Crafting Freedom NEH Landmarks Workshop 2012

Information for Prospective Applicants: 

“Crafting Freedom: Black Artisans, Entrepreneurs and Abolitionists of the Antebellum Upper South” simply known as the “Crafting Freedom Workshop” is an NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshop for K-12 educators. It is funded by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the thirteenth and fourteenth sessions will be offered in the summer of 2012. The workshop engages participants, also known as “NEH Summer Scholars,” in intensive study using the power of place to motivate exploration of the lives and works of several significant antebellum African Americans. These “freedom crafters” created opportunities and achieved greater freedom for themselves and others through their actions and ingenuity, through their works of art and craft, and through their spoken and written words.

The Crafting Freedom Workshop has reached hundreds of educators from 38 states over several summers since 2004. It has consistently been rated “excellent” with many deeming it one of the best professional development experiences of their careers. See participant feedback here.

To see a video created by a Crafting Freedom participant, Wallace Monteiro click here. Wallace is an English teacher from Brazil and we very much appreciate his  heartfelt, YouTube tribute to the 2011 workshop.

Next summer Crafting Freedom will be offered twice: Session I: June 21–26, 2012 and Session II: July 12–17, 2012. Each session will serve 40 participants.

For detailed guidelines on how to apply, see application guidelines.

The remainder of this information page is organized around questions prospective applicants often ask.

What are the landmarks to be visited and topics to be explored?

The Union Tavern, Milton Presbyterian Church, the Burwell School and Historic Stagville Plantation are the landmarks to be visited.

The Union Tavern, in the village of Milton, NC is a “hands-on” furniture museum featuring furniture made by free black cabinetmaker, Thomas Day (1801-ca.1861). The Tavern was Day’s furniture shop and home from 1848 until his death. There he built the largest furniture business in the state and became one of the most successful black businessmen in the South. He has been described by the New York Times as a “major antebellum figure” because of his expert craftsmanship, his economic success, and increasingly, because of his ties to abolitionists in the North. Laurel C. Sneed, workshop director, has been researching Thomas Day since 1995 when her ground-breaking research uncovered his family origins in southern Virginia. She will speak about Thomas Day’s formative years and how he came to Milton, as well as about findings re: his ties to northern abolitionists. Jerome Bias, a black cabinetmaker following in Day’s footsteps, will demonstrate traditional cabinetmaking techniques and discuss Day’s furniture from a woodworking perspective. Joseph Graves, an interpreter at the Union Tavern, will speak about Thomas Day as a successful business man.

The Milton Presbyterian Church is just a few steps from the Tavern. Vanessa Richmond Graves, (no relation to Joseph) will lead a discussion about Day as a father to three children and as member of the predominantly white church where he constructed the walnut pews still in use today. Fred Motley, a Thomas Day re-enactor, will portray Thomas Day reading a letter he wrote to his daughter when she was at school in the North.

The Burwell School in historic Hillsborough, the colonial capital of North Carolina, was a boarding school for elite white girls from the area and home to Elizabeth Keckly * (1817-1907) who was enslaved there as a teenager and young adult. Keckly became the most important black woman in the fashion and dress design business during the Civil War era. She also wrote a best-selling memoir or “slave narrative” that describes her youth at the Burwell School and her later years behind the scenes at the Lincoln White House as a dress designer and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln. William A. Andrews, internationally acclaimed scholar of African-American slave narratives, will discuss this literary genre and how it developed during the slavery era. He will place Keckly’s postbellum narrative in historical context and compare and contrast it with others. Sneed will lead a discussion on the ways the lives of Keckly and Day intersected in Hillsborough and beyond. Katharine A. Paulhamus, director of the Burwell School, will provide a brief biography of Keckly, focusing on her formative years and major experiences that shaped her. Participants learn how Keckly, as a slave, operated a successful dressmaking business that supported a household of 17 people; how she “crafted freedom” by purchasing herself and her only child; and how she leveraged her elite status as a White House insider to start a charity for black veterans of the Civil War. Participants will tour the school and grounds. In connection with these presentations, African-American seamstress/dress designer, Nellie “Chubb’s” Miles, will make a presentation entitled “Soul-Stitching with Chubb’s” about how she learned to sew growing up as a sharecropper’s daughter on a tobacco plantation near Hillsborough.

