Five Colleges, Incorporated: Partnership Active in Two Grants

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Public School Partnership Active in Two Grants with Area Schools

(from the Fall 2006 issue of Ink Newsbreaks)

The Five College Public School Partnership enters its 22nd year active on several curricular fronts in working with area schools and teachers. Earlier this summer it received word of two new grants that will support projects in which it will be a primary collaborator with area schools.

The Partnership will play a key role in a third award from the U.S. Department of Education (DOEd) to the Springfield Public Schools that will fund a multiyear series on Teaching American History (TAH). Each of the three awards has been for approximately $1 million.

Earlier this summer, the Partnership was awarded a grant of $88,412 from the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Program that will fund a study tour to South Africa in the summer of 2007 for educators of the area.

The new DOEd grant builds on the work of the two previous grants for Teaching American History, whose goal is to better prepare teachers for dealing with the subject matter by exposing them to current scholarly sources. To date, those grants have involved more than 80 teachers from Springfield. "The TAH programs," observes Rosemary Kalloch, director of social studies for the Springfield Public Schools, "have resulted in a widening circle of teachers who have become deeply engaged in the study of American history, who have remained with the program and are now taking on leadership roles by researching new curriculum modules and serving as mentors to their peers."

As it has done in the two previous DOEd grants, the Partnership will once again have a leading role in this new three-year TAH project, entitled "Creating, Challenging, and Sustaining Democracy," which will get under way in the summer of 2007. Other partners include a number of local museums such as Historic Deerfield, the Quadrangle Museums in Springfield, and the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke. The emphasis in recruiting teachers for this third cohort, says Kalloch, will be new teachers of history and those who do not currently meet the NCLB guidelines for "highly qualified" in the district's underperforming schools. Those who elect to take part will receive over 350 hours of professional development including a two-week summer institute at Smith College, featuring distinguished historians from the Five Colleges and from other colleges and universities in the region.

The focus of the first year's study will be "creating the new democracy," with lectures and discussions and readings on the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, ratification of the Constitution, and the early presidencies. "Challenges to democracy," the theme of the second year, will cover the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the rise of the Abolitionist movement, and the Civil War and its aftermath. In year three, the teachers will examine the challenges of sustaining democracy through industrialization, immigration, urbanization, the Great Depression and the New Deal, and 20th-century movements and events that resulted in America at war.

The focus of the Fulbright-Hays award is "America in a Global Context." As Partnership Coordinator Sue Thrasher observed, "This project responds to the needs of K-12 schools to develop curricula that will prepare students for citizenship in a global society." To support the yearlong project, the Partnership, Thrasher says, has assembled a management team knowledgeable about South Africa and about curriculum development. Joye Bowman, professor of history at UMass Amherst, will serve as project director and Beverly Bell, Five College Teacher Licensure Coordinator, who teaches in the department of psychology and education at Mount Holyoke, will head up planning for the study tour. The orientation and curriculum-building phases of the project, Thrasher says, will be supported by faculty members of the Five College African Studies Council and curriculum specialists in the education departments of Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges and area public schools. The five area districts that helped to develop the proposal to Fulbright-Amherst, Greenfield, Northampton, South Hadley, and Springfield-will send teams of teachers on the study tour to South Africa.

"The choice of South Africa made sense on many levels," Thrasher explains. "It is a democracy in progress, its people and culture have great appeal for Americans of all ages, and the place of Africa in a global society is obviously central." What's more, Thrasher adds, "we are unusually fortunate in having in our midst one of the largest cohorts of scholars of Africa in the United States. It just makes great sense to draw on their expertise."

The study tour, Thrasher says, which "constitutes the centerpiece of the project," will send 14 educators to South Africa in the summer of 2007 with the expectation that they will return ready to apply their firsthand experience and knowledge to developing teaching materials. The group will include ten K-12 teachers and administrators (two from each district) and four faculty members and administrators from the Five Colleges. During five weeks, the group will travel to four major regions in South Africa, where they will visit K-12 schools as well as sites that illustrate colonial, postcolonial, apartheid-era, and post-apartheid influences on the development of South Africa as an emerging democracy. School visits, Thrasher points out, "will allow us to establish cross-cultural learning projects linking schools and classrooms there with ours."

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