By Emily Canamella
In the Spring 2023 semester, Alachua County Public Schools partnered with the Department of History to create a new internship: Curriculum Development in K-12 Social Studies Education. In Spring 2023, the internship focused on writing curriculum on women’s history. Jon Rehm, the Alachua County Public Schools Curriculum Specialist in Social Studies, oversaw the internship.
The four student interns worked to create curriculum guides for each grade level. The guides provide teachers with historical topics and primary sources for classroom use. As students in the Department of History, the interns brought the knowledge they gained in the classroom to provide unique perspectives. Rehm said, “They could really expand the topics and make connections.” The students also deployed their awareness of key primary and secondary sources that they could access in the university’s libraries, found key passages, and provided them for teachers.
“It was really fantastic because a lot of them were history majors as well as women’s studies majors, so they had a wonderful perspective on women’s history,” Rehm said. It was especially important for Rehm to have University of Florida students to provide an outside opinion that could do more than just fulfill state requirements. Rehm joked that he has a “singular focus on what the state tells me to do,” while student interns complement that focus with content expertise.
A challenge of school instruction is the need to build on the curriculum from previous years. Rehm expressed the importance of teaching women’s history in all 13 years of education. He also emphasized the need for diversity – not only reteaching the histories of the same women –“so that every little girl in the district has somebody they can look up to.”
Through the internship, history students applied the research and writing skills they learned in class to support teachers and fill a gap in K-12 social studies education.