* “Keckly” without a second “e” is how she spelled her own name. “Keckley” is how many spell it, but scholars have encouraged us to respect her own spelling.

Historic Stagville Plantation, just North of Durham, was the largest plantation in North Carolina in the mid-nineteenth century. It has rare, intact slave quarters and structures built by enslaved craftspeople. At Stagville, NEH Summer Scholars will develop an appreciation of the range of skilled artisanship required to sustain a large antebellum plantation. They will witness the impressive handiwork of brick masons, carpenters, and others. There will be presentations made by site staff, as well as by workshop faculty. Juanita M. Holland, scholar of 19th century African–American art and material culture, will illuminate the kinds of art and craft activities that enslaved people were involved with. Historian, Reginald Hildebrande will discuss the role religion and spirituality played in the lives of the enslaved at Stagville and in the lives of 19th century African-Americans in general.

What will the schedule and workload be like?

Crafting Freedom will take place over an intensive five day period which starts on a Thursday evening and ends on the following Tuesday at noon. Participants spend over 40 intensive hours during the day and several evenings in lectures/presentations, in exploration and study at the landmarks, in instructional development activities and in independent study or research. Instructional development sessions focus on the abundant material freely available on the NEH-funded Crafting Freedom website, www.craftingfreedom.org. Scholars and master teachers who helped to develop the website will introduce the instructional material to participants. Click here for a printable summary of the workshop schedule.

There will be some assigned readings prior to attending the workshop. Additional media and material will be provided at the workshop. Thursday evening will begin with an orientation and presentation of workshop themes. On Friday and Saturday, a tour bus will take participants to the landmarks where site interpreters, as well as Crafting Freedom faculty will make presentations. Sunday and Monday are reserved for more lectures, instructional planning and independent study to include: hands-on craft demonstrations and activities, an orientation to the extensive research resources such as Documenting the American South on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before leaving the workshop on Tuesday, each participant will turn in a plan for a proposed lesson or instructional activity to be implemented during the 2012-2013 school year. Participants will be asked to incorporate primary source documents, lesson plans, handouts, web videos and/or powerpoints from the Crafting Freedom website into their instructional plan.

 

Who will be leading the workshop?

Laurel C. Sneed, Executive Director of the Apprend Foundation, Inc., will be the workshop leader. She also serves as the director of the Thomas Day Education Project (TDEP) which she co-founded with her husband, Charles “Charlie” D. Sneed in 1994. Charlie is assistant director of the workshop. He is a former journalist and classroom teacher who will be involved in all “behind the scenes” logistics, contracts, and financial matters pertaining to “Crafting Freedom.”

Laurel is an educator and has been an instructional designer and producer of educational media and materials for over 30 years. In addition, in 1995 she conducted the research that discovered Thomas Day’s origins in southern Virginia in consultation with a team of historians led by John Hope Franklin. She has been researching Day and the free black experience ever since. The Thomas Day Education Project (TDEP) began offering teacher workshops and creating media/materials on Thomas Day and related topics in the late 1990s. In 1999-2002, TDEP produced, with generous NEH funding, “Exploring the World of Thomas Day,” an interactive multimedia instructional game based on the research of Day’s origins. It received an Award of Excellence from Technology and Learning magazine and was named one of the top 25 educational software programs in the nation in 2003. All workshop participants will receive this resource. Laurel Sneed also served as executive producer of the “Crafting Freedom Materials Project” a freely available web-based resource, funded by NEH, that will be a major resource to be focused on in the Crafting Freedom Workshop.

