A summer institute for school teachers will be made possible through a $130,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
The institute is sponsored by UTEP’s Department of English, Department of History, Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, and Institute of Oral History.
A total of 25 Summer Scholars who teach grades 6-12 will be selected from across the country to convene at UTEP to participate in the institute in July 2017. Each teacher will receive a stipend of $2,100 for the two-week program.
The institute directors are R. Joseph Rodríguez, Ph.D., with UTEP’s Department of English and Ignacio Martínez, Ph.D., with the Department of History.
“The NEH Institute is an effort to reframe our national discourse about the ways in which we see and talk about the U.S.–México borderlands and its binational populations,” Martínez said.
Leading experts and award-winning scholars will contribute to the institute. In conjunction with inquiry-based activities centered in the classroom, Summer Scholars will also take part in several pre-planned field trips to local archives and repositories, historical sites and cultural venues.
Summer Scholars will prepare interdisciplinary instructional e-portfolios to incorporate into the secondary-level classroom with their students. Overall, the goal is to advance the critical study of borderlands histories and narratives and to benefit teaching and scholarship in the humanities.
“We believe it is important, especially for young adults, to understand and recognize the role that these marginal spaces and its populations have played in U.S. history and literature,” Rodríguez said.
For information, visit the institute’s website at http://borderlandsnarratives.utep.edu/index.php.