Professional Development Services

February 1, 2016

​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/CML is currently accepting applications for our 2014 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College and University Teachers on the Visual Culture of the American Civil War. The two-week institute, which will take place at the City University of New York Graduate Center and local archives and museums from July 7th to 18th, will study the ways the war was recorded, reported, represented, and remembered via an unprecedented array of visual media that included the fine arts, photography, cartoons, and a range of “ephemeral”pictorial items and publications.

Information about the institute−including an informational video, schedule of activities, roster of leading scholars in the field, and application instructions−is now available in a special section of the ASHP/CML website. We welcome inquiries about participating and invite college and university faculty, independent scholars, scholars engaged in museum work, and full-time graduate students to apply. If you plan to apply, be sure to review NEH’s Application Information and Instructions to determine your eligibility. The deadline for applications is Tuesday, March 4, 2014.

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.

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.

We’re pleased to announce that ASHP/CML is one of the winners of the 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, held in collaboration with Mozilla, supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and administered by HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). This year’s competition focused on Badges for Lifelong Learning, and it awarded grants of up to $175,000 to projects designed to build digital badge systems that can help people learn new skills and demonstrate them to unlock job, educational, and civic opportunities.

Our project, Who Built America? Badges for Teaching Disciplinary Literacy in History, beat out 14 other finalists in the Teacher Mastery & Feedback division, which was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Working with Electric Funstuff (developer of the Mission US online game—see below) and the Education Development Center (our longtime evaluation partners), the project takes ASHP/CML’s proven professional development methods and uses an online badge-earning system to build professional learning communities and promote social history and inquiry-based teaching methods. It also helps history teachers design instructional materials that will help their students meet the demands of the Common Core Standards.

We are pleased to announce that the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), in partnership with the American Social History Project, a National Leadership Planning Grant for Contextualizing the Visual Archive for Teaching. This project is designed to research and prototype an interactive online interface for archives and libraries that will help teachers use historical American images by linking them to rich contextual information as well as to full catalog records. During the planning phase of the grant, we will conduct research among potential users and program a sample set of test images for an online, open-source resource prototype that will demonstrate how visual images from any library or museum collection can be linked to collection records and teaching materials.