Department Updates

Serving Our Community

Western's History Department, with 16 award-winning faculty members dedicated to enhancing the public's understanding of and appreciation for history, is active in several community outreach and public service programs, with a particular focus on enriching the teaching of history in the region's secondary schools. In addition to our Annual History Conference, we also provide professional development opportunitities for history teachers through our "Teaching American History" federal grant-supported workshops and summer travel-study trips. Check out the latest Community Outreach News from the WIU History Department!

Dr. Ute Chamberlin presents at the WIU History Conference

Dr. Ed Woell speaks to teachers at the Spring "TAH" Grant workshop

"Teaching American History" Grants

Through a long-standing partnership with the Hancock-McDonough Regional Office of Education (ROE 26), WIU's History Department has participated in a series of three U.S. Department of Education "Teaching American History" (TAH) grants to enhance the teaching of U.S. history in the secondary schools in a twenty-one-county region surrounding Macomb. The Department's second multi-year TAH grant wound down in the Summer of 2008, just as its third three-year TAH grant began. Each year of each of the grants, for the past seven years, the participating teachers have developed teaching strategies and resources that are then provided free to all secondary schools and Regional Offices of Education in the twenty-one county region.

The new TAH grant involves a series of summer travel-study trips for twenty-seven history teachers in the region, led by WIU faculty members, combined with semi-annual on-campus workshops led by WIU History faculty members, to prepare teachers for the summer trips and provide opportunities for additional teachers to enhance their understanding of the nation's history. Approximately seventy teachers from the twenty-one-county region attend each of these workshops. The twenty-seven teachers traveling each the summer are selected from those attending the on-campus workshops during the previous year.

In the first year of this three-year grant, workshops were held in Fall 2008, with presentations by Dr. Larry Balsamo, Professor Emeritus, on the Battle of Vicksburg, and Dr. Barclay Key on violence within the Civil Rights Movement, and the Spring 2009, with presentations by Dr. Ed Woell on the French origins of New Orleans, and Dr. Peter Cole on the historical evolution of New Orleans as a city. In the Summer of 2009, a group of twenty-seven of the history teachers who attended both workshops traveled to Memphis, New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, and Vicksburg with Dr. Key and Dr. Balsamo. The themes of this trip were slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, southern culture, and Civil Rights.

In Summer 2010, after two on-campus workshops in Fall 2009 featuring presentations by Dr. Virginia Jelatis and Dr. Richard Filipink in October, and Dr. Peter Cole and Dr. Walter Kretchik in December, the grant will take teachers to Boston, Massachusetts, under the leadership of Dr. Jelatis and Dr. Balsamo. In the third year of the grant, following on-campus workshops in Fall 2010, the Summer trip will take teachers to Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia.

Teachers participating in each of these trips, as in the Summer travel-study trips in past years, prepare a DVD containing a variety of teaching strategies and resources, including unit and lesson plans, based on their visits to museums and historic sites. A copy of each year's DVD is given free to every school in the twenty-one county region, for possible use in their history classrooms.

The Department's Project Director for the TAH grant is Dr. Virginia Boynton, Department Chair. The History Coordinator for the grant is Professor Emeritus, Dr. Larry Balsamo. Either would be happy to answer your questions about this program.

WIU History Conference participants at a morning session

Annual WIU History Conference

Each Spring, the WIU History Department hosts the day-long WIU Annual History Conference for teachers of history as well as other interested individuals. After a series of morning presentations by History Department faculty, the conference culminates with lunch and an afternoon Keynote Address by a notable guest speaker. Conference Organizer Dr. Ed Woell or History Department Chair Dr. Virginia Boynton would be happy to answer any questions you might have.

The 35th Annual History Conference will be held on Saturday, May 1, 2010. Check here for further details in the future. Illinois public school teachers may receive Professional Development Unit credits for attending the conference if they wish.

The 34th Annual History Conference was held on Saturday, May 2, 2009. Dr. Edward Woell, the History Conference Organizer, arranged for the Larry T. Balsamo Keynote Address to be given in 2009 by Dr. Orville Vernon Burton, a Distinguished Teacher/Scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Associate Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.  An author or editor of eight books, most notably In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina, Professor Burton spoke after lunch about the role of ordinary South Carolinians in the landmark set of cases known as Brown v. Board of Education, considered by many scholars to be the foremost departure point of the modern civil rights movement. In addition, twelve WIU History faculty members discussed a wide array of topics during the three morning sessions. As in the past, each conference participant was provided with a packet of handouts full of additional information on all twelve talks.

WIU History Conference participants

History Dept's Community Service in the News