ready young people to take their places in an increasingly complex world.

This institute will "examine the Anglo-American relationship through the life, reflections, and experiences of Winston Churchill. The Institute encompasses lectures, discussions, and participants' personal responses to readings and films; projects using primary documents from the Churchill Archives Centre; and visits to Churchill sites in Britain. "

"This seminar explores how an economically and politically powerless racial minority wrested dramatic change from a determined and entrenched white majority in the American South. It will examine the changing nature of protest from the 1940s to the 1950s; the roles of Martin Luther King, Jr., local movements, and women; and the relative importance of violence and non-violence. Participants will discuss how they can use the experiences of schoolchildren, teachers, and students in the crises of the 1950s and 1960s to bring home the realities of the civil rights movement in the classroom. Topics include the Little Rock 9 and their teachers in 1957, students and sit-ins, and the use of schoolchildren in the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations."

Abraham Lincoln will stand at the centre of the seminar, though less as a biographical subject than as a prism for exploring key aspects of his age. The themes and topics to be addressed include slavery and the Old South; the abolitionist impulse and the broadening antislavery movement; party political realignment and the sectional crisis of the 1850s; evangelicalism and politics; the election of 1860, the secession of the Lower South, and the coming of war; wartime leadership, political and military; the Civil War 'home front'; emancipation; the elements of Confederate defeat and Union victory; and the meaning of the war for American nationalism.

This institute will "examine the Anglo-American relationship through the life, reflections, and experiences of Winston Churchill. The Institute encompasses lectures, discussions, and participants' personal responses to readings and films; projects using primary documents from the Churchill Archives Centre; and visits to Churchill sites in Britain. "

"This seminar explores how an economically and politically powerless racial minority wrested dramatic change from a determined and entrenched white majority in the American South. It will examine the changing nature of protest from the 1940s to the 1950s; the roles of Martin Luther King, Jr., local movements, and women; and the relative importance of violence and non-violence. Participants will discuss how they can use the experiences of schoolchildren, teachers, and students in the crises of the 1950s and 1960s to bring home the realities of the civil rights movement in the classroom. Topics include the Little Rock 9 and their teachers in 1957, students and sit-ins, and the use of schoolchildren in the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations."

"Abraham Lincoln will stand at the centre of the seminar, though less as a biographical subject than as a prism for exploring key aspects of his age. The themes and topics to be addressed include slavery and the Old South; the abolitionist impulse and the broadening antislavery movement; party political realignment and the sectional crisis of the 1850s; evangelicalism and politics; the election of 1860, the secession of the Lower South, and the coming of war; wartime leadership, political and military; the Civil War 'home front'; emancipation; the elements of Confederate defeat and Union victory; and the meaning of the war for American nationalism."