Envisioning America

Using Works of Art in the American History Classroom

In 2004, the Ackland Art Museum began an ongoing collaboration with the History Connect! Project of the Durham Public Schools and the National Paideia Center (NPC). K-12 Social Studies Curriculum Specialist Darnell Tabron and the NPC’s Associate Director of Training Cheryl Treadway worked with a group of fifteen Durham public school teachers, who then helped Ackland educators develop lesson plans for American history classrooms using works of American art in the Ackland Art Museum’s permanent collection. The lesson plans you see below are the result of this project. Envisioning America was made possible through a grant from the Wyeth Foundation.

Free CDs containing the current set of lesson plans are available to teachers.
To request a CD, please contact Beth Shaw McGuire at 919-962-0479 (voice) or (919) 962-0837 (Teletypewriter).

Each lesson plan can be viewed online and downloaded in a PDF or Doc file. The File Attachments in the Lesson plans can be downloaded from the HTML page in this website. Please read the disclaimers below to learn the "do's and don'ts" of using this material. Thank you.

MIDDLE SCHOOL:

Child Labor – A Study Using Lewis Hine’s Photos (3rd-5th grade)
Do We See What We Know? (8th grade)
Fact and Opinion (Can be adapted for grades 2 -12)

HIGH SCHOOL:

Taking Things Personally (10th grade)
The Cost of Saving (10th grade)
Working in the World (10th grade)
The Civil War (11th grade)
Territorial Expansion (11th grade)
John Brown , Then and Now (11th grade)
History, Literature, Art: Connections (11th grade)
A Nation in (Some) Context (11th grade)