Summer Seminars Draw Educators From Near and Far
While summer has been relaxing and festive for the staff in the San Francisco regional office of Facing History and Ourselves, we have also been actively engaged with teachers within the Bay Area – and beyond – in our two summer seminars.
Seminar sessions are designed to be interactive -- focusing on new learning about both content and instructional delivery. Upon arrival, participants receive a resource book and a binder of supplementary materials. Throughout the week-long seminar, several speakers are scheduled to deliver sessions, both highlighting and deepening our understanding of the historical case study.
Our Holocaust and Human Behavior seminar, which ran from June 22 to 26, drew 19 participants: 16 local educators, as well as two from Beverly Hills and one from Kenya. Arroyo High School in San Lorenzo generously hosted the seminar. Participants explored the Holocaust as a deep historical case study, focusing on themes of identity, membership, transitional justice, and civic participation. Always at the forefront were demonstrations of classroom strategies and best practices that help teachers improve their instructional strategies.
“By humanizing the content,” one teacher wrote, “using lenses and frameworks from Facing History and Ourselves, I think I can make great improvements in my curriculum for my students and myself.”
“The seminar is one of the most well-planned teacher education events that I have ever attended,” another teacher offered, “and that's over 27 years of teaching. The resources are amazing, the presentations well crafted, and the contacts for future planning outstanding.”
Another commented in her evaluation, “the seminar was an eye opener for me to really start teaching my classes in a more interactive way. It has forever changed my instructional techniques.”
Race and Membership Seminar includes Prominent Scholars
From July 13 to 17, 20 educators gathered at the San Mateo County Office of Education to study Race and Membership: The Eugenics Movement in American History. Senior Program Associate Milton Reynolds led team members Jack Weinstein (Director, San Francisco regional office) and Mark Davis (Program Associate) through an essential, yet often untaught, history.
Eugenics was an international movement that attracted heads of state, teachers, philanthropists, journalists and ordinary citizens who advocated laws and policies that would shape the most basic decisions that individuals and societies make: Who may marry? Who may have children? Who will be educated? Who may live among us? In addition to providing sessions that helped participants go “long and deep” into this rich and complex history, we hosted scholars George Lipsitz (pictured below) and Jennifer Eberhardt, both of whom helped frame our understanding of the legacies of the Eugenics movement.
Author George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of seven books, including The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics (1997), American Studies in a Moment of Danger (2001), and A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (1995). Lipsitz has been active in struggles for fair housing and is past president of the Board of Directors of the Fair Housing Council of San Diego.
One teacher wrote, “I truly enjoyed hearing George Lipsitz's work and thoughts. I felt i had so many questions and was moved to continue to work with him, learn from him, and potentially ask some questions that have lingered within myself both as an educator and as a lifelong learner.”
In her most recent work, Stanford Professor Jennifer Eberhardt examines how social representations of race can affect visual perception and neural processing. She received a PhD in Psychology from Harvard University in 1993. Before coming to Stanford in 1998, she held a joint faculty position at Yale University in Psychology and African & African American Studies where she was also a research fellow at Yale's Center for Race, Inequality, and Politics. At Stanford, she has conducted programs of research in areas ranging from social neuroscience to the intersection of psychology and law.
A teacher who attended both seminars this summer said, "I really plan to infuse what I learn from the Facing History Seminars in my daily lessons and throughout my units. I am really interested in the Facing History and Ourselves Journey and I believe I can implement and translate those ideas into my curriculum in a way that is accessible to my students. I would also like to continue a teaching/learning relationship with a Facing History representative and those teachers I met at the seminar."
For further information about the historical case studies featured in our summer seminars visit:
We also offer online seminars in Holocaust and Human Behavior and Choices in Little Rock among others. For more information about our online learning opportunities in 2009 and 2010, check out:
