NEH Awards Grant to Mercer for Intensive Course on Southern History for Teachers

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Mercer University $215,000 for an institute for high school teachers in summer 2010. The institute will be a five-week course on Southern history, titled “Cotton Culture in the South from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement,” and will be open to 22 high school teachers from across the country.

The institute begins in July 2010 and will be directed by Dr. Sarah E. Gardner, associate professor and chair of history and director of Mercer’s Southern Studies Program. Dr. Douglas Thompson, associate professor of interdisciplinary studies and Southern studies, and Dr. David A. Davis, assistant professor of English, will serve as the institute’s faculty. The institute will also include a number of guest faculty who are experts in Southern history and culture.

“The institute will create an engaged learning community of high school teachers, Mercer faculty and visiting experts who will share ideas about an extremely complex and often poorly understood aspect of Southern history and culture,” Dr. Davis said.

The NEH announced the grant last week as part of its Institutes for School Teachers program. The project was also selected for recognition as part of the NEH’s “We the People” Initiative, which funds programs “designed to encourage and enhance the teaching, study and understanding of American history, culture and democratic principles.”

“It was extremely rewarding to earn this grant with our first submission. Dr. Davis and Dr. Thompson did a wonderful job to create a curriculum that not only met the institute standards, but also earned recognition as a ‘We the People’ project,” Dr. Gardner said. “The NEH sees its ‘We the People’ initiative as a leader in ‘bringing about a renaissance in knowledge about American history and principles among all our citizens,’ so its recognition of our summer institute as playing a vital role in that mission is quite an honor.”

Dr. Thompson said that Mercer has long been a leading program for Southern studies at the undergraduate level, and bringing high school teachers to campus to experience the rigors of the program will be an excellent showcase for the program.

“This NEH grant will provide us a way to reach out to teachers to provide quality continuing education in the areas of history and literature and to highlight what Southern studies at Mercer has to offer their high school students,” Dr. Thompson said.

The institute is a natural for Mercer because of its history with Southern studies and because of Macon’s history, said Dr. Davis.

“The teachers participating in the institute will study the South’s history and culture during the crucial hundred years between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement through the lens of cotton, and they will see the connections between history, economics, labor, literature, religion and art,” Dr. Davis said. “We hope the institute will enhance the way high school teachers understand and explain Southern history and culture to their students, who will then better understand the complicated legacy of the cotton economy.”

The NEH grant is part of its Landmarks of American History and Culture: Summer Seminars and Institutes for School Teachers, which supports national faculty development programs in the humanities for school teachers. The seminars and institutes range from two to six weeks each and focus on significant humanities topics, texts and issues.

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University of Georgia qualifies three teams for National Debate Tournament

The University of Georgia Debate Team has qualified three teams to the National Debate Tournament for the first time since 2003. The NDT will be held at the University of Texas at Austin later this month.

The NDT is a qualifying event for the 78 best two-person debate teams in the country. As part of the selection process, only six schools are allowed to bring three teams to the event, based on an evaluation of competitive records over the course of the season.

This year the schools that have qualified three teams are: University of California-Berkeley, Emory, Harvard, Northwestern, Wake Forest and the University of Georgia.

The three UGA teams are comprised of debaters Brittany Cambre and Adam Schmidt, Karen Harrison and Maggy Warden, and Mike Lacy and Tommy Beyer.

The team’s new coach, Casey Harrigan, is in his first year at UGA preparing the teams for both regional and national competitions. This also marks the 20th consecutive year that UGA has qualified at least one team for the National Debate Tournament. Harrigan is a faculty member in the department of speech communication in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

The trip to Austin will be funded through the support of the President’s Venture Fund.

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UGA College of Environment and Design Receives Top Rankings in 2009

The University of Georgia College of Environment and Design's landscape architecture programs again received top national rankings. The bachelor's program was ranked first in the nation, and the master's program was ranked second in the 2009 edition of America's Best Architecture & Design Schools.

This continues a history of high ratings for the programs, which have both placed in the top five for the past five years - as long as landscape architecture programs have been nationally ranked. This is the second time that the bachelor's program has been ranked the best in the country.

Graduates of the College of Environment and Design also placed first in three of seven skill assessments considered in the ranking: sustainable design, security design and computer applications. CED graduates ranked second in two other assessments-analysis and planning and construction methods and materials.

Both the graduate and undergraduate programs offer Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification as part of the curriculum. Only 14 percent of the programs surveyed nationally can match that claim, putting the UGA programs on the cutting edge of sustainable design.

The America's Best Architecture & Design Schools rankings are the design industry equivalent of the U.S .News and World Report college rankings. To produce the rankings, trade publication DesignIntelligence asks employers which schools' recent graduates are best prepared to face the demands of the profession. This means that the high rankings will not only attract students to the college, but also serve as an endorsement for graduating students seeking employment.

UGA's College of Environment and Design is the only college in the United States dedicated specifically to landscape architecture and historic preservation, and features the largest landscape architecture faculty anywhere.

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