Wonderful Workshop

I spent Wednesday and Thursday of this week in Bemidji, MN with three teachers from our district's middle school: Teri Hammarback, Deb Schantzen, and Randy Galstad. They are so fun to work with and are a lot of the reason that I enjoyed this week's workshop so much. They and I are participants in a three-year grant-supported Teaching American History (and Literature) series of workshops and seminars (we're just beginning the second year of the grant). Twice during the school year, we attend a two-day workshop designed to teach us about Minnesota history and how to teach it using primary sources and innovative teaching techniques. That's followed by a five-day seminar each summer in which we read and discuss primary sources of American history, investigating the national events that parallel what we've learned about Minnesota history. The workshops and seminars feature presentations by scholars in the field, some of whom have given terrific lectures.

The Minnesota Historical Society runs the two-day workshops and has done a great job. They have us read the primary sources and do the activities that we would then use with our own students. This time we learned about the treaties from the mid- to late 1800s that removed much of Minnesotan land from the hands of Native Americans and made it available for the government to give to white settlers. We learned about Minnesota's efforts to advertise itself to prospective immigrants. We learned about George Bonga, an African American/Ojibwe man in Minnesota. We learned about the ox cart trade that made Minnesota an important part of the northern fur trade. We created posters, wrote songs and poems, performed in skits, and discussed a lot.

Undeniably most of what we do is geared toward history teachers more than literature teachers. In fact, many of our activities come from the wonderful sixth-grade Minnesota history textbook Northern Lights: Stories from Minnesota's Past that makes me want to be in sixth grade again! However, we English teachers did meet with a presenter who teaches English in Thief River Falls, MN about his use of historical documents in a themed unit on the American Dream in his literature course and the writing assignment that comes from it. Also, all of the activities can be adapted for use with literature--and I have already used some of them from last year!

Our workshop in the spring will be held in St. Paul, MN. We will be touring several historical sites in the Twin Cities and getting a "backstage peek" in order to be more knowledgeable about the places when/if we take our own students to them in the future. I'm very much looking forward to it. The Historical Society folks have also promised some sessions on Minnesota literature of the period that should be of more specific use to us English teachers, which will be great.