A number of faculty
members in the Department of History are currently working together
to build bridges between the teaching and study of the history of Latin
America and the United States of America. Our collaborative work includes
a May 2001 symposium, sponsored by the Center for Historical Studies,
entitled "National Identities in the Americas." Building upon these
activities within the university, and further supported by the
David
C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora and the Delmas
Foundation of New York, we seek to develop a series of workshops
on the history of the Americas for public high school and middle school
teachers in Montgomery County.
This
three-year project will enrich teachers' understanding of history and
thus improve student learning in two major ways. First, the workshops
will facilitate the integration of Latin American history into the social
studies curriculum of the Montgomery County schools by introducing some
of the major themes in the current scholarship on Latin America and by
providing sources that teachers might use to teach those themes. Right
now, teachers and administrators in the county are designing a new unit
on Latin America for the middle school curriculum, and because this area
of study has until so recently been ignored in programs of historical
study, they are hard pressed to do it. These workshops will aid the effort.
Second, we hope that the preparation of these workshops will help faculty
at the University of Maryland as well as teachers in Montgomery County
schools to think about the histories of Latin America and the United States
as interrelated and mutually illuminating. Especially for teachers of
modern world history, this sort of comparative understanding of history
is crucial. To see the histories of nations and regions as interconnected
both by direct relationships and by common trends is to begin envisioning
a truly global history.
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