Welcoming Remembering Lincoln Teacher Representatives!
On any project developed for teachers and students, having the input of actual teachers from the beginning is essential. Only those in the classroom on a daily basis can say what they need and how they will use the resources on offer. For that reason, for our Remembering Lincoln project, we decided to form a committee of Teacher Representatives. Thanks to many of our Remembering Lincoln program partners for distributing the ad to their email lists. The Alabama Department of Archives and History, in particular, spurred many applications from that state.
Choosing 10 teachers was difficult because we received many more applications from extremely qualified teachers. We aimed for a range of teachers from different places who teach different grade levels at different types of schools (public, secular private, religious private) in different communities (rural, suburban, urban).
They are:
- Kathleen Cook, Haughton Middle School, Haughton, Louisiana
- Georgette Hackman, Denver Elementary School, Denver, Pennsylvania
- James LeGrand, Altus High School, Altus, Oklahoma
- Concetta Lewis, University High School, Ypsilanti, Michigan
- Nancy McGowan, Bluff Park Elementary, Hoover, Alabama
- Dave McIntire, The Independent School, Wichita, Kansas
- Thomas Neville, Flint Hill School, Oakton, Virginia
- Mallory Sample, Lake View Elementary School, McCalla, Alabama
- Kevin Wagner, Carlisle High School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
We’re extremely excited to work with this talented group!
Together, the Teacher Representatives will take an active role in shaping the Remembering Lincoln site. Ford’s will host a video conference with the group to learn about how they teach the Lincoln assassination, what websites they use in the classroom and why (or why not), and how they might use Remembering Lincoln.
This spring and summer, Teacher Representatives will provide feedback as the site develops. They’ll test it with their new students in September, and also create frameworks for using the site that teachers can download and adapt. We hope that through participating in this project teachers will gain a familiarity with the process of creating such a digital history site, meet fellow teachers throughout the country, and be part of the process from the beginning.
We also will be doing a survey in early April to gain feedback from an even wider range of teachers. So be on the lookout for that.
Teachers—want to participate in other Ford’s Theatre activities? Sign up for our education enewsletter to be the first to learn about new opportunities! And don’t forget to apply for the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Civil War Washington Teacher Fellows program—applications are due April 4 (national teachers) and April 11 (D.C.-area teachers)!
David McKenzie is Digital Projects Manager at Ford’s Theatre, coordinating the Remembering Lincoln digital collection. He is also a part-time History Ph.D. student at George Mason University, studying 19th-century U.S. and Latin American history, as well as digital history.
