Educators, Route 66 can use your help

route-66-sign-santa-fe

Calling all educators who used Route 66 in their curriculum: The Route 66: The Road Ahead Initiative wants to hear from you.

University of New Mexico professor and author David Dunaway is serving as chairman of the initiative’s Research & Education Working Group.

He recently put out a call for educators to share their materials and insights about using Route 66’s history in their teaching methods.

According to a news release from Dunaway:

Our group is dedicated to assisting educators and researchers in finding and collecting accurate research about Route 66 to educate students about the Mother Road. We’re particularly interested in developing curriculum that teachers at different grade levels can use to teach classes about the rich history surrounding Route 66. We would also like to find the research institutions and collections that can help them answer the questions teachers want to ask.

The Working Group is very interested in identifying teachers at the elementary and secondary level who are teaching kids about Route 66. Thus, we’re reaching out to all of you to see if you know anyone currently doing this, so we can contact them.

We also are looking for existing curriculum or other teaching materials on Route 66. We hope to create a national clearinghouse for such materials, so people will have a good place to start if they want to learn about Route 66.

If you know of people who already have such materials, please forward them on to us (or ask them to do so) so we can start expanding this collection at davidkdunaway(at)gmail(dot)com. We appreciate any assistance that the many stakeholders in Route 66 can provide.

The effort can help keep Route 66 in the public eye and culture for future generations, plus give young people a better understanding of the history of the United States in general.

(Image of a Route 66 sign outside the New Mexico Education Department in Santa Fe by Stephen Hanafin via Flickr)

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