Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College - University System of Georgia

APPENDIX C: Picturing America Grant Summary
The Picturing America: Tracing America's Rural Roots grant project focuses on the rural story of America
as depicted in many of the images within the National Endowment for the Humanities' Picturing
America collection. This rural story is one that is shared by most conference participants and their
students as they work and live in rural South Georgia communities.
This grant project is a collaborative project between the Tift County School System and Abraham
Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC), Georgia's State College of Choice. The administrating institution is
the Tift County School System. The conference portion of the project will be held at ABAC's Georgia
Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village, a 95-acre living history museum with 35 restored buildings
from late 19th-century rural South Georgia. The museum will host a rural art exhibit for the conference,
and participants will be able to tour the site and connect strategic site locations to the images in the
focal collection.
There are four goals for this grant project: 1. increasing teacher knowledge of integrating art and visual
images into their classroom curriculum; 2. increasing the use of the Picturing America collection in
schools; 3. incorporating materials and content knowledge from the conference into teachers' classroom
lesson plans; and 4. helping classroom students connect to their own sense of place through the critical
analysis of art.
Project Director and Grant Administrator Dr. Julie H. Rucker of the Tift County School System will plan a
two-day conference for teachers grades K-12 in June 12-13, 2012, at the Georgia Museum of Agriculture
and Historic Village. Dr. Lisa Lishman of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College is the Conference Director
who will coordinate with the ABAC faculty and museum site and supervise a college student intern
dedicated to the project.
Four plenary sessions are planned for the conference, one each morning and one each afternoon
following the noon meal. The principal scholar for the project is Dr. Graham Corray Boettcher, the
William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. Other
keynote speakers and their areas of expertise include Dr. Darren Crovitz of Kennesaw State University
(media/visual literacy and digital technology), Arthur Wayne Roberts and Ali van den Broek
(photographers and digital artists specialiZing in rural subjects), and Dr. Susan Kirby Roe of Abraham
Baldwin Agricultural College (Music and Vocal Performance).
Breakout sessions will be led by Humanities and Rural Studies faculty members from Abraham Baldwin
Agricultural College and Kennesaw State University. Other important personnel for the project include
Paul Willis, Executive Director of the Georgia Museum of Agriculture, and Polly Huff, Assistant Director
of the Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College Arts Connection and Tifton-Tift County Arts Council.
Teachers attending the conference will come from a twelve-county area in Southwest Georgia; forty
schools-public, private, and homeschools-in this area own the Picturing America collection and will be
invited to send up to five teachers per school to the conference. The conference capacity is 125
teachers. Prior to the conference, teachers are asked to familiarize themselves with the Picturing
America Teachers Resource Book on the NEH's Picturing America website. For attending the conference
and participating in post-conference activities, teachers will receive two continuing education credits as
well as a $150 stipend. For their post-conference activity, teachers will design a standards-based lesson
plan, utilizing materials and knowledge gained at the conference, that they can use within their
classroom curriculum. These lessons will be submitted and posted to a dedicated public webpage on the
Tift County School System website and promoted to schools statewide.
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