North Hills Middle School teachers Larry Dorenkamp and Joe Welch have been selected to attend Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Summer Teaching Seminar programs as well as the Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers (ECET2) Western Pennsylvania convening sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Summer Teaching Seminar Programs
The highly competitive and academically rigorous programs are open to elementary, middle and high school educators who teach in buildings affiliated with the Gilder Lehrman affiliate school program with a goal of disseminating educational information to impact American history education in the United States.
Dorenkamp will attend a weeklong seminar “The Gilded Age and Its Modern Parallels” held at Stanford University. The seminar is led by Richard White, a professor of American history at Stanford University. It will focus on how the immigration, industrialization and class struggle of the Gilded Age created the foundation for the modern United States.
Welch’s weeklong seminar “9/11 and the American Memory” is in conjunction with New York University and in partnership with the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City. The seminar will be led by Indiana University history professor Edward T. Linenthal, editor of the Journal of American History and author and editor of numerous historical non-fiction books. It will examine the nature and meaning of historical memory using the 9/11 Museum collections, the historical site and memorial to explore the reactions to and interpretations of 9/11.
Both educators were chosen for the programs by a committee of educators and administrators due to their interest in American history, a commitment to growth and progress in the teaching profession and an ability to translate new knowledge and materials into effective classroom teaching.
About the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at North Hills
The institute’s affiliate school program is a special gateway to education resources, events and tools designed to bring American history to life in the classroom. North Hills Middle School history teacher Larry Dorenkamp spearheaded the building’s involvement in the program this year. The high school has been a program affiliate since 2013, and only a handful of Allegheny County school districts participate in the program.
The program is a network of schools that are committed to promoting history education. The program offers schools and teachers access to free resources, invitations to events and web tools designed to enhance the teaching of American history.
As affiliate schools, both North Hills secondary schools have special access to The Gilder Lehrman Collection that contains more than 60,000 documents detailing the political and social history of the United States. The collection’s holdings include handwritten letters, diaries, maps, photographs, printed books and pamphlets ranging from 1493 through modern times.
The program is funded by a We the People Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is free for all schools.
Elevating and Celebrating Effective Teaching and Teachers (ECET2)
The ECET2 will be held at the end of April in Moon Township with a goal of celebrating and empowering exceptional teachers in western Pennsylvania to collaborate and support one another. The event celebrates and elevates teacher voice, collaboration and empowerment. Founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2015, ECET2 events have been held nationwide and included more than 19,000 teachers across the United States.