Curriculum

September 21, 2020

The American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, CUNY, will host a National Endowment for the Humanities institute in Summer 2021 for 25 college and university teachers to study the visual culture of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Postponed this year due to Covid-19, this fifth iteration of the institute will focus on the era’s array of visual media—including the fine arts, ephemera, photography, cartoons, maps, and monuments—to examine how information and opinion about the war and its impact were recorded and disseminated, and the ways visual media expressed and shaped views before, during, and after the conflict.

Due to continuing restrictions regarding face-to-face meetings, the institute will be entirely online, giving participants the opportunity to view lectures and interact with noted historians, art historians, and archivists. In addition, they will participate in new “behind the scenes” virtual sessions with curators and staff in major museums and archives. A core team of three institute faculty will introduce participants to the rich body of new scholarship that addresses or incorporates Civil War and postwar visual culture, meet them via individual remote conferences to guide their research, and help them to use visual evidence to enhance their scholarship and teaching. The 2021 institute faculty includes: Jermaine Archer, Amanda Bellows, Louise Bernard, Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, Gregory Downs, Matthew Fox-Amato, Amanda Frisken, Dominique Jean-Louis, Barbara Krauthamer, Turkiya Lowe, Maurie McInnis, Susan Schulten, Scott Manning Stevens, and Dell Upton.

Information about applying as well as the institute’s program of activities will be available in November at: https://ashp.cuny.edu/nehinstitute.

Thanks to a supplementary NEH grant, many of the institute’s resources and previous activities are available online on The Visual Culture of the American Civil War website. The site features video lectures and related picture galleries, primary documents, and print and multimedia bibliographies.

Image: Engraving. “Emancipation Day in South Carolina” – the Color-Sergeant of the 1st South Carolina Colored addressing the regiment, after having been presented with the Stars and Stripes, at Smith’s plantation, Port Royal, January 1. , 1863. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Vol. 15, No. 382 (1863 Jan. 24), p. 276.

​ASHP is pleased to be participating in an ambitious social studies curriculum writing project currently underway at the New York City Department of Education. NYCDOE’s centrally-based Social Studies team, led by Executive Director Eric Contreras, has selected a group of social studies teachers representing grades K-12 who are writing model curriculum lessons and units to align with each year in the city’s Scope and Sequence for Social Studies. Once complete, these units will be made available to social studies teachers citywide. Since January 2015, Ellen Noonan, ASHP’s director of online professional development, has been meeting regularly with the high school grade level teams of curriculum writers to provide guidance and resources for their work. ASHP is also working closely with NYCDOE staff to develop secondary essays to accompany each unit as well as a library of primary source documents that can be used in the grades 9 and 10 global history units.

ASHP recently launched new features on the Who Built America: Badges for History Education website, our online professional development program. These improvements represent our continued commitment to providing classroom ready, discipline specific professional learning to history teachers.

We’ve developed four tutorials designed to aid teachers in modeling disciplinary literacy and historical thinking skills in their classrooms. The skill tutorial topics include: thinking historically, building context, using evidence, and reading and writing for arguments. We feel strongly that such skills are essential to effective instruction, and have incorporated the tutorials into the badge earning process.

To make badges more accessible to those unfamiliar with online professional development, we’ve also introduced a new set of entry-level lesson builder badges. Lesson builder badges allow teachers to design their own U.S. or world history lessons and focus their instructional design on a specific disciplinary literacy skill. See our WBA Badges page for more information about this new structure.

Educators throughout the country are already using the redesigned site, including the New York City Department of Education, which approved our new badge courses for their After School Professional Development Program last fall.

We are very excited to announce the launch of Who Built America Badges for History Education. The site is a free online professional learning community where teachers can work with ASHP/CML history educators to teach and create document-based, Common Core aligned units. While doing so, they earn digital badges that demonstrate their professional learning and help to advance their careers. This project grows out of our decades of work providing professional development to history teachers in New York City and elsewhere and features the engaging social history content ASHP/CML is known for. Please help us to get the word out about WBA Badges to both in-service and pre-service teachers by sharing this announcement with colleagues.

With the support of a supplementary grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, ASHP/CML just launched Visual Culture of the American Civil War. The new website provides broad public and educational access to the resources of our 2012 NEH summer institute for college and university teachers. The website features videocast presentations by historians, art historians, and archivists focusing on the war’s different visual media as well as major themes of the conflict. In addition, each presentation is accompanied by a selection of archival images, primary documents, and a bibliography. Additional presentations and resources will be posted on the website over the course of the coming fall.

Visual Culture of the American Civil War is a special feature of ASHP/CML’s Picturing U.S. History, an interactive resource for teaching with visual evidence.

We’ve been hard at work on our latest website, Who Built America Badges for History Education. It’s free, online professional development designed to help middle and high school social studies teachers integrate the Common Core Standards into their teaching—and it’s launching in October at badges.ashp.cuny.edu. Our new professional development program, Bridging Historias through Latino History: An NEH Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges Project, is underway. Thirty-eight faculty and administrators from colleges in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania have been active in online reading discussions and will meet at the Graduate Center in October for the first full-day seminar on “Conceptualizing Latino/a History and the Colonial Era.”

As part of our continuing effort to support digital research and experimentation in a collaborative interdisciplinary environment, 2013 ushered in 10 new doctoral students into the ranks of the New Media Lab. Bringing our total to 24, NML’s coterie of students comes from 14 programs/subprograms at the Graduate Center, with each student incorporating a range of approaches and tools as they explore the use of new technology in his or her doctoral work. For the first time, we have representation from Educational Psychology (Second Life environments to teach autistic children), French (Digitization of 17th century manuscripts), and Criminal Justice (Othering and Selective Victimization).

New Media Lab student at workAdding to the novelty, the NML now has five awards available to its students:

  • The New Media Lab Digital Dissertation Award
  • The History or Public Health Award
  • The Social Justice Award
  • The Dewey Digital Teaching Award
  • NML Conference Travel Award

We are excited that, along with other recent Graduate Center digital initiatives, the New Media Lab is the site of the cross-pollination and birth of so many new projects and directions in research, teaching, learning, and publishing.

ASHP/CML is pleased to announce its role as a subgrantee on Zoom In, a new online professional development project being undertaken by our longtime evaluation partner Education Development Center (EDC) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We will work with EDC to create, test, and disseminate a suite of digital tools and resources for middle-school history education. Drawing on the professional development materials and approaches ASHP/CML has developed over the past two decades, the project will help teachers create document-rich inquiries in U.S. history, with explicit supports for building both historical content understanding and Common Core literacy skills among students. Zoom In will also include model historical inquiries that make innovative use of digital tools to help students read, write, and talk about compelling historical questions, grounded in evidence from textual and visual primary source materials.

HERB: Social History for Every Classroom won a 2012 “Best of the Web” award from the Center for Digital Education. Named after our co-founder, the late distinguished historian Herbert Gutman, HERB is a free website that pulls together ASHP/CML’s most effective teaching activities, primary documents, and special collections into an accessible site for teachers and students. The award recognizes the site’s contribution to the benefit and quality of online education for students, teachers, and the community.

Our most recent interactive game for middle school students produced in collaboration with New York public television station Thirteen/WNET, Mission US 2: Flight to Freedom won a 2012 International Serious Play Gold Medal Award in the education division. Flight to Freedom, which tells the story of an enslaved teenager in the 1850s as she escapes north and confronts challenges presented by the Fugitive Slave Act, also has been receiving rave reviews from the press (such as this article in USA Today) as well as from teachers, and students.