A chance to work at the Library of Congress with American Memory is one not to be missed. Thank you for the opportunity. The use of primary sources of all types in the study of history is my passion. I have edited three anthologies of sources recently for Newsweek, the College Board, and American Heritage. Now comes the opportunity to tap into the biggest collection of them all!

Deerfield Academy is a coeducational boarding school with students from around the world. This year I am teaching only Advanced Placement United States History (I'm the only active high school teacher to have chaired that discipline's Committee of Examiners.) Next year I will team teach only an interdisciplinary senior seminar with an environmentalist and a place-based literature guru. I'll supply the local history. Our first departmental intern from Wellesley will round out my responsibilities.

Beyond the needs of my classroom and Academy, I am perhaps even more interested in generating files and materials which elementary and middle school students can use successfully. I spend a great deal of my vacation time consulting with schools through Annenberg money, with a particular eye to curricular coherence and constructivist history. Most of these schools are inner-city: Memphis, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Miami, San Antonio, New York. These schools, in particular, with limited local resources, need to be brought on line en masse in an educationally meaningful way.

Hope it's not too muggy in Washington in late July for some early morning runs on the mall or along the Potomac. I also coach basketball at the high school and AAU levels. Just today, I was up in the hamlet of Green River, Vermont, clearing all of the winter storm debris from our meadows and lawns. The neighbors up the hill have just bought six yaks--five golden-haired and one off-white. What stately animals!

That's about it for now. It will be good to find out who all of the other mystery people behind that long concatenation of e-mail addresses are!


Kevin Randolph
Department Chair, History/Social Studies
North Shore Country Day School, Illinois
Link to Team Portfolio

While my interest in history teaching has remained firm for the last sixteen years, the way history is being taught in my own classroom has changed rather dramatically. A great deal of my own research has been in the area of what might be called popular culture and has included significant inquiry into subjects ranging from "Baseball and the American culture" to the American Utopian movement of the Nineteenth century. In each case it has always been done with an eye toward producing usable materials for my classroom. The production of teaching materials relating to American popular culture has quite naturally led to questions about how history is taught, and has caused me to explore a range of curricular changes ranging from co-designing an American Studies curriculum to creating a Pilot Project in my AP US History class integrating technology into the day-to-day classroom environment. My school allows me to both focus on teaching(my current teaching assignments are Advanced Placement US History-11th grade and Modern European History-10th grade)and doing independent research.

As an active and contributing member of the Organization of American Historians and the National Council of the Social Studies, I also take seriously the responsibility of working in my chosen field and demonstrating and promoting good history teaching. Participating in workshops, symposiums, and conferences is critical to staying active and current in the field of history. I have been fortunate to attend and participate in a number of these over the last seven years including:

1996 Workshop on the Frontier and American Culture at the Newberry Library
1995 National Standards Workshop on History sponsored by the NCSS
1995 Awarded an NEH Summer Fellowship to study "Major American Utopias"
1993 Symposiums on the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition at the Chicago Historical Society
1990 Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and the American Culture
1989 Awarded an NEH Summer Fellowship to study "Tocqueville and Democracy"

Just as important is the opportunity I have had to encourage good history teaching by sharing my ideas and projects with colleagues from around the country and around the world. The most recent presentations I have done occurred at:

1996 National Council for the Social Studies Annual conference in Washington, DC
1996 Midwest Technology Conferences in St. Louis, Missouri
1996 National Education Computing Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota
1995 National Council for the Social Studies Annual conference in Chicago,
Illinois
1994 National Council for the Social Studies Annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona
1993 National Council for the Social Studies Annual conference in Nashville, TN
1993 Committee for American Studies Education conference in Chicago, Illinois


Joelen Mulvaney
Chelsea School K-12 Teacher
Chelsea, Vermont
Link to Team Portfolio

My background as a scholar begins with fine arts. I have transformed this training into academic pursuits with visual arts and history intertwined. Primary ethnographic materials have influenced my painting as well as my teaching. My field of interests include the study of Woodland Native People birch bark culture, native practices of maple sugaring, radical activists from and in Vermont (1400-present), Vermont labor history, and immigration to Vermont. Having worked with Algonquin, Abenaki, Micmac, Penobscot and Passamoquoddy and numerous first generation immigrants, taking, documenting, and accessioning new material has been a humbling lesson in cultural sensitivity and challenging. I will share my experience conducting field work with my students, who have ranged over the years from adult learners, to college undergraduate, second, fifth, and eighth grades to high school.

Life long learning is the goal of public education and that primary research, in its myriad forms, the path to cultural survival. Small efforts on the part of many individuals, working from their own interest, can create a collective mass of popular history which empowers people by informing their decisions. Popular education has always been at the root of democracy. I live in Barre, Vermont with my husband and twin sixteen year old daughters. I love tending my herb garden in summer.


Nancy Kerwin
Chelsea School K-12 Media Specialist
Chelsea, VT
Link to Team Portfolio

I was born in New York City but began a life of travel when my father joined the military soon after by birth. I was privileged to grow up in Europe and Korea and I still have a wide streak of wanderlust in me.

My undergraduate work was in political economy with a double minor in history and philosophy. I have long enjoyed reading about the history of the United States and have traveled extensively in Pennsylvania and Virginia tracing Civil War sites.

I received a MEd. from the University of Vermont in 1990. My certification as an educator is in Library Media, although I prefer to be called an InformationTechnology Specialist as it better reflects the bulk of the computer work now associated with my field. I absolutely love computers. I am a librarian by vocation and a technologist by avocation

In my work I see less and less equality in education because of the information explosion. I am politically active to see that everyone has equal access to information through federal and state funding. I write myriad grants in an attempt to keep my students, who are generally poor, recipients of new technology.

In 1976 I moved to rural Vermont where today I live with my three children in a circa 1812 home with our dog and cat. I love libraries on rainy days and hiking in the mountains when the sun shines.