Avondale School District, an achievement-oriented learning community focused on student leadership and success in academics, the arts and athletics, is pleased to announce that Avondale High School social studies teacher Kourtney Thompson will travel to Clare College, Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, to attend a weeklong seminar entitled, ‘The Civil Rights Movement.’

Led by renowned historian Anthony J. Badger of Clare College, Cambridge University and held July 15-21, seminar participants will include K–12 teachers, library educators and National Park Service interpreters who were selected by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in a competitive process. The seminar will explore how an economically and politically powerless racial minority wrested dramatic change from a determined and entrenched white majority in the American South. It will examine the changing nature of protest from the 1940s to the 1950s; the roles of Martin Luther King, Jr., local movements and women; and the relative importance of violence and non-violence. Participants will discuss how they can use the experiences of schoolchildren, teachers and college students in the crises of the 1950s and 1960s to bring home the realities of the Civil Rights Movement in the classroom.

Participants will work with primary source documents provided by professors and the Gilder Lehrman Collection, and in addition will receive reading materials, room and board, transportation for tours and travel reimbursement.

About the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is a nonprofit organization devoted to the improvement of history education. The Institute has developed an array of programs for schools, teachers, and students that now operate in all fifty states, including a website that features the more than 60,000 unique historical documents in the Gilder Lehrman Collection, www.gilderlehrman.org. Each year the Institute offers support and resources to tens of thousands of teachers, and through them enhances the education of more than a million students. The Institute’s programs have been recognized by awards from the White House, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Organization of American Historians.

About Avondale
Avondale School District is a collaborative community of teachers, staff and families working together to assure student success. The district, encompassing portions of Auburn Hills, Bloomfield Township, Troy and Rochester Hills, celebrates the richness of a diverse student population and strives to be a model school community that prepares students to be lifelong learners and contributing citizens to the world that awaits them upon graduation. Learn more about Avondale Schools, an AdvancED certified district, at www.avondale.k12.mi.us.