National History Day to Collaborate with the Mississippi Department of Archives & History to Offer Teacher Professional Development Workshops in Summer 2024
August 29, 2023, College Park, Maryland—National History Day® (NHD) is excited to announce a partnership with The Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) to present two workshops on teaching the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the summer of 2024.
The program is being funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This Landmarks of History and Culture workshop will mark the 60th anniversary of a pivotal event in American history, 1964’s Freedom Summer.
Seventy teachers from across the nation will have the opportunity to attend one of two weeklong workshops starting at the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, Mississippi, and then traveling to specific locations in the state that were central to the historic events of Freedom Summer.
“National History Day is excited to partner with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to bring this place-based learning experience to teachers,” said Executive Director Cathy Gorn. “We are excited to take teachers to visit the archives, museums, and historic sites that tell this powerful story in American history.”
The workshops, which will run from July 8–12, 2024, and July 22–26, 2024, will consist of two different groups of K-12 teachers, with 35 per group, who will gather at the Two Mississippi Museums and the MDAH archives to interact with historians, Civil Rights Movement veterans, educators, and museum professionals. Teachers will collaborate to develop inquiry-based classroom activities and lessons about Freedom Summer using primary sources found in MDAH’s archives and experiential, site-based learning at the Two Mississippi Museums and key civil rights sites across Mississippi. Applications will open later this fall.
The Landmarks of American History and Culture program supports a series of one-week residential, virtual, and combined format workshops across the nation that enhance and strengthen how K-12 educators, higher education faculty, and humanities professionals study sites, areas, or regions of historic and cultural significance and incorporate place-based teaching and learning in the humanities.
About National History Day® (NHD)
NHD is a non-profit organization based in College Park, Maryland, that seeks to improve the teaching and learning of history. The National History Day Contest was established in 1974 and currently engages more than half a million students annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest. Students present their research as a documentary, exhibit, paper, performance, or website. Projects compete first at the local and affiliate levels, where the top entries are invited to the National Contest at the University of Maryland at College Park. NHD is sponsored in part by the 400 Years of African American History Commission, the Bezos Family Foundation, The Better Angels Society, HISTORY®, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Park Service. For more information, visit nhd.org.
About the Mississippi Department of Archives and History
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History was founded in 1902 to collect, preserve, and provide access to the archival resources of the state, administers museums and historic sites, and oversees statewide programs for historic preservation, state and local government records management, and publications. For more information, call 601-576-6850 or see the MDAH Web site, www.mdah.ms.gov.
About the National Endowment for the Humanities
National Endowment for the Humanities: Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.
###
