News : VSHS teacher Steffen earns national recognition as NEH Summer Scholar

Kelly Steffen, a teacher from Vinton-Shellsburg High School, has been selected as an NEH Summer Scholar from a national applicant pool to attend one of twenty summer study opportunities supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Endowment is a federal agency that each summer supports Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops so that teachers can study with experts in humanities disciplines.

Mrs. Steffen will participate in a workshop entitled “Sailing to Freedom; New Bedford and the Underground Railroad.” The one-week program will be held at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and directed by Lee Blake.

The eighty teachers selected to participate in the program each receive a $1,200 stipend to help cover their travel, study, and living expenses.

Topics for the twenty NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops offered for teachers this summer include Benjamin Franklin; Fort Niagara; Emily Dickinson; Philadelphia and the Early Republic; the Industrial Revolution; James Madison; African-American History in Massachusetts; Duke Ellington; the Chicago Lakefront; the abolition, women’s rights, and religious revival movements in upstate New York; mining in the far west; Abraham Lincoln; the Hudson River; Zora Neale Hurston; African-American entrepreneurs in antebellum America; Fort Ticonderoga; California history; and the Underground Railroad. The approximately 1,600 teachers who participate in these studies will teach over 200,000 American students the following