SJSU to Host NEH Summer Institute

national endowment for the humanities logoNEH Grant Given to SJSU to Host a Summer Institute!

Dedicated to giving instructors opportunities to extend their mastery of the subjects they teach, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has given San José State University a grant to host a Summer Institute for School Teachers focusing on “The California Immigrant Experience through Literature and Theatre.” Led by Dr. Matthew Spangler and Dr. David Kahn, and featuring workshops led by prominent figures such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Luis Valdez, Kinan Valdez, Sara Zatz, and Andrew Lam, institute participants will explore immigrant experiences through discussion, performance creation, and immersion in the theatrical experience. This is the second time that the prestigious NEH Summer Institute opportunity has been awarded to Professors Kahn and Spangler; a previous version of the workshop was offered at SJSU in 2014.

Composed of twenty-five K-12 school teachers competitively selected from around the country, the Institute will provide a framework for understanding political borders between geographic territories and social borders between groups of people, intercultural interactions between settled and immigrant communities, and changing family and gender dynamics within discrete immigrant communities.

Visits to San Juan Bautista, Angel Island, and San Francisco’s many immigrant districts will ground the texts being read in real places, and help to connect teachers to the lived experience and history of the diverse peoples who together comprise California. Hands-on learning opportunities will help participating teachers develop teaching materials focusing on immigration, enriching their students’ experiences in the classroom.

“This was a wonderful experience in every way,” remarked a participant of the 2014 workshop. “It will have a definite and direct impact on my teaching beginning with my professional goal next year: to find more ways to get students to adapt parts of novels into scenes that they can perform in the classroom. I also have learned so much about immigration that will inform my teaching of countless books in the future!”

The workshop is expected to grow even more this year, and the Institute instructors are as eager to share their experiences as the participants are to engage with them. Running from July 17th to July 31st, the Institute culminates in a public performance on July 29th, in which Institute participants share what they learned, allowing the larger community to benefit from the rich learning experiences that characterize the Summer Institute.

For more information, please visit http://immigrationtheatreinstitute.org/

By Kaitlynn Magnuson