Middle School Harlem Historians
Myself and one of the project collaborators receiving the ING Unsung Heroes Grant in 2013.
In collaboration with two middle schools teachers at a local middle school in Harlem, this initiative that began in Fall/Winter 2013 and concluded in Spring 2014, uses local history to explicitly improve writing skills and students' motivation to write. These three 6-week cycles have been immensely successful, and preliminary results suggest that the MSHH curriculum (an abbreviated version of the Youth Historians curriculum) has greatly improved students' writing skills.
This project was generously funded through the ING (now Voya) Unsung Heroes Grant, which my collaborators and I were awarded for 2013-2014. Please visit the ING Unsung Heroes website for more information.
In addition, this project was also in partnership with the Literacy Teachers Initiative (LTI) at the Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME).
In December 2014, this work was accepted for publication in Voices from the Middle, a top peer-reviewed journal for middle school. This article will be released in Fall 2015. See Goldenberg, B.M., Wintner, A, and Berg, C. (in press). "Middle School Harlem Historians: Motivating Urban Students Through Community Based History." Voices from the Middle.
Educating Harlem
"In collaboration with the Teachers College Institute for Urban and Minority Education and the Center on History and Education, the Program in History and Education seeks to establish a scholarly community focused on investigating the history of education, broadly defined, in 20th century Harlem. All of the forces that shaped education in the 20th century U.S. ran through Harlem, often in amplified form because of the particular confluence of people, ideas, and institutions in this community. Nonetheless, Harlem remains understudied in the history of education." --via Educating Harlem Website
My historical scholarship, currently around youth activism in Harlem, is in coordination with the larger Educating Harlem initiative. Please visit the Educating Harlem website for more about the larger goals of this initiative.