Virtual Workshops for Educators
This page provides more information about past and upcoming Virtual Workshops for Educators organized by National Women's History Museum!
Upcoming Workshops
July 11, 2024 at 4pm EST
Educators will also have the chance to engage in a conversation around their existing curriculum and collaborate on incorporating these strategies into current work. This workshop will be co-facilitated by NWHM museum educators and Dr. Katherine Perrotta, Assistant Professor of Middle Grades and Secondary Education at Mercer University Tift College of Education.
This session is required for all selected 2024 For Educators, By Educators participants but is open to other educators as well.
Past Workshops
Silences in the Archive: Women’s History and (lack of) Primary Resources
Held April 17, 2024
Many learners expect archives and collections to be comprehensive. If a document isn’t listed or a story isn’t included, it must not exist! Yet archives and collections themselves contain silences. In the past, people made decisions that certain primary sources were not worthy of preservation or study and therefore deliberately excluded them from collections—those decisions created these silences. When it comes to the history of women—particularly women of color, immigrant women, and working-class women—these silences are even more deafening. How can you understand or learn the history of women in the United States when there is a lack of primary sources on which to base that inquiry?
Check out the related lesson plan here.
C3 Framework for Social Studies Standards and Historical Empathy
Held May 4, 2023
Explore how learners can use the practice of historical empathy to examine the role and impact of women throughout history. Based on the work of, and facilitated by, Dr. Katherine Perrotta, assistant professor of middle grades and secondary education at Mercer University Tift College of Education, educators engage in discussions about the C3 Framework for Social Studies Standards, its ties to historical empathy, and its use in the classroom with focus on the example of pathbreaking civil rights activist Elizabeth Jennings. Known as the “Nineteenth-Century Rosa Parks,” Elizabeth Jennings successfully challenged segregation ordinances on New York City streetcars in 1854. The National Women's History Museum is partnering with workshop facilitator Dr. Katherine Perrotta to conduct a study to explore teacher perspectives on historical empathy now that you have completed the workshop. Once you've watched the video, please consider participating in our survey.
Dr. Perrotta created a series of handouts associated with this workshop, which you can find below:
- C3 Framework Alignment with Historical Empathy
- Instructional Strategies and Assessments
- Suggested Sources for Historical Empathy InquiriesC3 Framework Dimension 3
- “A Wholesome Verdict:” Using Historical Empathy Strategies to Analyze Elizabeth Jennings v. The Third Avenue Railway Company
This recorded session represented work done over a 3-part series on Historical Empathy and the C3 Framework held in 2022 and hosted by Dr. Perrotta. The PowerPoints associated with that series can be found below:
Media Literacy and Primary Sources
Held February 23 and March 2, 2023
When we read texts, we bring a whole world of conscious and unconscious knowledge with us. Facilitated by Dr. Sarah K. Miles, (Ph.D., History. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) this two session Virtual Workshop for Educators delved into the history of print media and reading culture to examine how the creation and consumption of texts have changed over time. It also explored how teachers can use this history to teach students to be careful readers of media in the present. Each of these workshops in the two-part series introduced key concepts from reading culture and print media studies, providing a brief overview from history, media studies, and communication. Then, using digitally accessible material from two time periods of American history, educators were introduced to a sample activity they could undertake with students.
In each session, the activities showed how to help students contextualize print media—finding relevant information about publications, authors, and readers as well as making inferences about readership and editorial intent based on the historical object itself. Participants worked through what questions they can ask of print media and how these sources can help students and educators understand the societies and cultures in which they were produced. We will conclude by discussing how historic media compares to contemporary media and how educators can help students translate the skills of critical media literacy to the digital content they interact with every day.
In 2024, the National Women's History Museum is proud to be part of the Library of Congress's Teaching with Primary Sources Consortium. Our Virtual Workshops for Educators in 2024 are sponsored in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Eastern Region Program, coordinated by Waynesburg University.
