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Assumption College to Participate in Teaching American History Grant The total award is $999,908 to be paid over three years (in various amounts to each of the partners) to further educate local public school teachers in the state education frameworks in History. Through the help of the partners, area high school teachers will receive intensive, content-based instruction in the time period from 1763 to the present. This three-year project, slated to begin in January 2006, will consist of six graduate level courses organized chronologically with 18 corresponding workshops, six summer institutes centered around seminal documents in U.S. History, and three lectures by prominent award-winning historians. Assumption College will play a major role in the process including content suggestions for courses, information technology support (facilities/building Web sites for courses), and state of the art classrooms to house classes. McClymer will teach courses dealing with subject matter from 1763 to the end of the 19th century while Assistant Professor of History Dr. Deborah Kisatsky will teach courses from the end of the 19th century to the present. McClymer’s courses will be structured around three main emphasis areas: the notion of republicanism, the development of capitalism, and religion. Kisatsky’s courses will focus on culture, race, and gender as well as international and domestic politics. The Worcester Public Schools are currently in the process of implementing a two-year U.S. History course to be taught in the 10th and 11th grades, which will culminate with students taking the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam in History. Students will have to pass the test in order to graduate. The MCAS test places a strong emphasis on historic primary source documents, which reinforces the need for teachers to receive additional specialized training in the analysis of such texts. “This is a great opportunity to make a huge difference in the level of training that these teachers receive,” said McClymer. “It’s fun to work with teachers. We want the school systems to succeed.” Although McClymer acknowledges that “teachers lives are often determined by the MCAS test,” he also sees the opportunities the test provides to teachers with its reliance on knowledge of primary source documents. He noted the Constitution as one example of a primary source that should extend well beyond a simple memorization of the facts. “Constitution making is bred in Americans. It is built into our culture,” said McClymer. “People make constitutions all the time when they want to do something. They are used to organize and facilitate the rules of a group or activity.” According to McClymer, high school History is often taught using a mundane memorization of dates and facts rather than applying documents such as the Constitution to modern day life. “A lot of History is taught to these terrible lists—two or three things to remember about the New Deal for instance,” said McClymer. “I take a list to the grocery store, not the classroom.” According to James David Moran, the Director of Outreach for the AAS, the goals of the project are: to increase teacher’s knowledge of primary and secondary resources through study with American history scholars, to increase teacher’s content knowledge in the timeframe 1763 to the present yielding increased critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, and interpretation practices of their students, to improve student’s learning in U.S. History, to create and expand new and sustainable linkages with scholars, higher education partners, cultural institutions, and other school districts, and to establish an ongoing evaluation process to provide feedback on the project. “By putting teachers together with prominent and dynamic historians and scholars and immersing them deeply in the study of American History, we can recharge their batteries and help them rediscover why they became teachers in the first place,” said Moran at a press conference announcing the project on October 14. “Good teachers are as vital to our communal well being as physicians or firefighters, for while those professions preserve our lives and possessions, teachers preserve our future.”
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Worcester, MA - Professor of History John McClymer, Ph.D. was recently notified by the U.S. Department of Education, that his project, submitted in collaboration with the Worcester Public Schools, The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), Old Sturbridge Village, the John F. Kennedy Library, Worcester State College, Sutton Public Schools, Millbury Public Schools and Assumption College, has received a grant for “Keepers of the Republic: A Program for Teacher Development.”