Two dozen college teachers from around the country are studying at Harvard this month. The lesson they'll be learning: how to integrate more black history into their classrooms and research projects.
The National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College Teachers at the university's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute brought the group to Cambridge, Mass., for an intensive three-week program, including archival research, debates on history and lectures by some of the nation's leading scholars in black studies, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The program was founded in the mid-1990s by South Carolina history professor Patricia Sullivan, Du Bois institute Director (and The Root's editor-in-chief) Henry Louis Gates Jr. and University of California, Berkeley history professor Waldo Martin. Their mission is to introduce college teachers from different disciplines to new scholarship on black civil rights, from emancipation to the 1960s.
The program has inspired a number of projects, including an anthology edited by a former participant on the literature of the civil rights movement.
Tiffany Wheeler, an education professor at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., told the Wall Street Journal that the experience inspired her to propose new courses on race and inequality. "At our fingertips were the most cutting-edge scholars," said Wheeler. "This has been great."
Read more at the Wall Street Journal.
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