Institutes for K-12 Educators

Overview

NEH-funded institutes are professional development programs that convene K-12 educators from across the nation to deepen their understanding of significant topics in the humanities and enrich their capacity for effective scholarship and teaching.

Most fundamentally, institutes:

• allow immersive study of humanities topics
• foster new fields of study and/or revitalize existing areas of inquiry
• strengthen humanities teaching and learning in the classroom
• build lasting communities that foster participants’ intellectual and professional collaboration

Institutes should:

• ground the study in significant humanities texts and related resources
• explore multiple, rigorous approaches to the topic
• consider how the topic engages recent developments in the scholarship, teaching, and curricula of participants’ professional settings
• provide opportunities for deep and collaborative engagement with the topic
• model excellent scholarship, teaching, and collegial dialogue
• reach the widest possible audience for whom the topic is relevant

Institutes for K-12 Educators must design Institutes for K-12 Educators for a diverse group of 25-36 K-12 educator participants drawn from across the nation.

• You must target a national audience of full- or part-time K-12 educators who teach in public, charter, independent, and religiously affiliated schools, or as home schooling educators.
• You may admit museum educators and other K-12 school system personnel—such as, but not limited to, administrators, substitute teachers, and curriculum supervisors who can demonstrate that participation will advance project goals and enhance their professional work.
• You may target a more specific audience by, for instance, requiring foreign language proficiency or by including those outside the humanities, but the potential audience should be large enough to yield a complete participant group.
• You must reserve twenty percent of available spaces for early-career educators (those who have been teaching for five years or fewer).

Topic and Intellectual Focus An institute topic must be significant to humanities study and teaching. It may:

• consist of subject matter that supports regularly taught humanities courses
• address emerging or overlooked humanities fields
• include attention to pedagogies and/or methodologies, provided the humanities content remains central
• be interdisciplinary, provided the humanities remain central Format and Program of Study Institutes run from one to four weeks and may adopt a variety of schedules and formats to suit the needs of the topic and audience. One week is equivalent to five or six days of structured study.

Institutes can be one of three formats:

• Residential: All participants attend the duration of the program at the host site.
• Virtual: All participants attend the duration of the program using an online platform. This can include synchronous and asynchronous sessions.
• Combined: All participants attend a portion of the program online and a portion of the program at the host site. Online and residential sessions occur at different times, but participants attend the sessions simultaneously. All institutes, regardless of schedule and/or format—residential, virtual, or combined format— should involve guided, well-planned activities that engage participants in substantive collegial study in the same format simultaneously.

Other Information

You may request up to $220,000, depending on the duration of your proposed institute.

One week - $120,000
Two weeks - $175,000
Three weeks - $200,000
Four weeks - $220,000

 Live Q&A Session: Click here to participate in a live Q&A session at 12 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, December 8.

Optional draft due December 15, 2022

Deadline February 1, 2023

Expected notification date August 31, 2023

Project start date October 1, 2023