Applications Open for Regional Social Studies Teacher Workshops
This fall and winter the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) will host Institute for Louisiana Culture and History (ILCH) regional workshops for K–12 social studies educators in Monroe, Shreveport, Lake Charles, Port Allen, and New Orleans. The Saturday workshops will focus on 18th-century Louisiana history in alignment with the Louisiana Department of Education’s (LDOE) new 6th grade social studies standards and provide a $150 stipend for all participants. Learn more below about the workshops.
Schedule
Monroe (open to educators from north-central and northeast Louisiana)
Saturday, November 4, 2023 | 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Northeast Louisiana Delta African American Heritage Museum
Shreveport (open to educators from north-central and northwest Louisiana)
Saturday, December 9, 2023 | 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Louisiana State University-Shreveport
Lake Charles (open to educators from central and southwest Louisiana)
Saturday, January 20, 2024 | 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Virtual
Port Allen (open to educators from central and southeast Louisiana, including the Florida Parishes)
Saturday, February 24, 2024 | 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
New Orleans (open to educators from southeast Louisiana, including the Florida Parishes)
Saturday, March 9, 2024 | 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
The Helis Foundation John Scott Center
Application
Applications for the regional workshops are current closed.
Details
These one-day regional workshops will provide Louisiana-based public school social studies educators the opportunity to build their content knowledge by engaging with a historian and participating in social studies working sessions exploring how to use expanded standards-aligned content found on LEH’s 64 Parishes online encyclopedia, 64parishes.org, in the classroom.
Historian Dr. Erin Greenwald will take participating teachers on a deep dive into Louisiana’s colonial history. Greenwald is Vice President of Public Programs at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, where she also serves as editor in chief of 64 Parishes, a magazine and website dedicated to exploring Louisiana history and culture. Greenwald specializes in French Atlantic and Louisiana history and is the author of Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana. Prior to joining the LEH, she was curator of programs at the New Orleans Museum of Art and senior curator and historian at The Historic New Orleans Collection.
Louisiana social studies curriculum specialist Lindsay Bardes will lead hands-on teaching sessions. Bardes has been an educator in New Orleans for over fifteen years. Bardes earned her teaching certification from the University of New Orleans and her MEd from RELAY Graduate School of Education. She spent the first decade of her career teaching early elementary school, before taking on roles in school leadership, teacher coaching, and curriculum writing. After spending three years as the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for Social Studies at ReNEW Charter Schools, Bardes now serves as Schools Manager with New Schools for Baton Rouge, where she works with teachers, leaders, and schools to improve educational outcomes for students across the capital city.
The institute will provide a $150 stipend to all regional workshop participants on completion of the one-day workshop. Social studies educators and specialists employed by public schools in Louisiana and working with 6th grade social studies content are encouraged to apply. All four workshops will cover the same content. We encourage applicants to apply to participate in the workshop most closely located to their residence.
About 64 Parishes Encyclopedia and K–12 Educational Resources
Encompassing an award-winning quarterly print magazine and website, encyclopedia, and K–12 resources, LEH’s 64 Parishes explores Louisiana history and culture. 64 Parishes encyclopedia hosts over 1,200 entries about Louisiana accompanied by thousands of archival images, documents, and audio files. The encyclopedia is the LEH’s most-used resource, reaching hundreds of classrooms across Louisiana each year.
The institute is expanding encyclopedia content and adapting and grade-leveling encyclopedia entries for the classroom. As part of the effort to better serve students and teachers, institute staff has also rolled out new tools that allow teachers to search content by the new Louisiana social studies standards numbers.
The LDOE, one of LEH’s partners on the 64 Parishes encyclopedia expansion, has introduced new social studies standards to be rolled out in the 2023–24 school year. The new course frameworks will expand the study of Louisiana history and culture in the state’s public schools from third and eighth grade to nearly every grade. Together, LEH and LDOE are mapping these new social studies standards to the content on 64parishes.org, creating resources for teachers and students, including grade-level appropriate adaptations of key texts.