| TEACHING AMERICAN HISTORY GRANT |
| PARTNERS in the FREEDOM PROJECT |
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| FREEDOM PROJECT |
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| With the help of our area’s institutions of higher learning—Northern Illinois University, Rockford College, and Rock Valley College—our community organizations—Midway Village & Museum Center, Veterans' Memorial Hall, Tinker Cottage, and Atwood Center—and our nationally known partners--Colonial Williamsburg, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History--we will create mutually beneficial partnerships that focus on the teaching of American History. The purpose of these collaborations is to raise student achievement by improving the teachers’ knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of American History through extensive content exposure and application of improved instructional strategies following intensive and comprehensive professional development. |
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| Northern Illinois University has a mission of engagement with communities and supports the goals and objectives of the History Connections grant for Teaching American History. The University is committed to a focus on educational issues, pre-school through graduate and to working with other educational and regional partners to improve educational outcomes for students in all phases of life. According to President John Peters, “…at NIU, preparing better teachers and improving student academic performance is everybody’s business.” NIU will work with RPS teachers to audit the curriculum, develop history assessments and develop engaging units by sharing their content knowledge expertise. |
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| Rockford College, founded in 1847, is an independent, co-educational liberal arts institution of about 800 students. Offering Bachelor degrees in 31 areas and graduate degrees in business and education, RC educates many history teachers for the RPS. The college’s best-known alumnae, Jane Addams (class of 1881) received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Today her legacy provides a model for what RC strives to be in the 21st century. Faculty expertise will support unit development and help new teachers transition into RPS. |
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| Rock Valley College, our regional community college, plays a role in an effort to articulate curriculum between high schools and college. The new teacher education program, developed in 2001, works with four-year institutions and students are required to take two semesters of American History in preparation for teacher certification. Therefore, it will be helpful for RVC's faculty to work with Rockford Public Schools' teachers to insure a common vision. RVC faculty will share expertise in living history projects that will support any theme chosen. |
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| Once the artillery firing range for World War I soldiers training at Camp Grant, the 334-acre park and lodge today are known as Atwood Center and are part of the Rockford Park District. Other structures from early days remain, such as the target pits and bunkers, as well as several buildings constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps during Roosevelt's New Deal era. Also nearby is the New Milford Cemetery containing graves of settlers and Civil War soldiers. The park has a restored prairie and is a prime location for teaching Native American studies offering an authentic learning environment for professional development and future field trip opportunities for trained teachers with their students. Atwood's staff and living history presenters will contribute to the grant through their curriculum development, guided interpretation of historic sites, and living history presentations. |
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| The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation will partner with the Freedom Project during the first year of the grant. By providing teacher support, materials, and "behind the scenes" tours of the historic district in Williamsburg during the teachers' field study trip to Virginia in June of 2009, this partnership will create memorable experiences for participating teachers. By spending the majority of their week in the historic area, the teachers will be able to soak up a great deal of colonial history to take back with them to their classrooms! |
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| The Midway Village Museum's mission is to provide interpretation of the history of Rockford and the northern Illinois area and to show how this region affects the world through its products, people, and industrial innovations, and to demonstrate how the world afects Rockford and northern Illinois. Organized in 1968 for the purpose of collecting, preserving, and interpreting the history of the area, the Midway Village and Museum Center's campus today includes 143 acres with an open-air village of two dozen historic buildings as well as the museum center itself. The museum center features temporary as well as permanent exhibits, collection storage for 80,000 artifacts, and space for meetings and educational functions. Using local stories, teachers will gain working knowledge of the community's early history and its place in the broader context of American History and westward expansion. The Midway Village Museum will play a major role in the implementation of the grant since Rockford Public School teachers will be able receive content on history relating to the Rockford area through a variety of seminars, and students will be able to participate in hands-on learning activities at the Museum, such as Civil War Days and World War II Days. |
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| Veterans' Memorial Hall was completed in 1903 and dedicated President Theodore Roosevelt on one of his visits to the Forest City. Once the home of the Grand Army of the Republic, this historic building now serves as a museum as well as a gathering place for veterans and members of the armed services. On display are artifacts from every war that has affected members of the Rockford area, from the Civil War to the present war in Iraq. With a new outreach program for students and a timely Veterans' Oral History Program underway, the Hall is finding ways to get the general public through its doors. Teachers participating in the Freedom Project will be able to use Veterans' Memorial Hall for student field trips, as well as for doing research, either with the veterans' database or by perusing the extensive collection of books in the library. |
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| Each summer, teachers participating in the Freedom Project will have the opportunity to travel to Springfield for two days of touring historic sites, brushing up on Lincoln lore, and visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. In addition to the tours, the teachers will be able to attend special workshops in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library conducted by the Director of Education for the ALPLM, Erin Bishop. Each year the workshop will be different but the subject will always be focused on Lincoln and his legacy. Workshops to date have covered such topics as "Teaching Lincoln through Primary Source Documents," "Teaching Lincoln through Political Cartoons," and most recently, "Lincoln, Race, and the Riots of 1908" which led to the founding of the NAACP. This year's trip will take place the last week in June. |
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| In the past, Gilder Lehrman has provided several of our district's teachers with outstanding summer seminars in places such as Stanford University (for a study of "The Great Depression and WWII in the West"), the University of Colorado at Boulder (for a study of "The Great Plains: America's Crossroads"), and the University of Virginia (for the study of "The Civil War: Battles and the Home Front"). This year, the Freedom Project with be partnering with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History for a very special workshop in December. With the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth in 2009, the GLI will be conducting the December workshop to provide teachers with outstanding content and instructional strategies for "Connecting with Lincoln" in the 21st century. Lincoln scholar and historian, Thomas Krannawitter, will be the featured keynote speaker and his book, "Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of our Greatest President," will be presented to each teacher who registers. In addition, GLI staff will conduct pedagogical sessions, training participants in the use of classroom materials created by GLI which each teacher will be receiving as part of the workshop. |
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The Tinker Swiss Cottage, home of Rockford businessman Robert Hall Tinker, is a treasure trove of a time gone by. Built in 1865, the home is perched high on a limestone bluff overlooking Kent Creek. Inspiration for the home came from an 1862 tour of Europe where Tinker fell in love with the architecture of Switzerland. Today the Cottage is one of only a handful of Swiss-style homes remaining in the United States from the 1800s. Filled with original furnishings, artwork, diaries and household items, the Cottage is a rich time capsule of life a century ago. Teachers and students in the Rockford area will benefit from the partnership with Tinker Cottage as their educational programs offer a range of topics.
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