Pre-collegiate Educational Programs
Since the 1970s the Society has engaged in occasional efforts to
improve the teaching of American history and literature in the
pre-collegiate level. Most notably, in 1975 the Society produced a
packet of historical facsimiles of documents and maps from the AAS
collections pertaining to the colonial era and the American
Revolution. Published by the firm of Allyn and Bacon, the series was
edited by Francis G. Walett of Worcester State College in honor of the
nations bicentennial. Designed to supplement traditional classroom texts,
these high-quality reproductions examined extraordinary events and figures
as well as the daily life of ordinary people.
With funding from the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund, the
Society began to experiment with additional ways to impact K-12 education
in the mid-1990s. This experimentation included offering fellowships to
elementary and secondary level teachers and librarians, and conducting a
two-day seminar on early American history in honor of AAS member Alden
Vaughan upon his retirement from Columbia University.
With the appointment of a full-time director of outreach in 1997,
the Society adopted criteria for evaluating potential AAS educational
projects. These criteria emphasized the primacy of the Society's
collections in such projects; encouraged the input of scholars, practicing
educators, and AAS staff in their development; and mandated that all
projects adhere to relevant national and state curricula frameworks.
The Society's K-12 efforts are designed to be a measured response
to the educational reform movement that has swept the nation within the
past 20 years. These reform efforts have resulted in a multitude of
governmental and private initiatives to develop curriculum frameworks and
assessment methods. Although these efforts vary considerably, most stress
the need for inquiry-based learning and advocate for the use of primary
source historical materials in the classroom. Many even stress the
introduction of historic materials into the lower elementary grades.
Accordingly, the Society has sought to make available paper and
digital facsimiles of select AAS library materials related to specific
themes and supplemented with background information and lesson plans. AAS
has been mindful of the social realities of most contemporary American
classrooms and has attempted to make these historic materials accessible
to learners of varying styles and abilities and who come from a wide
variety of social and ethnic backgrounds. The Society has also played an
important role in educating teachers about historic printed materials and
their pedagogical applications. In developing its own projects and in its
collaboration with other institutions, the Society always seeks to create
programs that can be used on a national level.
The Society has engaged in a number of educational projects. In
celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Isaiah Thomas in
1999, for example, AAS created a one-person dramatic presentation entitled
Isaiah Thomas - Patriot Printer - that
literally
brings Thomas into classrooms via the talents of professional actor Neil
Gustafson. The theatrical presentation was written and staged by James
David Moran, the Society's director of outreach. In addition to the
traveling dramatic presentation, this program also includes a
curriculum/facsimile package that contains copies of all the documents
featured in the presentation, as well as additional historic graphic
images from the AAS collections. This packet also contains transcriptions
of these documents, background biographical and historical information,
and lesson plans for elementary, middle, and high school students
developed by classroom teachers. Focusing on the life and times of the
Society's founder, the program addresses the following themes
specifically: the American Revolution, life in colonial New England, the
early American printing trade, communication and transportation in the
colonial and early national periods, and the development of a distinctly
American culture. Over 3,000 students have participated in this program
since its inception in the winter of 2000. With support from the
Hoche-Scofield Foundation and the Massachusetts Foundation for the
Humanities, the Society was able to present this program to inner-city
schools in Worcester, Springfield, and Boston. A modified version of this
program has also been successfully presented to civic organizations and
historical societies throughout the central New England region.
The Society has also collaborated with Old Sturbridge Village, the
Worcester Historical Museum, and the Worcester Public Schools to create an
interdisciplinary curriculum unit entitled, Coming of Age, 1798-
1850: What Does it Mean to be an American? This program, initially
funded
by a grant to Old Sturbridge Village by the Institute for Museum Services
and continued with support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, asks
teenage students to examine the changing roles of American culture and
character in the nineteenth century and compare it with that of
today. Designed for eighth-grade students, Coming of Age focuses
primarily on how people matured in the past and compares and contrasts
that with the students own life experiences and choices.
As the Society's work in the pre-collegiate educational field has
become more widely known, AAS has been asked to participate in a number of
other collaborative efforts to train teachers and to provide educators
with historic primary source materials. The Society has played an active
role in presenting teacher-training workshops both at AAS and in school
systems and conferences throughout the New England region. In 2001, the
Society was asked by the Boston Public Schools to collaborate on a project
to retrain all junior- and senior-high school faculty members. Funded by
a Federal Department of Education grant, the Boston Teaching American
History Project includes graduate level classes, summer institutes, and
the development of specialized curriculum materials. AAS supports this
project by conducting summer institutes in the use of historic printed
materials, supplying historic primary source facsimiles for use in
classrooms, and in creating a digitized database of historic images.
- James David Moran, Director of Outreach
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More information on the Society's pre-collegiate educational programs is
available under the heading of "K-12 Programs"
in the "Programs" section
of this website.
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