Crossroads of Conflict: Contested Visions of Freedom & the Missouri-Kansas Border Wars
Through lectures, readings, on-line resources and field trips, “Crossroads of Conflict” participants will have a multi-disciplinary, multi-layered opportunity to use resources that shed light on the diverse structure and cultural conflicts of mid 19th Century America.
The workshop will be divided into three parts: 1) Pre-workshop preparation, 2) the residential workshop and 3) a final project.
Before the workshop begins, participants will be provided with resources and reading materials that will immerse them in some of the best and most recent scholarship on the roots of the Civil War as played out on the Missouri-Kansas border.
At the beginning of the residence, participants will be divided into five teams according to grade level taught. Each team will be assigned a member of the workshop faculty and a specially-oriented teacher facilitator from the highly-acclaimed UMKC High School College Program with experience in the use of historical evidence in performance-based learning. During the course of the workshop, each team will discuss content topics and approaches to teaching that explore how readings, site visits and other resources can best be used in the grade levels they teach. They will work together to begin developing lesson plans for their final projects.
All participants will be asked to post a two-part project on the “Crossroads of Conflict” listserv by October 30, 2008. They will develop two lesson plans: a field trip, lecture or class project, tied directly to the “Crossroads of Conflict" workshop experience and a second lesson plan for using resources from their home communities. Projects, based in part on criteria developed by the participants themselves, will be vetted by workshop faculty and posted to the “Crossroads of Conflict” website. In addition to dissemination through the web site, participants will be encouraged to share presentations on their work at national and state social studies/ history conferences. They will also discuss approaches for submitting journal articles about their workshop experiences and applications to appropriate teacher journals such as Social Education, the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies.
Stipend checks (up to $500) will be distributed at the end of the workshop.