Crossing Divides: Connecting Veterans, Teachers and Students through Oral History

Virginia Tech will host a two-week summer institute, from June 19-30, 2023 to enable twenty-five K-12 educators to incorporate veterans studies into their curricula and train them to do oral history projects as class assignments. Faculty in the Center for Humanities, Department of English, and College of Education will team up to host our first institute on veterans and oral history. The first week of the institute will be in residence at the Athenaeum at Virginia Tech's University Libraries in Blacksburg, VA, where participants will engage in a series of workshops with oral historians, educators, scholars, and veterans. During the second week, we will travel to Washington D.C., touring the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, exploring the Military Women's Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, and visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and World War II Memorial. We plan to host 25 participants, ideally educators of grades 9-12, who comprise a range of civilians, veterans, and military family members. We expect participants to be teachers of History, Social Science, Civics, English Language and Literature, and Communications. Answering NEH's call for "Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War," this institute seeks to help bridge the military-civilian divide by teaching educators to engage veterans in their local communities and to inspire dialogue between veterans and students.