K-12 Teacher Institute: Historic Children’s Voices
Institute Dates: August 10-14, 2026
This five-day summer institute for school educators in social studies and language arts will take place at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts. The Historic Children’s Voices teacher institute includes hands-on workshops using not only AAS’s unparalleled collection of early American books for children, but also its surprising and fascinating collection of children’s own writings from the colonial period through the 19th century. Looking at books children read, coupled with their own productions, offers an unusually intimate and immediate connection to literacy goals and practices of the past. Participants will explore diaries and letters in which children record the details of their daily lives, as well as stories and poems that display their imaginative engagement with the world around them. The large amateur newspaper collection—most printed on home parlor presses—demonstrates young people’s sophisticated understanding of media norms and social and political concerns of their times.
The institute corresponds with AAS’s Historic Children’s Voices website, which makes these unique child-authored materials easily accessible in classrooms everywhere. These little-studied, now easily available materials delight and inspire teachers and the young people in their classrooms, and support their thinking about the value of children’s perspectives and the empowering of children’s voices in the past and today.
The workshop format aims to foster engagement with primary sources in original and digitized form. The week will be structured to consider the value of these materials for meeting current history and language arts curricular objectives and pedagogical best practices, with particular attention given to diversity, equity, and inclusion; social and emotional learning; and experiential learning. Institute participants will create curricular materials for use in their own classrooms and to share on the Historic Children’s Voices website for use by teachers nationwide.
The lead instructor is Karen Sánchez-Eppler, L. Stanton Williams '41 Professor of American Studies and English, Amherst College. The teacher facilitator is Allison Bass-Ricco, Teacher and Department Chair of English, Cheshire Academy, CT.
Participating teachers will receive a stipend of $500 and a travel allowance of $1,000. Lodging and some meals will be provided.
Online applications are due March 23, 2026. Notifications will go out by April 24, 2026. Twenty-four applicants will be selected. Those selected will have until May 1, 2026, to accept or decline the offer.