Inter-American Workshops for Teachers

Abstract

During the past summer groups of United States teachers gathered in some twenty-five colleges and universities throughout the nation for Inter-American teacher-workships, sponsored or aided by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. These groups prepared teaching plans and new textmaterials and studied how to utilize the language, geography, social and economic conditions, history, literature, music, and art of the other Americas to enrich instructional programs. During the coming year this army of over two thousand teachers will be in a position to make a notable contribution to the Inter-American program of cooperation and solidarity through the schools of this country. No two of these workshops were the same. In each case the nature of the program was determined chiefly by the resources available in the institution and by the interests and needs of the particular group of teachers. The workshops at Mills College; Teachers College, Columbia; The College of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio; and the Texas College for Women emphasized instruction in Spanish and Portuguese languages and culture. Mills College, the University of Florida, and the University of Texas were concerned with English. The largest number of workshops were concerned with the InterAmerican content of the school curriculum. They included the University of Chicago, George Peabody Teachers College, University of Nebraska, Marquette University, University of South Dakota, University of Louisville, University of Alabama, Harvard University, University of Kansas City, and one sponsored jointly by the St. Louis Schools, St. Louis University, and Washington University. Several of these workshops, in addition to the one at St. Louis, were undertaken with the cooperation of the public schools. The interests of teacher participants covered a wide range, and included children's literature, children's songs, folk dances, and materials for art, reading, geography, and history in the elementary schools. Secondary-school teachers pursued problems concerned with teaching Spanish and Portuguese, the content of courses on Latin America, or the question of incorporating Latin American materials in the present curriculum. Some teachers concerned themselves with broader aspects of orienting our education to the needs of the permanent Inter-American program. In some ways the most significant and certainly the most distinctive workshops were those concerned with the educational problems of our Spanishspeaking Southwest. During the summer of 1942 the schools of the County of Los Angeles under the leadership of Superintendent C. C. Trillingham and Mrs. Marie Hughes took the initiative with a workshop to provide special training for these teachers to enable them to deal more effectively with the