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Duke University partnered with the National Archives Foundation and Durham Public Schools (DPS) this June to hold the inaugural Summer Civics Institute for North Carolina elementary and secondary educators. This unique workshop focused on helping teachers bring primary source-based activities into their classrooms. The workshop was part of Duke & Durham's We the People initiative commemorating America’s 250th anniversary through a diverse series of programs, courses, and partnerships.
The Summer Civics Institute was made possible through a unique partnership between Duke University’s Office of Duke Community Affairs and the National Archives Foundation, a nonpartisan non-profit that helps educate the public about the valuable holdings in the United States National Archives. This program was the National Archives Foundation’s first satellite workshop based outside Washington, DC. Joanna Capps, director of civic and outreach programs at the National Archives Foundation, discussed the Foundation's involvement in the teacher training workshop.
Capps described the importance of teachers and students engaging directly with primary sources.
"At the National Archives Foundation, we’re committed to providing teachers with tools to incorporate primary resources into the classroom. We believe when students engage with primary sources, they are given a direct window not only to events in the past but also to the people who shaped history."
"This connection with our collective past often helps students find their civic spark and path for civic engagement in their own communities,” Capps said.
Debbie Goldstein, associate vice president for community-engaged scholarship, leads the center at Duke Community Affairs that helped make the teacher training possible.
“The Duke Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship sits at the intersection of connecting community to Duke’s academic resources, whether that’s collaborative research or teaching or learning with students,” said Goldstein.
"This particular program is a great example of thinking more deeply about how we teach civics and the humanities in our local schools,” Goldstein said. “It also gave us an opportunity to come together to talk about the meaning of democracy today, what we would like to see in the future, and how youth can engage with those questions.”
The process of getting the workshop up and running from the Center’s side directly aligns with its mission.
“[The Center’s] mission is very much to be a place that community can go so that they can navigate Duke and find partnerships and collaborations, particularly with the academic parts of the university, and to help connect faculty and staff and students at Duke to understand the societal issues that the community is wrestling with,” said Goldstein.
Goldstein said the Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship became involved by bringing the opportunity to life and upholding Duke’s Strategic Community Impact Plan through its focus on early education to strengthen K-12 education in the local community.
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Hosted on June 22-24 at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, the program included a unique mix of guest lectures from top Duke University faculty and classroom pedagogy sessions to help tie workshop content back to North Carolina classrooms. The program kicked off with Duke history professor Thavolia Glymph as keynote speaker focused on Abraham Lincoln and primary sources reflecting his presidency. Other guest lectures covered the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution and its global context, and the Civil Rights Movement.
Pedagogy sessions focused on helping students explore these topics through primary sources, the arts, and new classroom technologies. The program also featured a tour of the Carolina Theater in downtown Durham, focusing on how teachers could use local history sites and community members to teach students about topics like the Civil Rights Movement.
Workshop participants shared how the workshop prepared them for the new school year. Cecily Jobe, K-5 media coordinator at Lyons Farm Elementary, expressed how she can take what she learned back to her school. “I feel like this will be a really good way to lead [the teachers] in some lessons, some professional development on kind of how to bring in the 250th anniversary to the classroom and to their students,” she said.
Jobe mentioned that her school places a strong emphasis on history, and she thinks it would be valuable to incorporate their own primary sources of history of the school as well as other important parts of history using the resource tools that were offered at the workshop.
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At the end of the first day of the workshop, Jobe said her main takeaway is to have some things that are “ready to go” for teachers to use, so it doesn’t make it any harder on them by giving them good resources without adding any extra work.
Jobe said she was motivated to participate in the workshop because it was advertised not just to teachers but also to media coordinators and librarians.
“It was interesting to me to be able to see how my role in my school building could get some specific things and specific professional development that I could use to help my teachers.”
At the DPS teacher training, numerous sessions featured speakers from Duke who helped teachers incorporate practices into their lesson plans, from using primary sources to using Artificial Intelligence in classrooms.
Alicia Kelly, Special Ed teacher at Neal Middle School, reflects on her time spent at the teacher training workshop.
Kelly said the fact that the program was unique and that “we don’t talk about it [civic engagement] enough motivated her to take part.
Kelly shared that the most exciting part about bringing what she learned back to her classroom is seeing how her students will respond.
“I want to see the impact, the knowledge that I’ve gained, and what I can implement,” she said.
The participating teachers will have the opportunity to work with Duke Arts and Duke Community Affairs to bring their students to Durham’s fall exhibition of the Declaration of Independence.