Teaching American History to Muslim Exchange Students
For general background on the State Department program of American Studies Institutes for Undergraduates, see this 2003 press release:
http://exchanges.state.gov/
education/amstudy/archives/
2003/institutes03.htm
Your best guide to resources for this program is Washington College's own website, describing its participation in the State Department's American Studies for Undergraduates Institute:
http://asi.washcoll.edu/
Here you'll find an outline of the curriculum and non-classroom activities and excellent links to teaching materials.
To supplement the excellent selection of materials listed in the Washington College site, you'll find useful additions in the Gilder Lehrman Collection. Do searches for "Declaration of Independence", and "Monroe Doctrine" and "Constitution", and you'll find a generous choice of documents:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/search/chooser.html?words=&x=4&y=13
For materials relating to the Constitution and the early years of the Republic, go to:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/treasures2.html
And don't forget the resources for African-American history given in the discussion of sources for the "Voting Rights" essay.
For lesson plans, methodology, and the like, you may want to investigate pertinent ERIC Digests:
Materials relating to teaching American Islamic students:
http://www.ericfacility.net/databases/ERIC_Digests/ed429144.html
Teaching the Bill of Rights:
http://www.ericfacility.net/databases/ERIC_Digests/ed298076.html
Teaching the Declaration of Independence:
http://www.ericdigests.org/2003-4/independence.html
Teaching "America's Founding Documents":
http://www.ericfacility.net/databases/ERIC_Digests/ed470040.html.
To share some of the non-classroom experiences of the students in the Washington College program, go to the website for the historic town where the college is located:
http://www.chestertown.com/
A nd the website at the National Gallery of Art for the Islamic Art Exhibition drawn from the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that the students visited:
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/islamicinfo.htm
And don't forget to take an online tour of United Nations headquarters in New York:
http://www.un.org/Pubs/CyberSchoolBus/untour/index.html
