News Release Date: January 13, 2010
Research Triangle Park, N.C. National Humanities Center (NHC) and PBS's American Experience, are pleased to announce a new partnership to benefit teachers. This collaboration, which provides online training for teachers, showing them how to combine American Experience programs with primary sources and teaching tools available from the NHC, combines the highly regarded efforts of both organizations to create new synergies in teacher professional development.
In spring 2010 the NHC will host two interactive, online seminars featuring American Experience episodes, Walt Whitman's Civil War Poetry and Hamilton's America—Jefferson's America. In Walt Whitman's Civil War Poetry, Franny Nudleman, an English professor at Carleton University, will lead an exploration of how Whitman, an antislavery Democrat, incorporated "the real war" in his poems. Hamilton's America—Jefferson's America, led by Peter Onuf, a history professor at the University of Virginia, will examine the distinct visions Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson had for the new nation they were founding.
This unique seminar series, which the partners have agreed to sponsor in each of the next two years, will integrate the superior broadcast content of American Experience with exceptional primary source materials from the Center's Toolbox Library. All of the seminar content is free and available online, which helps already strained teacher and school district budgets. These seminars offer engaging opportunities for teachers to explore how to use both video and primary documents in their teaching.
These online teacher professional development seminars are led by outstanding scholars and offer concentrated study of specific historical topics. The 90-minute sessions are live and online, and enable teachers from all over the country to interact with each other as well as with the faculty scholar—all from the comfort and convenience of their own homes or offices.
American Experience is the most highly honored and widely viewed history series on television. In 2005 American Experience Online was launched allowing teachers and students to easily access past episodes and a variety of special features, including teacher's guides. The National Humanities Center has been offering high-quality, standards-based teacher professional development for more than twenty years and in 2009 began presenting live, online seminars for educators. The National Humanities Center's training and resources for teachers have been lauded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and others for their quality and originality.
Through this creative partnership, the National Humanities Center and PBS's American Experience, offer teachers and students fresh ideas as well as new learning resources, and a model for future collaborations.
Other seminars scheduled for spring 2010 include sessions on religion and the founding of the United States, ideas of progress in the nineteenth century, and the West in national reunification after the Civil War, among other topics.
The latest schedules and information are available at nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/. Teachers interested in participating should contact Caryn Koplik at ckoplik@nationalhumanitiescenter.org.
