“It’s not simply the presidents and the politicians and the tycoons. What makes up American historical past are households and individuals who expertise on a regular basis occasions, and the way they react.”
So says Kristen Crews, who teaches AP U.S. Historical past and girls’s research at Ronald Wilson Reagan Excessive Faculty in Pfafftown, North Carolina. Based on Crews, that takeaway was strengthened for her after taking part in knowledgeable studying program hosted by New York Metropolis’s Tenement Museum.
The museum in July hosted its second annual Summer season Trainer Institute, the place educators might talk about instructing about immigrant historical past and the way curricular supplies can overlap with college students’ family tales.
Educators toured the museum’s replicas of immigrant properties, heard from historians, and talked concerning the experiences of a distinct immigrant group every day in the course of the July 20-25 program.
The summer time institute is an instance of how faculties can work with museums and different historic assets of their areas and past to reinforce skilled growth.
The Tenement Museum programming is “nuanced, however not graduate-level,” stated Mike Agovino, who teaches geography, world historical past and AP Seminar at Queens Gateway to Well being Sciences Secondary Faculty in New York Metropolis’s Queens borough, and took part within the museum’s 2025 cohort. “It’s relevant to a 15- or 16-year-old.”
For Crews, who participated in this system’s 2025 cohort, this system imparted precious insights about instructing American historical past by way of the lens of households and people that make the teachings relevant to right now’s college students’ lives.
Each Agovino and Crews have used the museum’s “Your Story, Our Story” publishing portal to encourage college students to write down private tales that illustrate who they’re, whether or not it’s an immigration-related story or one thing else about them.
The institute “helped us to turnkey this to our college students throughout the nation,” Agovino stated. “I used it as an icebreaker to get to know college students in an genuine manner. They ate it up. They had been excited to be printed on a museum web site and likewise to share their tales.”
Crews modified the task by asking college students to deal with a household heirloom or different object that illuminated parts of their very own household historical past or tradition. One scholar introduced in a tobacco stick and talked concerning the agricultural historical past of the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, space. One other introduced in a Seaside Boys album and reminisced about listening to the band’s music with their grandparents.
This helped college students get to know each other and “in understanding what it means to be an American, and the way all these items labored collectively,” Crews stated.
All through the final college yr, Crews stated, her college students had been extra receptive to historical past classes given the main target this method positioned on common folks.
“They paid consideration a little bit bit extra,” she stated. Throughout a unit on urbanization and the way the Industrial Revolution affected immigration, “we had been instructing youngsters how to have a look at totally different views and be capable to perceive. They realized they had been from totally different cultures and backgrounds and wealth, however additionally they had similarities.”
The Tenement Museum does a considerate job of “chunking” content material about immigration into themes and time durations in order that academics can simply infuse it into their current curricula, Agovino stated.
He drew upon the museum’s “Flags of Hope” unit targeted on the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and the way immigration teams reacted to them. The unit segues into the current day, exploring how “immigrant teams view themselves, legally and emotionally,” in a transformative interval in American historical past, Agovino stated. This prompted college students to ponder “what they love about america, and what they want to see modified.”
Agovino was in a position to result in 200 college students to tour the museum. “Quite a lot of these college students are first-generation immigrants,” he stated. “For them to have this expertise, I used to be very moved and touched by it.”
Crews and her college students, being positioned a number of states away, made a digital go to as an alternative. “With the ability to stroll the halls of the tenements just about actually helped my college students … to consider their lives, what they worth, and the way they turn out to be higher residents and higher members of their group,” she stated. “It helped me take into consideration what’s necessary and what I ought to be doing in my classroom.”
