About Future History
The Teaching American History Project: Future History offers graduate courses, lectures, workshops and summer institutes aimed at introducing new knowledge and new methodologies to novice secondary-level faculty in history and the social sciences.
A cadre of secondary-level teachers have reached retirement and that our member-districts will need to replace them with new professionals. In addition, few teachers have access to either primary sources or the technology to capitalize on the recently digitized sources essential to understanding our nation's past. To date, primary sources have made only slow integration into the classroom curriculum. The Teaching American History Project: Future History exists to begin to remedy these problems, within the context of the Massachusetts Department of Education's History Frameworks.
Future History will assist new history teachers by increasing their knowledge of American history, providing classroom technology for the use of primary sources and creating a support system for new professionals in the area.
The benefits of participation in this project are long and meaningful:
- Participating districts: Participating districts will receive classroom technology for each participant in our Technology Course
- Technology Course: Through a partnership with the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, this course will familiarize teachers with primary sources on the web and the technology to integrate primary sources into the classroom.
- The Essentials: Through a series of lectures and workshops with renowned historians of the immigrant experience, participants will increase both their content knowledge and their understanding on the uses of primary sources
- Summer Institutes: Our summer intensives help teachers develop and share lesson plans and modules focusing on the use of primary sources.
- Other Professional Development Opportunities: by attending lectures and submitting a work product participants can earn content area professional development points.
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.
