With NEH support, faculty at Hood College developed a professional development seminar for K–12 educators that examines the contemporary relevance of World War I. Over the course of three weeks, participants considered historical sources and literary texts and examined the impact of the war on a wide range of individuals in the United States and around the world. Educators left the seminar prepared to teach the war and with enhanced pedagogical strategies for teaching from an interdisciplinary perspective.
“[This seminar] completely revolutionized the content and materials I made available to my students.”
–2020 program participant
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Participants were introduced to total war—a war that involves governments, economies, and populations on a scale never before seen in history—as a key concept in the historiography of World War I. The concept of total war provided the historical contexts for their consideration of literary works about the conflict. Participants then explored a range of topics through history and literature, including canonical narratives of the war, local and national memorializations of the war, the 1918 influenza pandemic that coincided with the war, and the role of women in the war.
Facts & Figures
89%
of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they “gained an active network of colleagues outside of [their] school/district through the NEH summer program.”
At the conclusion of each unit of deep content exploration, the seminar featured a pedagogy consultant who hosted discussions about curricular uses of seminar materials. These sessions allowed participants to learn new strategies and workshop ideas with their colleagues. In a survey of participants a year following their participation in the 2019 program, respondents wrote about the value of the pedagogical strategies they learned and the cohort they developed amongst themselves. One respondent said: “It was an invaluable experience that changed my outlook on how I teach and how I strive for further professional development opportunities. We had host professors who encouraged and excited us and made us feel confident. We were able to form a cohort of other great teachers with whom we still converse. We were provided with amazing resources for the classroom. And we were taken to historical sites that had real, lasting impacts on how we view historical events. It was life changing and I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity.”