Teaching programs continue to grow: Seattle, Ohio, Florida
Bard students read letters from the ALBA collections. Photo David Rodríguez Solás.
Now in its fifth year, ALBA’s educational program aims to reach high school teachers of social studies and Spanish who will use archival sources related to the Spanish Civil War in their classrooms. Three separate programs filled the calendar during the spring term; three more are expected in the fall.
Last March, ALBA board members James Fernández, Tony Geist, and Peter Carroll joined with the Center for Spanish Studies and the Division of Spanish and Portuguese of the University of Washington to co-host a Saturday development day in Seattle, mostly for local Spanish teachers. The teachers were introduced to a variety of source materials. The seminar focused on U.S. policy in the Spanish Civil War and related human rights issues of civilian casualties and showed how volunteers from the Pacific Northwest participated in the struggles.
In May, ALBA returned to the campus of the University of South Florida for a fourth session with Tampa high school social studies teachers. ALBA explained how the study of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the civil war in Spain fit within the state’s curricula guidelines. ALBA Vice Chair Fraser Ottanelli drew on local resources to assist the project.
Thanks to a matching grant from the Ohio Humanities Council, ALBA Chair Sebastiaan Faber leads the second week-long teaching institute at Oberlin College, which will accommodate 20 high school teachers from around the state.
For the coming fall, ALBA is looking to New York, New Jersey, and Chicago, Illinois, for additional programs. As always, the goal of these sessions is to reach teachers, and through them, their students, to keep alive the history of American activism.
Peter N. Carroll chairs ALBA’s committee on teaching.
It is a shame that the Spanish Civil War isn’t more widely taught in American schools. Hopefully this program can help change that.