What academic resources will be available?

NEH Summer Scholars are encouraged to bring a laptop computer because of the focus on the Crafting Freedom website materials. For those who do not have a laptop, there will be a few computers available, as well as some printed copies of textual material downloaded from the Crafting Freedom website. On the 4th day of the workshop ( Monday) NEH Summer Scholars will tour the various collections of the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill where they will learn about the vast digitized Documenting the American South collection and other primary and secondary source material housed at Wilson. A few lectures will also take place at Wilson.

When and where will Crafting Freedom take place?

There are two sessions of the workshop serving 40 participants each: Session I: June 21 – 26, 2012 and Session II: July 12–17, 2012.

The workshop will take place in the heart of the Research Triangle area of North Carolina near the border of Chapel Hill/Durham, about 25 miles west of Raleigh and 10 miles west of the Raleigh–Durham (RDU) Airport, an East Coast hub for several airlines.

How much is the stipend and what does it cover?

NEH Summer Scholars attending Crafting Freedom will receive a $1200 stipend upon completion of the workshop. From the stipend, some costs will be deducted such as workshop hotel costs, a few meals, and tour fees. Participants must pay for transportation to the workshop in advance of receiving the stipend. Generally participants outside of North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina fly into RDU, but some drive or take Amtrak. In most instances the $1200 stipend covers all costs : hotel, meal, round trip airfare/other transportation expenses to the Workshop, tour fees and a few group meals when touring sites or working at the hotel.

May I get CEU or other credit?

Though the Crafting Freedom workshop is not able to provide official CEUs or other credits, we will furnish all NEH Summer Scholars with a workshop certificate verifying the number of hours they participated in this professional development experience. This certificate may be presented to the official in one’s school or district who is authorized to approve in-service credit.

What and where are the accommodations?

Since Crafting Freedom is a “residential” educational experience and because there will be some required activities in the evenings, all participants are urged to stay at the workshop hotel complex. The cost for one room (for one person) for five nights is approximately $450.00; the cost for five nights goes down to $225.o0 if the room is shared. Subject to a moderate change, the room rate includes a buffet breakfast, high-speed internet access, a business center with several computers, a 24-hour fitness center, and a pool. We will help find a room-mate for those desiring to share a room with a fellow NEH Summer Scholar. There are a few restaurants within easy walking distance of the workshop hotel site, carry-out services and some meals will be provided when touring or working at the hotel. More details on accommodations will be provided upon acceptance.

Am I eligible to apply to Crafting Freedom?

Full-time and part-time classroom teachers and librarians in public, charter, independent, and religiously affiliated schools, as well as home-schooling parents, are eligible to participate. Other K-12 school personnel, including administrators, substitute teachers, and classroom professionals, are eligible to participate, subject to available space. We encourage individuals from all grade levels and disciplines to apply.

How do I apply?

For detailed information on how to apply, see application guidelines.

The most important part of the completed application is the one page ( double or single spaced) essay. It should include information about the applicant’s professional background and interest in the specific subject of the workshop. It should also address any special perspectives, skills, or experiences that the applicant will bring to the workshop; and, how the experience would enhance one’s teaching or capacity to share knowledge with others. If the applicant has participated in an NEH workshop before, it would be helpful to know how the workshop impacted his or her teaching. In addition to the essay, each applicant must submit a letter of recommendation from the principal or department head of his or her teaching institution or the head of a home-schooling association in support of his or her application. A brief resume is also required. Note: Individual applicants are allowed to apply to up to TWO separate projects (NEH Landmarks Workshops, NEH Summer Seminars or NEH Summer Institutes); however, it is possible to participate in only ONE project per summer.

Completed applications should be postmarked no later than March 1, 2012, and should be addressed as follows:

Laurel C. Sneed, Director
Crafting Freedom
P.O. Box 13144
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709.

For further information, please do not hesitate to contact Laurel C. Sneed at lsneed@apprendfound.org.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.