Upcoming Webinars
These live and interactive programs introduce educators to NK360° and its extensive resources. Webinars are designed to support education professionals in learning approaches to incorporate more complete narratives about Native American histories, cultures, and contemporary lives into their teaching.
This free four-part webinar series is designed for education professionals who teach about the Native Nations of New York State. Educators whose primary teaching focus is social studies, English language arts, or library sciences, and who work with students in grades 4–12 are encouraged to register. We also invite homeschoolers, parents, and others looking for digital educational resources about Native Americans.
Native New York Toolkit for Educators (PDF)
Webinars are limited to 500 participants unless otherwise noted, and advance registration is required. Please email questions to NMAICulturalInterpreters@si.edu.
Preview a virtual student program and learn about the museum's distance learning programs.
Thursday, October 1, 2020
4–5 PM ET
During the second session of this series, participants will see a facilitated dialogue in action. Carrie Gonzalez, Program Specialist, and Ami Temarantz, Lead Cultural Interpreter, will lead participants through a 45-minute virtual student program called Living in Native New York, which explores how Native nations have maintained, and continue to preserve, their connections to their New York home in the face of adversity and change. Museum educators will facilitate new conversations about the places students call home and their role in caring for those places. The webinar will conclude with an introduction to the museum's distance learning programs for students grades 4–12 and information about the registration process. Participants are strongly encouraged to attend Webinar One on September 24th to learn more about the foundational theory and skills of dialogue.
Learn the history of problematic narratives about Native Americans, its impact on society, and why it matters today.
Thursday, October 8, 2020
4–5 PM ET
Participants will hear from Ed Schupman (Muscogee), manager of the National Museum of the American Indian's national education initiative, Native Knowledge 360° (NK360°). Ed will discuss the long tradition of problematic narratives about Native Americans and show how those narratives affect American society and K–12 education. The webinar will conclude with an introduction to the NK360° initiative, including the museum's NK360° Framework for Essential Understandings about American Indians, a set of key concepts about the rich and diverse cultures, histories, and contemporary lives of Native peoples. This session will inspire participants to think about what transformations they can make in their own teaching and learning about Native Americans.
This session will focus on the NK360° digital lesson Did Native People Really Sell Manhattan? Participants will consider ways to implement elements of the lesson, which is designed to complement the New York City and New York State 4th and 5th grades' social studies scope and sequence, in their classrooms and curricula.
Thursday, October 15, 2020
4–5 PM ET
On the fourth and final session of this series, participants will focus on classroom implementation. Johanna Gorelick, Manager of the Education Department, and educator and curriculum writer Myra Hernandez will walk participants through the NK360° website, where they can find classroom-ready lessons and resources. Myra and Johanna will spend time guiding participants through one digital lesson about the early years of the fur trade in New York City, which provides Native perspectives, images, documents, and other resources to help students and teachers understand how the 17th-century fur trade brought together two cultures, one Native and the other Dutch. Through this lesson, educators will examine the two communities' different values and ideas about exchange to determine whether the transaction that took place on Manhattan in 1626 was really a land sale or not.
