About the NEH Summer Teaching Institute

Pandemics in History, Literature, and Today

July 11-22, 2022 — Fayetteville, Arkansas

This is a planned residential program for 36 K-12 educators. Depending on public health guidelines related to COVID-19, plans for a residential offering are subject to change.

At the institute “Pandemics in History, Literature, and Today” participants will delve deeply into the global history of the 1918 influenza pandemic, discuss literature related to its cultural and personal impact, work with archival, primary source materials from front-line workers of 1918, and compare these historical, literary, and archival descriptions with histories being gathered of the current pandemic.

The institute will demonstrate how medical content can be integrated into the study of global history and literature of the twentieth century. Participants will return to their middle, junior or high school classrooms with lesson plans that unite history, literature, rhetoric, and science, and they will become familiar with new approaches for building skills in source analysis, reasoning, and argumentation.

By implementing the full “inquiry arc” and adding interdisciplinary content such as art, music, and literature this institute goes beyond the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards (2017) to emphasize forms of literacy beyond traditional reading and writing and provides tools to educators who acknowledge the diversity of their students and the varying mediums of sources in which those students can connect.

Working with the main themes of history, literature, narrative, medicine, and memory will prepare participants to make connections for students of how the past is created from our current lives.

The institute allows 36 K-12 educators to study a humanities topic with a team of experienced scholars. Because this larger format emphasizes the range of perspectives that can be brought to a topic, an institute typically has more and longer meetings per week than a seminar. Project leaders and participants mutually explore connections between scholarship and teaching, and some time is provided for work on individual or collaborative projects.