UF Student Secures $1 million History Teaching Grant for Clay County

Dianna Miller, a doctoral student in the School of Teaching and Learning, wrote a grant proposal that secured nearly $1 million for the Clay County school district, where Miller used to teach. The U.S. Department of Education awarded the grant to the Andrew Jackson Liberty Fellowship, a professional development program for 50 K-12 history teachers.

“The fellowship program is designed to increase teachers’ knowledge of history so that they will be better teachers in the classroom,” Miller said. “There will be three symposiums a year that a historian, history educator and master teacher lead. Not only do we teach them the history, but we introduce new teaching strategies they can use in class.”

Miller, who was named Clay County teacher of the year in 2001, earned her Ed.S. degree from UF in 2004. She is currently teaching AP Macroeconomics for the Florida Virtual School, and commutes to Gainesville to attend classes in pursuit of her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in Social Studies education.
Clay County was one of five counties in Florida to receive the $999,245 grant last year, which will establish a three-year program focused on educating fifth, eighth and 11th grade-level teachers.

Under the grant, Professor Elizabeth Yeager, coordinator of UF’s social studies education program, will conduct a social studies workshop, and Associate Professor Colleen Swain will conduct technology workshops on creating electronic notebooks with primary documents.

To be eligible for the grant, participating counties must have an affiliation with a local American history institution to help facilitate learning. School officials in Clay County partnered with the Clay County Historical Society, the American Institute for History Education and Learners Online for the program.

Each year, the program hopes to touch on specific, topics including the empire versus the colonies, the agrarian South and the industrializing North, and liberal democracy versus totalitarianism. For more information, click a href="http://www.andrewjacksonlibertyfellowship.org/">here.