NEH and EDSITEment: Outreach for History Educators

Bruce Cole

EDSITEment (<http://edsitement.neh.gov> ), NEH’s web-based humanities project for educators, serves teachers in all fifty states and reaches out to teachers in other countries. Around 170,000 educators access its lesson plans and web resources each month. Although the website is also used in community colleges and undergraduate classes, it is probably less familiar to history scholars than longstanding outreach programs from NEH’s Division of Education Programs, such as Summer Seminars and Institutes, Faculty Humanities Workshops, and the newer Landmarks program.

A unique collaboration with NEH, the National Trust for the Humanities, and the MarcoPolo Education Foundation, EDSITEment is unlike most NEH programs in that it does not award funding; it receives most of its funding from the MarcoPolo Education Foundation. As one of seven educational institutions in the MarcoPolo Consortium established to guide teachers in integrating the best of the Internet into their teaching, EDSITEment represents the full range of the humanities, although its history resources predominate.

Websites undergo NEH’s traditional rigorous panel review—out of several hundred nominated each year, only twenty to thirty sites are recommended for inclusion among the top humanities websites. EDSITEment staff work closely with educational writers to develop classroom teaching materials from the reviewed websites for educators in grades K-12.

Initiated under a two-year grant, EDSITEment has grown far beyond its intended function as a gateway to the top one hundred humanities websites deemed most valuable for classroom use. EDSITEment currently features 150 websites and more than 300 lesson plans and teaching guides for integrating resources from these top sites into classes. Over two-thirds of the lesson plans and 100 of the top websites focus on history.

Redesigned twice in the last five years, and now supported by a database, educators find the site more dynamic and easier to navigate. Users praise the lesson plans, the monthly calendar and “This Month’s Feature,” which highlights historical events, commemorative occasions, and other topical subjects linking to teaching material and websites on EDSITEment.

EDSITEment constructs lesson plans around links to online repositories of primary documents, textual and visual, and each lesson plan concludes with a list of additional web-based resources. In the future, EDSITEment will continue to grow and to add new resources to address classroom needs in the humanities at all grade levels. EDSITEment aspires to fill the needs of teachers who seek material targeted by state standards or who wish to explore more recondite topics that illuminate and deepen students’ engagement with the humanities.

Recently, as more students log on to use EDSITEment for research or to access materials assigned by teachers using EDSITEment lesson plans, EDSITEment strives to make the site more student friendly. With funding through NEH’s We the People initiative, NEH awarded cooperative agreements to City College of New York (CCNY) and Ashland University, to create a series of intensive high school U.S. history lessons; many of them are structured for AP, IB, or Honors courses. Teams of distinguished historians will work with veteran classroom teachers to construct these new materials. These lessons challenge students to research and read closely documents pertaining to the Colonial Period, the American Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, World War II, and twentieth century history. And to facilitate this deeper level of learning, Ashland and CCNY will develop tools that enable students to engage in history in more sophisticated ways. At the end of this three-year project, students will be able to examine primary documents virtually using an online annotation tool, a multi-layered map reading tool, and an image analysis feature.

EDSITEment history lessons draw from major online repositories of American history, such as the Library of Congress American Memory Collection, the National Archives Digital Classroom, the Supreme Court Database Oyez Project, and Yale University’s Avalon Project. EDSITEment also showcases a number of NEH funded websites with archives and databases created by university history faculty. They include Exploring Amistad, Freedmen and Southern Society Project, New Deal Network, U.S. Women’s History Workshop, Valley of the Shadow, Virtual Jamestown, Web de Anza, and Women and Social Movements in the United States.

Teachers appreciate most the high quality of the lessons and the scholarly pre-screened websites used in EDSITEment lessons. In 2003, the Association of Educational Publishers awarded EDSITEment a Distinguished Achievement Award in the category of Educational Technology for its lessons on the Declaration of Independence, the three branches of government, and the Preamble to the Constitution.

EDSITEment staff seek to align the project with other NEH programs, especially those from the Division of Education, and the We the People initiative to expand both the reach of EDSITEment and the impact of traditional NEH programs. A number of project directors have used EDSITEment resources in their NEH funded programs and several have expressed interest in submitting lesson plans to be considered for inclusion on EDSITEment.

EDSITEment reaches educators across the globe. Teachers and students from Thailand, Greece, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Nigeria have contacted NEH praising the resources on EDSITEment. A teacher from Thailand wrote, “You are providing a really important service to all international school teachers who use an American curriculum.” A Moroccan user said of EDSITEment, “it’s very interesting and varied.” A user from Karachi, Pakistan, heard of the site through a friend in the U.S. and wrote that he found the site very good for a beginning English student. Similarly, a graduate student in Portugal found EDSITEment especially useful for learning English and studying American culture. And an educational consulting firm in Tamilnnadu, India, recommends EDSITEment to regional teachers.

Scholars and teachers help EDSITEment by nominating outstanding websites and by writing and reviewing lesson materials and student activities. These introduce teachers and students to the kinds of extraordinary archives once only accessible to academics. NEH relies on users’ feedback and website nominations to maintain EDSITEment as a repository of the best humanities websites and teaching resources on the Internet.