Teacher Workshop: Teaching Native American Histories and Cultures Through Primary Sources and Cultural Items

The Penn Museum is hosting a professional development workshop for K-12 educators on Saturday, November 7, from 9 AM to 12 PM, focused on teaching Native American histories and cultures through primary sources and cultural items. It's a morning session where teachers work alongside educators from the museum and the National Constitution Center to look at new ways of bringing these histories into the classroom.

A good chunk of the morning is spent in the museum's Native North America Gallery, which was developed in close collaboration with Native American scholars, artists, and community advisors. You'll get a guided tour of the space and a curator's talk about how the gallery came together and the stories behind the cultural items on view. The focus is on using those objects as primary sources—the kind of tangible history that can anchor a lesson.

From there, the workshop introduces two educational frameworks: the National Constitution Center's and the Penn Museum's new curriculum framework. Both are built around inquiry-based learning, so the goal is to give you tools to help students ask their own questions about Native American histories, cultures, and perspectives rather than just handing them a set of facts. If you're already working with these topics in your classroom, it's a chance to see how two different institutions are approaching the same subject.

It's free to attend, and you'll walk away with a $75 stipend and ACT 48 credits, plus parking reimbursement. Space is limited, so if you're a K-12 teacher in the area and this fits your curriculum, it's worth getting your name in early. The workshop runs from 9 AM to 12 PM at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.