NEH Seminars and Workshops

The Center for the Humanities

The Sock Hop and the Loft: Jazz, Motown and the Transformation of American Culture, 1957-1975

The Center for the Humanities will conduct a Summer Institute for schoolteachers entitled “The Sock Hop and the Loft: Jazz, Motown, and the Transformation of American Culture, 1959-1975.” The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Division of Education Programs awarded a grant to fund the institute, which will bring together thirty school teachers (including two graduate students) from various humanities disciplines including English, History, Social Studies, Art, and Music, to explore two streams of popular music within the larger context of the transformation of American taste and changing ideas about the role and importance of music in society.

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The Impact of Jazz on American Life

The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Faculty Humanities Workshop for school teachers took place at Washington University in Saint Louis in 2008-2009. Entitled “The Impact of Jazz on American Life,” this Workshop was a fresh reconfiguration of the successful NEH institutes that the Center for the Humanities at Washington University administered on the same subject in the summers of 2005 and 2007. It aimed to introduce participants to the ways that interdisciplinary approaches to popular music, specifically jazz, can enrich a variety of humanities subjects. The primary goal of the Workshop was to help teachers understand how, through the study of the social, cultural, technical, and aesthetic history of a major American musical genre, jazz, they can re-think aspects of teaching American history, literature, art, and music while broadening students’ understanding of the political, social, and commercial impact that an artistic movement or style can have.

The Workshop format included a one week-long summer session and eight Saturday sessions throughout the academic year 2008-2009, from September until May. The workshop also included having the teachers attend performances of nationally known jazz musicians at a local jazz club, Jazz at the Bistro, one of our institutional partners. We also had a formal institutional partnership with both the St. Louis public schools and the St. Louis Catholic schools, with a representative from each serving on our supervising staff.

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New Negro Renaissance Digital Institute

In July 2010, Washington University in St. Louis hosted a Summer Institute for schoolteachers entitled "The New Negro Renaissance in America, 1919-1941" and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Through an NEH Digital Dissemination Pilot Grant, we are now able to offer the New Negro Renaissance Institute in digital form to the public. The following resources offer an exciting opportunity to learn about one of the most extraordinary cultural periods in American history and to explore lectures, essays, interviews, and curriculum resources from our Institute. We hope that this Digital Institute will enhance our ability to create a stronger scholarly community among our participants and will enable us to reach out more effectively to K-12 as well as college and university teachers who have an interest in our subject matter and our pedagogical approaches to it.

Teaching Jazz as American Culture

The summer institute will offer participants an exciting opportunity to learn about one of the most extraordinary art forms the United States has ever produced. You will learn how this art form, at the height of its popularity and power, deeply affected many aspects of American artistic and cultural life--vernacular speech, film, fine art, dance, literature, fashion, race relations, sex relations, and the business of disseminating art to the masses. The secondary goal of the institute is to work with you to show how, through the study of the social, cultural, technical, and aesthetic history of a major American musical genre, jazz, you can rethink aspects of teaching history, literature, music, art and film while broadening students' understanding of the political, social, and commercial impact that an artistic movement can have. Participants will develop lesson plans for their subject area using aspects of jazz.

more information on teaching jazz institute

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