American Legacies II: Immersion Seminars

The Harlan Independent School District, Harlan, Kentucky, a local educational agency, in partnership with the Kentucky Historical Society, the University of Kentucky, the Kentucky Heritage Council, and the Kentucky Department of Education, proposes to offer three one-year immersion seminars in traditional American history for teachers in an eight-county region of southeastern Kentucky. Each immersion seminar will involve thirty teachers for an eighteen-month commitment (one year of study followed by six months of intensive classroom support). Related activites sponsored by the project will be open to all history teachers from schools that have scored poorly in the history section of the state assessment test, the Kentucky Core Content Test. This project will expand upon and intensify the mission of the current TAHG grant underway by the project partners: American Legacies. In this project, we are engaged in an intesive, three-year professional development program in American hsitory content and pedagogy with a select group of thirty-two American Legacies Fellows drawn from the ranks of the region's teachers. To magnify the impact of our current grant, our ew project will reach and additional ninety teachers in the region and position our current American Legacy Fellows as peer mentors of other teachers in the region.