MHC teacher programs offer intense professional development in humanities topics for Maine teachers K through 12. From day-long seminars to week-long institutes and programs that meet frequently throughout the year, MHC teacher programs give educators the chance to think and work as scholars. This translates to tremendous learning for both them and their students.
David Farrington, who teaches social studies at Yarmouth High School (his classes include “World to 1600” and “Intro to Government”), has been a Maine educator for 14 years and calls the MHC’s teacher programs “far and away the most intellectually stimulating and rewarding form of professional development that I’ve experienced.” He finds his opinion shared by many colleagues, all of whom highly value the serious scholarship that is at the center of MHC teacher programs.
Educators today face pressure to seek training in assessment and reporting techniques—necessary, David calls this, but hardly inspirational. “Teachers like me,” David said, “respond to the MHC teacher programs with such enthusiasm because these programs focus on the history and literature that we love.” MHC teacher programs open dialogues between educators and prominent scholars “who challenge us to deepen our understandings and pursue our questions.” In this context David, like many others, “welcome[s] the chance to deal with big ideas and intellectual challenges.”
David is what he calls a “serial participant” in these programs. He has taken workshops on the Middle East, American consumerism, the Harry Potter phenomenon, American Studies, and Asian Studies, the latter through a week-long program called “Views of the East.” He is also a participant in one the MHC’s largest and most ambitious programs, “Teaching American History,” which is composed of a series of summer institutes requiring intense study and a significant commitment of time, energy, and imagination.
“Teaching American History” has had an immediate effect on David’s classroom. This ranges from placing a “Teaching American History” handout, text, or idea in his curriculum, to the research and use of textual and visual primary documents, which “Teaching American History” scholars show how to find and use in order to tell the story of history directly.
“My students now work with primary documents ranging from Muslim accounts of the Crusades, to African-American slave narratives, to 1950s political advertisements on television,” David said. “I find that when students understand a primary document’s context and begin to learn the skills of interpretation, there is no more powerful tool for teaching history.”
Major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the Freeman Foundation’s National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, and UnumProvident.
