October 18 , 2007

Local Teacher First-Place Winner of National History Award for Teaching

Arlington , Virginia – The Bill of Rights Institute proudly announces the First-place winner of the George Washington Prize for Teaching America’s Founding, Emma Humphries. A teacher from Middleburg High School in Middleburg, Florida, Humphries received $2,500 for her outstanding entry.

All 100 participants in the 2007 Landmarks in American History Summer Workshop for teachers held at Mount Vernon, the home of our first president George Washington, were eligible to enter the contest. Entrants wrote a 500-word essay describing how they benefited from the summer workshop, how their views about Washington changed, and how they would apply their recently gained knowledge to the classroom. They also submitted a lesson plan on a topic addressed at the workshop. The funding for the contest was provided by a grant from Dr. John Templeton.

“[The] Summer Workshop helped paint a broader and more in depth picture of George Washington,” Humphries wrote in her essay. She also plans “…to use original documents to reach my students with my new understanding of Washington and the events surrounding the birth of our nation.”

Humphries addressed the impact of Shay’s Rebellion on George Washington in the lesson she submitted to the Bill of Rights Institute. She utilized primary source documents in her lesson plan, such as Washington’s letters to James Madison, John Jay, and Henry Knox.

Second-place winners of the George Washington Prize are Lydia Lewis, a teacher at National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., and Brian Corman, a teacher at Merritt Academy in Fairfax, Virginia. The three winners of the George Washington Prize come from elementary, middle, and high school. The lesson plans and essays of all winners are posted on the Bill of Rights Institute’s website, www.billofrightsinstitute.org.

The Bill of Rights Institute, in partnership with The National Endowment for the Humanities and George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens, offered the week-long summer workshop for educators, entitled Shaping the Constitution: A View from Mount Vernon. K-12 educators from around the country explored the role Mount Vernon played as a meeting place for prominent intellectuals of the era, and how the ideas discussed at Washington’s home shaped the Constitution and the future the United States. In the past four years, nearly 500 teachers have participated in the program.

For more information on the George Washington Prize winners or the Bill of Rights Institute’s Landmarks in American History summer workshop, contact Claire Griffin at 1-800-838-7870, ex. 14.

Click here to return to the Press Release Corner main page.