NEH 2025 Summer Professional Development Offerings

 Each summer, the NEH offers tuition-free opportunities for K-12 educators and higher education faculty to study a variety of humanities topics. Stipends of $650 to $3,450 help cover expenses of these one-to-four-week programs. Programs may offer continuing education or graduate credits (often for an additional cost).

Teachers who participate in these institutes (including our own interpretive historian, Melissa Hibbard) rave about the opportunity and talk about how energizing, restorative, and enlightening the experience is.

All applications are due March 5, 2024. These programs are extremely competitive, so if one interests you, don't leave the application until the last minute (especially if the application requires a letter of recommendation.) Twenty percent of the slots of each program are reserved for applicants in their first five years of K-12 teaching. The selection committees also get points for geographic diversity, so in general Montana teachers have a slight advantage. You do have to write a personal essay though (which will build your empathy for students applying for college!)

Program Formats

Professional development programs include the following format options:

• Residential: All participants attend for the duration of the project at the host site.
• Virtual: All participants attend for the duration of the project using an online platform. This can include synchronous and asynchronous sessions.
• Combined Format: All participants attend a portion of the project online and a portion of the project at the host site. Online and residential sessions occur at different times, but participants attend the same format simultaneously.

The programs focus on topics from Angel Island and Asian American Immigration to The Pequot War and Africa in World History. I'm particularly a fan of the one-week Landmarks programs because you get to go to places where history happened. It's probably no surprise, but "Voices of the Ancients: Archaeology and Oral History in the American West" (held in Cedar City, Utah), particularly caught my eye. When I mentioned it to Melissa, she told me that this is the Landmarks program she attended, and it was revelatory.  

Learn more.

P.S. Looking for MUCH shorter, less intensive PD? Join Mark Johnson, author of Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky, on January 14 from 4:30-5:30 p.m. for Teaching Montana's Chinese History and earn one OPI renewal unit. Register.