Indiana Academy teacher wins national ‘Teaching America 250’ grant to celebrate American history
A teacher at The Indiana Academy in Muncie is Indiana’s winner of a national grant that aims to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. IPR’s Thomas Ouellette reports.
Sean Scott says rather than focusing specifically on the Declaration of Independence with the grant, he’ll highlight the document’s impact on President Abraham Lincoln.
He says the $5,000 dollar award will allow him to fully fund field trips to multiple sites of historical importance to Lincoln, including the presidential library and Lincoln’s burial site in Springfield, Illinois.
“This will give the students a chance to get hands on, see and touch and read documents, from different parts of Lincoln’s life and career that they’re interested in,” Scott said.
The award will completely cover the cost of transportation, food, chaperones, and a t-shirt for each student.
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Scott says he believes it’s important now more than ever for students to understand the importance of the Declaration of Independence and the way it shaped Lincoln’s administration.
“The Declaration is really significant in just, you know, shaping him, influencing his ideas of what good government looked like and what the ideals that the United States stood for,” said Scott. “Why he had to wage a war to keep those ideals in the forefront of people’s minds.”
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Scott says the end goal of the project is for students to be able to present in a museum style about Lincoln’s life at times when the Declaration of Independence was at the forefront of his mind.
“We could invite some local school groups and they can come through and have a 30 minute presentation where our students could pretend like they heard Lincoln give his speech at Peoria in 1854, and they can talk about the response to that,” said Scott.
Students will take the field trips to Illinois later this spring.
Thomas Ouellette is our reporter and producer. Contact him at thomas.ouellette@bsu.edu
