Professional Development Opportunity “The Civil Rights Movement in Northeast Georgia”

When I worked at the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, one of the programs that I wanted to implement was an annual professional development opportunity for area educators, providing them a space to learn about Gaines’ work and the history and people that informed it, looking at how all of it shaped the community and region in which we lived and taught. When I started working at the Lillian E. Smith (LES) Center, I knew that I wanted to start a similar program here. COVID threw a wrench in those initial plans. However, this year we are planning the first annual professional development program at the LES Center. We hope that this will be the first of many.

One of my main goals when thinking about professional development programs is to provide educators with the space and time to dive deeply into material and to provide them with facilitators that will work with them to bring what they learn into their own classrooms. As well, I want to make sure that educators do not have to pay for their professional development. Instead, I want to pay them and provide them with the texts they will discuss during the program. The NEH provides stipends for its programs, and we need to do this for educators. We don’t need to expect them to pay for opportunities to increase their…