Research Triangle Park, NC. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation has made a $75,000 grant to the National Humanities Center to strengthen the teaching of American history and literature in schools districts across the state.

The Center, in collaboration with five state universities, will provide training in a seminar model of professional development that embodies the standards adopted by the state in 2003 for helping teachers continuously improve their content knowledge and instructional skills.

The National Humanities Center has crafted its Teacher Professional Development Program over the past decade to improve teaching and learning in American history and literature. At the heart of the program is a library of "seminar toolboxes." These online resources contain historical documents, literary texts, works of art, discussion questions, and lesson planning tools, with which teachers, collaborating with scholars from nearby colleges and universities, craft their own interdisciplinary seminars.

"Teachers use our toolboxes to construct seminars that increase their knowledge of American history and literature," said Richard Schramm, the Center's vice president for education programs. "They come away with new materials to teach and new ideas about how to teach them."

The Center recently launched its fourth online toolbox, "The Gilded and the Gritty: America 1870-1912." A fifth, "American Beginnings: America, 1492-1760," will be available in 2006. Eventually the library will span the entire range of typical American history and literature curricula.

Designed and tested largely in North Carolina schools—and used this summer by more than 250 teachers in Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Vermont—the toolboxes reflect the state's professional development standards. A working group convened by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and the State Board of Education last year found that few teachers knew about or used the new standards. The grant will address this situation, and bring more teachers into contact with the Center's well-designed, thoroughly evaluated model of professional development.

Faculty from Appalachian State University, East Carolina University, the University of North Carolina at Asheville, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington will contribute intellectual firepower to the project.

"This collaboration will give teachers the opportunity to study with outstanding scholars in American history and literature," Schramm said. "In the process, they will also learn how to apply the state's professional development standards to their own professional growth and that of their colleagues."

Once instructed in both professional development standards and the use of the Center's toolboxes, educators will work with the Center and faculty at their universities to practice their new skills by building a seminar. The Center will continue to consult with a district as it integrates implement seminars into its schedule and budget.

About the National Humanities Center

The National Humanities Center is a private, independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978, nearly 1,000 scholars from across the United States and around the world have researched and written 900 books during fellowships at the Center's Research Triangle Park facility. The Center also sponsors award-winning programs through which leading scholars work with high school and college teachers to improve teaching in the nation's schools and colleges, and holds conferences, seminars, and other public programs to raise and explore basic issues affecting human beings and their societies.

About the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation

The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation was established in 1936 as a memorial to the youngest son of the founder of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. In that year the brother and two sisters of Z. Smith Reynolds, R.J. Reynolds, Jr., Mary Reynolds Babcock, and Nancy Susan Reynolds Bagley, provided that their inheritance from his estate would go to the establishment of a trust for the benefit of the people of North Carolina. One of the initial trustees of the Foundation was Z. Smith Reynolds' uncle, William Neal Reynolds, who at his death in 1951 created a trust that now provides a portion of the Foundation's annual income.

In its history, the Foundation, as the beneficiary of the income from the Zachary Smith Reynolds Trust and the W.N. Reynolds Trust, has now made grants totaling more than $350 million to recipients in all of North Carolina's 100 counties. The Foundation currently gives special attention to certain focus areas: community-building and economic development; the environment; governance, public policy, and civic engagement; pre-collegiate education; and social justice and equity.