BGSU, Hayes Presidential Center offer ‘history links’ to area teachers

BOWLING GREEN, O.—It’s not often that history is taught in an atmosphere that actually evokes the era under consideration. This month, however, teachers from Fremont and Toledo schools will be out of the typical classroom environment for a day at the Dillon House, a Victorian home in Fremont where they will learn how emancipation impacted the post-Civil War period when the house was built.

Dr. Donald Nieman, dean of Bowling Green State University’s College of Arts and Sciences, will lead the Saturday session, which will kick off a professional development program funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd’s belief that American students lack adequate historical literacy led last year to the creation of the federal grant program. Fremont and Toledo schools, in partnership with BGSU and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, will address the issue locally through their recently awarded grant of nearly $885,000.

The grant underwrites a professional development program called “History Links” for Toledo and Fremont teachers in grades 4-12. Over the next three years, up to 30 teachers per session will attend 12 Saturday conferences and three summer institutes focused on three periods in American history, beginning this year with the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Revolutionary era and the period from the stock market crash of 1929 through World War II will be studied in the second and third years.

BGSU faculty will provide the bulk of the planning for the Saturday and summer sessions, which they, and historians from other institutions, will also lead, said Dr. Scott Martin, associate professor of history at the University and academic director of the project. All of the sessions will be held at the Hayes Presidential Center, beginning with the Nov. 16 conference at the center’s Dillon House.

Dr. Peter Way, chairman of BGSU’s history department, said the three periods of study were chosen in part because they’re “key focal points in American history.” Their selection was also a reflection of the expertise of Bowling Green faculty, he said, adding that the resources of the Hayes Presidential Center are a good fit, too, particularly with the Civil War and Reconstruction era. Rutherford B. Hayes fought in the Civil War and was president from 1877-81.

Project director Tom Culbertson, director of history and education at the Hayes Presidential Center, said the grant program required that a museum and a school district be involved, “but neither of us (the center or Fremont Schools) was in a position to provide instruction, so a university was a natural partner.” The center has “a lot of close associations with Bowling Green, and so it just seemed like a natural fit,” he added, noting that BGSU met the criteria of having strong history and teacher education programs, as well as a history of working with school districts.

Ongoing mentoring opportunities are also part of the program, whose purpose, in Way’s words, is to give students a better sense of history.

Ohio recently adopted new K-12 social studies standards, and history is a large part of them, particularly in the upper grade levels, Martin said. “Ohio students do have to know the basics of American history,” he said, and activities funded by the grant will give their teachers more depth of knowledge from which to draw.

The grant, one of six awarded in the state, is intended to help generate more enthusiasm for history as well, Martin said. Aiding on that score will be the use of primary source documents, which include not only well-known documents from the period in question but also diaries, letters and anything else that illuminates the time, he explained.

Participating teachers will receive reproductions of primary source document packs for their own and classroom use.

BGSU’s Jerome Library will also be a resource for participants, who will attend three more Saturday conferences on Civil War/Reconstruction topics early in 2003—probably in February, March and April—before the initial summer institute, Martin said.

(Posted November 17, 2002)