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Teachers Benefit from Summer History School
Seventeen teachers from eleven counties across the state attended the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s inaugural Summer Teachers School in June. The week-long workshop was the first of several innovative programs that MDAH is developing for teachers and students, as well as the general public, in preparation for the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and Museum of Mississippi History in December 2017.
During the week teachers identified topics ranging from Black Codes and Jim Crow laws to the Great Migration to Freedom Summer and spent more than twenty hours researching and identifying primary source materials in the state archives to create original lesson plans for their classrooms. Finished lessons and resource packets will be posted on the MDAH website for use by teachers across the state.
Located in the William F. Winter Archives and History Building, the state archives' is the repository for an extensive collection of the state’s government documents, bound volumes, maps and drawings, photographs, oral histories, and video and audio tapes.
“We are thrilled to have such a dedicated group of teachers participate in our first Summer Teachers School,” said Stacey Everett, MDAH director of education. “We want to connect the department’s extraordinary collections with the people of Mississippi, and working with educators to develop tools for teaching Mississippi’s complex history is one of the many ways we do that. We’re already looking forward to next summer.”
“We’ve been handed the tools to walk out of here with, and we can access those resources and use them to bless black children, white children, and whatever group of individual students we are teaching,” said Ruth Brown, social studies teacher at Lanier High School in Jackson. “The smarter a teacher is in a classroom, the better opportunities children have to grow.”
“I’ve learned so much,” said Loran Bell-Taylor, English teacher at Forest Hill High School in Jackson. “Every day has been packed with helpful information. I’ve learned how to properly research here. This institution has so much material. It’s at your fingertips and we don’t know it’s there. I’ve learned how to make connections between literature and social studies.”
Participating schools included DeSoto County School District, Jackson Public
Schools, Rankin County School District, Madison County Schools, Brookhaven Academy (Lincoln County), Amory School District (Monroe County), Laurel School District (Jones County), Picayune School District (Pearl River County), Webster County Schools, Coffeeville School District
(Yalobusha County), and North Delta School (Panola County).
Twenty-five lesson plans and teaching units are available online on topics ranging from Mississippian mound builders to Freedom Summer. All units and plans are based on the Mississippi Department of Education Frameworks and the Common Core Curriculum. MDAH’s annual teacher’s guide is a compilation of department’s resources, including field trips, classroom outreach programs, and teacher training. The lesson plans and guide are available on the Learn tab at mdah.state.ms.us.
The Summer Teachers School is a partnership between the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, and the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. The school is made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Applications for next summer’s teachers school will be available online in early 2016. Teachers accepted into
the program receive a $340 stipend that covers room and board, registration reimbursement, and CEU credit.
In October 2014 the Mississippi Department of Archives and History received a $2.3 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to support programming through the
Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and fund a partnership between MDAH, the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, and the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. The grant makes possible educational initiatives such as the Summer Teachers School, other teacher and school workshops, public programs in communities throughout the state, and the digitization of important historical documents from the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Collection at MDAH.
“[As a teacher] you can’t just do multiple choice, matching tests,” said Masha Laney, social studies teacher at Amory High School in Amory. “You have to use documents, encourage students to read, to interpret, to understand and answer questions, and provide evidence. It’s just a completely different way of teaching, and I had to set my bar higher.
I	had to revamp my teaching and that’s one of the things that this whole institute is all about. It just helps me be a better teacher, and it also helps the students be more successful on the state test.”
Loran Nicole Bell-Taylor (left), a teacher at Forest Hill High School in Jackson, works with her colleague Ruth Brown from Jackson's Lanier High School on their lesson plan created using original material in the state archives.