Teaching Jazz as American Culture

FAIN: EZ-50247-08

Washington University (St. Louis, MO 63130-4862)
Gerald Early (Project Director: September 2007 to December 2009)

A workshop series for twenty St. Louis-area high school and middle school teachers on the history and cultural significance of jazz in America.

?Teaching Jazz as American Culture? Faculty Humanities Workshop is 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 aims to introduce middle and high school teachers to the ways that interdisciplinary approaches to popular music, specifically jazz, can enrich a variety of humanities subjects. The primary goal of the Workshop is 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 reconfigure aspects of teaching American history, literature, art, and music while broadening students? understanding of the political, social, and commercial impact that an artistic movement can have.