The Conference is the state's largest meeting devoted to the history of the Prairie State. This is the ninth year of the conference, which is sponsored by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. The conference will feature topics that include politics, geography, community studies, Abraham Lincoln, African-American history, and the Civil War. Teachers will benefit from workshops on a variety of topics. All teacher workshop sessions are approved for Continuing Professional Development Units (CPDUs).
This place-based, interdisciplinary workshop uses Henry David Thoreau’s ethic and his experience at Walden Woods as a model, and features a daily mix of lectures, field trips, readings, discussions and reflection time. The participants encounter speakers from different fields with expertise in the areas of natural history, writing, literary analysis, history, and the environment.
Offers teachers an opportunity to earn certificates of participation, redeemable for 36 PDPs; Fitchburg State College offers this seminar as a 3 graduate credit course.
This free weekend will feature “field trip” tours of Antietam and Harpers Ferry, focusing on techniques teachers can use to make a battlefield visit a central part of their Civil War curriculum.
Teachers will attend their choice of workshops on Friday and Sunday, covering a range of military and civilian topics. Past presenters of these workshops have included leading historians and educators, and topics have ranged from tactical military history to strategies for teaching the Civil War to struggling readers. These workshops are designed not only to impart specific information about the era but also a variety of pedagogical strategies to help teachers bring the Civil War to life in their classrooms.
In June 2008, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park and the Harpers Ferry Historical Association will host a one-week workshop that will enable 4th–12th grade teachers to walk in the footsteps of John Brown, John Cook, Shields Green, Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Heyward Shepherd, Fountain Beckham, and many others as they learn about events of national significance that have occurred in Harpers Ferry. Educators will get to interact with historians, curators, museum educators, and other professionals in the field. This institute will prepare teachers to use historic documents, artifacts, and images to enhance their teaching and to inspire students with the stories that make history come alive in the classroom and beyond.
The conference, which is geared towards secondary Social Studies, English and Spanish teachers, offers educators the opportunity to meet and interview former child laborers and trafficking victims, and attend a film festival and lectures by top scholars and human rights activists working in the field. The conference will provide the first forum in the United States for intensive training in the internationally acclaimed, interdisciplinary SCREAM—Supporting Children’s Rights through Education, the Arts and Media— program, developed by the International Labour Organization, International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (ILO/IPEC). SCREAM offers cutting edge pedagogy, ideal for adapting and differentiating instruction to accommodate students' different learning needs and styles.
The highlight of the program will be the forum where former child laborers from South America and victims of trafficking within the US will share their stories. These stories will be videotaped for classroom use and conference participants will develop teaching ideas to accompany these narratives which will be published for use in the schools.
12.5 Professional Development Hours (1.25 CEUs) available.
Sponsoring Organization
Drew University, International Center on Child Labor and Education
This two-and-a-half day workshop will provide a varied program of lectures, demonstrations, collaborative work, and analysis of documents and works of art to introduce teachers to the holdings of the National Archives and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Workshop attendees will participate in and develop classroom activities that utilize both visual images and primary source documents as teaching tools in ways that sharpen students’ skills and enthusiasm for history, social studies, and the humanities. The content focus will be on Westward Expansion and the Civil War.
This year sees the publication of a wealth of important new literature on America in the 19th century. This abundance of excellent new contributions to the scholarship on these important years is an exciting opportunity to revisit what we all think we know about America in the 19th century, and to rethink what our students need to know. This event will focus on teaching topics with the Civil War as the chronological fulcrum.
Topics include The Technological Revolution, Teaching about Abraham Lincoln, Women in the Civil War, Teaching Military History, and Postwar Reconstruction.
Applications are welcome from social studies and history teachers, curriculum supervisors and junior college faculty. Free room and board and selected stipends are offered.
Wachman Center of the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Phone number
1 215-732-3774
Start Date
Cost
Free room and board; travel reimbursement up to $250 for participants outside conference center
Course Credit
Certificate of Participation for 12 hours of instruction. College credit available for a fee through cooperating institution, School of Professional Studies, Carthage College, Kenosha, Wisconsin
Contact Title
Director, Wachman Center, Foreign Policy Research Institute
"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."
"Participants who complete the seminar in a satisfactory manner will receive a certificate. Teachers may use this certificate to receive in-service credit, subject to the policy of their district. No university credit is offered for the course."
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.
Participants who complete the seminar in a satisfactory manner will receive a certificate. Teachers may use this certificate to receive in-service credit, subject to the policy of their district. No university credit is offered for the course.
"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."
"Participants who complete the seminar in a satisfactory manner will receive a certificate. Teachers may use this certificate to receive in-service credit, subject to the policy of their district. No university credit is offered for the course."