Gerald L. Early, Ph.D., the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English and director of the Center for the Humanities, both in Arts & Sciences, has received a $230,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) Division of Education Programs.
The grant will support the Center for the Humanities’ 2007 Summer Institute on “Teaching Jazz as American Culture.”
First offered in 2005, the institute helps high school teachers examine how interdisciplinary approaches to popular music, specifically jazz, can enrich a variety of humanities subjects, broaden understanding of American history and literature and reveal new perspectives on race and gender in the United States.
The 2007 installment will expand the curriculum to include questions of how American jazz has influenced the music of other countries and how musicians in other countries have reshaped jazz. The curriculum also will look more closely at the formation of the “Tin Pan Alley song” and its impact on jazz.
“‘Teaching Jazz’ is intended to re-imagine how popular culture can be taught,” Early said. “It is hoped that the Summer Institute will offer teachers new and engaging ways to teach popular music as a humanities subject.
“The 2005 institute was a huge success, beyond our wildest hopes. Everyone was so inspired by it. It will be a tough act to follow but we intend that the 2007 institute will be better.”
One of only 10 NEH Summer Institutes for 2007, “Teaching Jazz” also has been designated part of “We the People,” an NEH initiative designed to explore significant events and themes in American history and culture.
Instructors will include some of the nation’s leading scholars of jazz music and American culture, including WUSTL’s Patrick Burke, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. The curriculum will approach jazz from social, cultural, political, technical, aesthetic and international perspectives and participants will have numerous opportunities to attend live jazz concerts.
Registration, which is limited to about 30 applicants, is open to high school teachers from a variety of disciplines, including English, history, social studies, art and music, and to qualified non-teachers, such as high school librarians, media specialists and museum staff.
Further details will be announced in a forthcoming brochure with additional updates posted in future issues of the Center for the Humanities’ publications Belles Lettres and The Figure in the Carpet, both available online at cenhum.artsci.wustl.edu. For more information, call 935-5576.
The NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes for School Teachers are designed to present the best available scholarship on important humanities issues and works taught in the nation’s schools.
Participating teachers compare and synthesize perspectives offered by faculty with the aim of developing improved teaching materials for their classrooms.