Grantee Name: Borrego Springs Unified School District
Project Name: DeAnza Liberty Fellowship
Project Director: Consuela Smith
Funding: $967,456
Number of Teachers Served: 120
Number of School Districts Served: 30
Number of Students Served: 59,000
Grade Levels: Grades 5-12
Partners: University of San Diego, American Institute of Historians and History Educators, Bill of Rights Institute, Civil War Society, American Institute for History Education
Topics: Year 1, Building of early America; Year 2, Empire vs. the colonies; Year 3, Agrarian South and the industrial North
Methods: Year 1, Building of early America; Year 2, Empire vs. the colonies; Year 3, Agrarian South and the industrial North The DeAnza Liberty Fellowship will increase teacher knowledge of and appreciation for traditional American history, resulting in improved academic achievement in students. The project will allow the consortium of districts to design traditional, yet innovative, American history curricula and lesson-units that will provide students with a substantive historical continuum, not a series of disconnected events. Through web-conferencing distance learning sessions, the project will provide Saturday sessions during the school year and days during the summer, including field study trips, emphasizing historical content and teaching strategies with leading historians, pedagogy experts, and master teachers. Teacher-leaders will be trained to disseminate the benefits of the project to teachers throughout their home districts. Teachers will examine the ideological roots and precedents that formed colonial America, compare and contrast the ideological and historical developments that greatly increased the rift between the British Empire and the colonies, contrast the agrarian South with the developing market-economy of the Northern states during the 19th century, contrast American societies with totalitarian regimes during the first half of the 20th century, and study the Cold War.