Siena College's McCormick Center for the Study of the American Revolution was awarded a grant in the amount of $169,426 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to underwrite a Landmarks of American History and Culture: Workshops for School Teachers. This is the third NEH grant that Program Director Jennifer Dorsey, Ph.D., has been awarded since 2010.
Themed "Religious Revivals, Utopian Societies and The Shaker Experience in America," the workshop is bringing 73 participants from across the country to Siena to study the history, contributions and legacies of the Shakers. The first session wraps up on Saturday, June 25 before the second session begins on June 26. Each week-long session gives teachers, librarians and counselors from all across the country a glimpse into the historic Shaker roots in the Capital Region.
Kathy Weingand, a teacher from California, is participating in this workshop as a way to broaden her knowledge of American history on the east coast. She explained, “I must continue to be a student, so that I never forget what it is like to be a learner.”
Dorsey’s program is fulfilling the wishes of Weingand and many of her fellow participants.
"The NEH Landmark Workshop program is very place based. The idea is to educate participating K-12 educators about early American history and culture, and in this case, the Shaker experience, but also to show them where this history was made. My sincere hope is that all the teachers -whether they are from New York or somewhere else- with leave the workshop with a great appreciation for the special role that New York State has played in American History."
Workshop participants will tour Watervliet Shaker National Historic District (the original Shaker site in America), Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon and Hancock Shaker Village. They are traveling to the New York State library to research historic Shaker documents and study Shaker objects (furniture, clothing and art) at the New York State Museum. The group will also read and discuss scholarly works about Shaker history, religion, culture and art with leading scholars including Robert Emlen of Brown University and Carol Medlicott, author of Issachar Bates: A Shaker’s Journey.
Jason Davidson, a teacher from Kentucky, applied to participate in the workshop as a way to broaden the scope of the work he is doing in his classroom. Believing that every student deserves the highest quality of education he can provide, Davidson created a living history museum where his students played figures from the signing of the Declaration of Independence and a hashtag campaign for historical and current events. He hopes to use the workshop as a source of inspiration for another large project to engage his students.
The grant application for "Religious Revivals, Utopian Societies and The Shaker Experience in America" was written in the winter of 2015 by Dorsey, in collaboration with alumni Francis Butler '15 and Rachel Bournique '15, as well as education professionals from the New York State Museum, New York State Library, Shaker Heritage Society, Hancock Shaker Village, and Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon. Two Siena students, Delia Ernst '16 and Aubrey Kirsch '17 are working with Dorsey during the workshops.
