Thirty six of the nation’s teachers, representing 22 states, are in Alabama this week to learn a lesson, retracing the actual steps of history.

As part of Alabama Humanities Foundation’s Stony the Road We Trod: Alabama’s Role in the Modern Civil Rights Movement, K-12 educators from across the country are participating in a week-long, interactive field study.

After a rigorous selection process, these educators were chosen to take part in this workshop that will travel across the state, participating in lectures by scholars, interact with iconic leaders and foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, visiting key sites of memory as well as sites dedicated to the preservation of civil rights history in Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery and Tuskegee. The teachers will review archival film footage and other primary source documents, as they use national instructional standards (or their own state standards) to develop curricular products.

Made possible by a $179,340 grant to AHF from National Endowment for the Humanities’ Landmarks of American History and Culture, this groundbreaking event will be offered twice during the summer of 2016.

The dates are June 26 – July 2 and July 10 – 16.

In this week’s workshop, teachers represent Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Texas, Utah and Virginia.

The project director is Dr. Martha Bouyer, and the lead scholar is Dr. Glenn Eskew. AHF Program Director Dionne Clark is serving as the program administrator.

A veteran educator, Bouyer developed the Stony the Road workshop and is executive director of Historic Bethel Baptist Church Restoration Fund.

Eskew is a professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta and author of But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements In the Civil Rights Struggle, which won the Southern Historical Association’s Francis Butler Simkins Prize.

The group will be in Selma on Wednesday morning for a tour and lunch at Wallace Community College Selma.