Applications available for Teaching Franklin workshops

Posted by on November 16, 2009

NEH Funds Benjamin Franklin Summer 2010 Teachers’ Workshops in Philadelphia

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a major grant to Penn State University’s Capital College that will allow teachers from across the United State to walk in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin.  The $168,000 Landmarks of American History grant will bring eighty teachers to historic Philadelphia during the summer of 2010.

The program, “A Rising People: Benjamin Franklin and the Americans,” will be held June 27-July 2 and July 5-10. Teachers will study with major scholars of early America, visit sites that Franklin knew, peruse documents in Franklin’s own hand, and experience the host of historic opportunities Philadelphia has to offer in the weeks surrounding Independence Day.

“We’re absolutely delighted that the NEH’s funding will allow this program to continue,” said Dr. George Boudreau, associate professor of history and humanities and the program’s director, “Understanding Benjamin Franklin is essential to understanding the history of the United States.” Since its inception in 2005, more than 200 teachers have participated in the “Rising People” program.  “The real importance here is that these outstanding educators take this information back to thousands of American school children,” Boudreau said.

More than 500,000 schoolchildren visit Philadelphia’s historic district and Independence National Historical Park each year. A longtime volunteer and advocate for historic sites in the Philadelphia region, Boudreau points out that museum staffs have found that many of those children arrive with little understanding of the city’s importance to the creation of the United States, and many teachers have no follow-up information for their students once they leave. These NEH-funded workshops will train teachers to understand Franklin and his era and to make use of historic sites as teaching tools, while at the same time making information available to all teachers through the Internet.  As part of the project, Penn State has developed the website http://www.teachingfranklin.org to give teachers throughout the U.S. and around the world access to lesson plans, original sources, images of the founding era, and other materials.

The Landmarks grant is funded through the NEH’s “We, the People” program, an initiative that has hosted thousands of teachers at outstanding historic sites throughout the United States since 2004.  Teachers find rigorous, professional development at Landmarks sites, which have included Mount Vernon, Pearl Harbor, and sites related to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Like those extraordinary sites, Franklin’s Philadelphia offers a glimpse not just at a person, but at an entire era.  “Men and women, rich, poor, and middle class, multi-ethnic and multi-racial – these were the people Franklin saw daily in Philadelphia,” Boudreau said. Teachers will study these lives through eighteenth-century buildings, music, art and material culture, and writings from the era.

Application materials will be available through the http://teachingfranklin.org website.  All applications are due March 2, 2010.