An interdisciplinary team of professors and education majors at Anderson University developed resources that will help students understand the Revolutionary War in new ways. The Traveling Trunks offer K-12 teachers and community educators South Carolina standards-aligned American Revolutionary War units with resources.
Across two academic years, Associate Professor of History Dr. Lindsay Privette led the Traveling Trunks team that included Drs. Jayson Evaniuck and Tanya Espinosa Cordoba of the College of Education, and current education student Bailey Williams, along with several secondary social studies students who have since graduated.
Part of the Traveling Trunks team gave a presentation at the South Carolina Council for the Social Studies conference, held recently in Rock Hill, South Carolina. According to Dr. Cordoba, the presentation was well-received by the conference audience, composed primarily of middle school teachers from across the state, along with a few high school teachers.
Drs. Evaniuck, Privette and Cordoba, collaborating with Williams and recent secondary social studies graduate Kacey King, presented on the Revolution War traveling trunk sets they initially created for Anderson County.
“We’re just really proud of our students getting up there and helping lead,” Dr. Cordoba said. “It’s such a good opportunity for them, while also spreading the word about the trunks, because we had teachers from all over the state present at the presentation.”
The Traveling Trunk project that was presented was grant-funded through the South Carolina Revolutionary War AR250 initiative, which marks the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the conflict that birthed the United States.
“The state put together committees for every county. Dr. Privette is on the Anderson committee and came up with the idea for a set of traveling trunks. Her not being a teacher, she thought ‘let me bring one of the faculty from the College of Education into it,’ so she contacted me,” Dr. Cordoba said. “We started talking about what we thought should be in the trunk, the scope and scale, then wrote the grant. When we were awarded the $10,000 grant, we brought the students into it and later Dr. Evaniuck, who was new faculty but jumped right in. The first step was making sure the curriculum in the trunks were standards-aligned, because if a public schoolteacher was going to be able to use this, they had to justify that it was meeting their standards. We then started developing the units.”
Dr. Cordoba added that units were developed with the Anderson County Museum and the Anderson Public Library community educators in mind, along with homeschool families.
“The second step was to consider access and look for a place where it would be housed, we were lucky to partner with the Anderson County Library main branch because they can ship the trunks to any of the satellite libraries,” Dr. Cordoba said. “That’s really a great opportunity both for public educators and homeschoolers across our county.”
The trunks themselves represent two themes: “Becoming America” and “South Carolina and the Revolution.”
“We try to get at a bigger narrative and that’s all supported by the South Carolina state standards,” Dr. Cordoba said. “Both themes include stories and perspectives of underrepresented people groups, such as indigenous, women, as well as enslaved and free Blacks of the Revolutionary War era. The difference between the trunks is the focus given to the wider conflict in the ‘Becoming America’ trunk and South Carolina’s unique role in the ‘SC and the Revolutionary War’ trunk.”
Cordoba added that for each of the themes a primary trunk was created to meet the state’s fourth-grade standards; and a secondary trunk to meet the eighth-grade state standards for Social Studies, along with U.S. Government and U.S. History.
Initially the trunk project was tried out with a group of homeschool families to get feedback needed to improve the content of the trunks. That, according to Williams, was a good opportunity for her to see the trunk in action.
“We were able to work through the trunk and any kinks that needed to be worked out—see those in real time. And I was able to see how the library adapted that curriculum to what they needed for their homeschool students,” Williams said.
Dr. Cordoba praised Williams’ initiative and leadership with the project.
“She’s the one who went out to the library and helped to lead the pilot lesson at the library and collaborated with those professionals as a pre-service teacher,” Dr. Cordoba said. “They gave her high praise and said she was wonderful. It’s important, when we provide our students different ways to grow by noticing their talents and then provide ways for them to live those out.
Williams commented, “I think this project, more so than really anything I’ve done within my classes, helped me get familiar with the standards and how to look at them and dissect them and take what we have to teach and create lessons and projects and interactive activities that can most benefit my students in the future.”