The Teaching American History Project: Making American History Tangible offers colloquia, seminars and summer institutes aimed at introducing new knowledge and new methodologies to middle and secondary-level faculty in history and the social sciences. Our research has shown that barely half of the region’s middle and secondary-level history teachers have an undergraduate or graduate degree in their subject area. In addition, few teachers have access to the advances scholars have made in understanding the events that create our nation's past.

Perhaps most importantly, research-based methods of teaching history have made only slow penetration into the classroom. The Teaching American History Project: Making American History Tangible exists to begin to remedy these problems, within the context of the Massachusetts Department of Education's History Frameworks.

Local schools and districts began meaningful participation in this program by selecting site coordinators to serve on the project's advisory board and providing us contact information for target faculty in local schools. The benefits of participation in this project are long and meaningful:

• Participating districts receive $1000 per year for the purchase of history-related instructional materials.
• Colloquium participants receive both cash stipends and Professional Development Points, required for the more demanding certification under the No Child Left Behind Act. Each colloquia requires participating teachers to try a new method of instruction in the classroom, giving students immediate best-practices pay-off.
• MAT in History: Through a partnership with the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, the project will lead already certified teachers halfway to the completion of MAT in history, at no cost to the teacher, school or district.
• Summer Institutes: Our summer intensives help teachers develop a deep content knowledge of a specific era in American history.

The Teaching American History Project: Making American History Tangible is supported by:

The United States Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement, administers the Teaching American History grant program, of which this project is a part. All our project's funding currently comes from this grant program.

Fall River Public Schools is the grantee of record for the Teaching American History Professional Development Project. The department's director of curriculum for History and Social Studies, Susan Horvitz, serves as the Project Director..

Bristol Community College serves as host for and administrator of the Teaching American History Professional Development Project. The Project's Director, Erik Baumann is employed by BCC.