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Barnard
Historians Lead Workshops for NYC High School Teachers
 New
York, NY, Dec. 10, 2002 -- Barnard is bringing New York
City high school teachers to campus for seminars with faculty
historians aimed at reversing the trend toward historical
illiteracy among young people.
Barnard’s leadership on the project was the subject
of an article in the New York Daily
News on Tuesday (12-10-02).
In collaboration with the Queens High School Superintendent’s
Office and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History,
four Barnard history professors, including Mark Carnes,
Robert McCaughey, Rosalind Rosenberg and Herbert Sloan,
will lead eight workshops a year over the next three years
in creative classroom approaches to American history. With
25 teachers in each workshop, the goal is to reach nearly
500 teachers in Queens over three years.
The program is underwritten by Congress, which has provided
$50 million to encourage schools across the country to strengthen
classes in history. The Gilder Lehrman Institute, whose
president is Barnard Professor James Basker, was one of
114 organizations nationwide to receive the federal financial
support known as Byrd Teaching American History grants,
after Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. The Institute
developed the collaborative program in New York with a $722,000
grant. It oversees a similar program in Chicago.
Basker called teachers the lifeblood of educa tion and said
the goal of the program is to bring top scholars in as resources
for high schools. "The aim is to reach as many students
as possible," he added.
According to Carnes, who is known for his teaching innovation
as the inventor of an acclaimed teaching program at Barnard,
Reacting to the Past, that other colleges have adopted,
a recent federal study underscores the need for more creative
classroom approaches to history. He said the study showed
that half of America’s high school seniors do not know
that the United States and the former Soviet Union were
allies during World War II or that President Nixon reopened
diplomatic relations with Communist China.
"Few history professors can take much comfort from
this view of the United States of Amnesia," said Carnes.
In addition to the Barnard professors, historian Eric Foner,
a colleague at Columbia University, will join the seminars.
Carnes led the first workshop in Queens on Nov. 14 and a
second on the Barnard campus on Dec. 5 in which he discussed
how teachers might use Winona Ryder's performance in the
screen adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible
and Kate Winslet's and Leonardo Di Caprio's performances
in Titanic to generate discussions on courtship patterns,
premarital sexuality, and the relationship of marriage to
capital accumulation.
The final workshop of this year on Dec. 18 will be led by
Professor Rosalind Rosenberg, who will explore race and
gender and the 14th Amendment.
She said: "I hope to illustrate the ways race and gender
became central and connected concerns in the American society
in the middle of the 20th century by pointing out how civil
rights leader Pauli Murray helped the women’s movement
to see ways of using the 14th Amendment, as the civil rights
movement had before it, to advance the course of women."
The workshops are four hours in length with the first two
hours devoted to a lecture and the final two hours focusing
on the study and analysis of historic documents and other
teaching materials. The idea is to help teachers design
lesson plans and curriculum to take back to their schools.
These two-hour sessions are led by Michael Serber and Howard
Seretan, career master teachers in social studies at the
Gilder Lehrman Institute. Seretan was the chairperson of
the history department at Cardozo High School in Queens
and Server was the chairperson at Forest Hills High School
in Queens for many years.
Serber said the reaction of teachers to the first workshop
was positive. "In a time of severe budget cuts in New
York City, this program provides a valuable alternative,"
he said.
Contact: Petra Tuomi, Barnard Office of Public Affairs,
(212) 854-7907
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