UMBC’s education department has built strong, lasting partnerships across Maryland’s public school districts, from Baltimore County and Baltimore City to Howard County and Anne Arundel County. This winter an exciting new partnership has developed to support even more teachers through professional development, and it’s having an international impact.

The Howard County Public School System (HCPSS), in partnership with the South Korean Iksan District Office of Education, recently invited Jonathan Singer, associate professor and chair of education, to provide professional development to visiting secondary science teachers from South Korea.

Singer’s training utilized a curriculum designed by UMBC researchers, called INSPIRES, for Increasing Student Participation, Interest, and Recruitment in Engineering and Science. INSPIRES was previously developed and tested, with National Science Foundation support, by Julie Ross, former dean of the college of engineering and information technology, principal investigator; and co-principal investigators John Singer and Christopher Rakes, assistant professor of education. Jacqueline Krikorian, project coordinator for INSPIRES, joined Singer in presenting the material to the South Korean teachers during their time in Howard County.

The Howard County professional development began by showing the teachers how to integrate three key ideas into instruction: content, context, and the design process,” explains Singer. “It was important to provide a conceptual understanding and strategies to show how this practice is a shift from traditional teaching.”

Building partnerships, sharing ideas

HCPSS has played a unique role in connecting South Korean teachers with educational resources in Maryland. Over the last seven years, several K-12 teachers have traveled to Howard County to shadow public school teachers, with support from their district and state government. During each visit, teachers pair with a Howard County educator in a similar grade level and subject area to share ideas, professional learning opportunities, and best practices.

“The goal and purpose of this program is for teachers from Korea to gain a U.S. perspective on teaching science in innovative and creative ways,” says Min Woo, international student and family services specialist for Howard County Public Schools.

This is where UMBC comes in. Historically, the group has traveled to New York for additional professional development at Teachers College, Columbia University, following their time in Howard County. But HCPSS leaders who had experienced the positive results of the INSPIRES curriculum for local teachers thought it could be a great fit for the South Korean teachers as well. Mamie Perkins, former deputy superintendent, and Carl Perkins, former principal of Centennial High School, encouraged partnership coordinator Sunghwa Jung to reach out to Jonathan Singer to explore the possibilities.

Planning ahead

“Working with Dr. Singer was a great start. His research and the tasks he prepared benefited the Korean science teachers greatly, helping them to reflect on their own teaching practices,” said Jung. “I hope to improve our professional development through our partnership with Dr. Singer and his team.”

The partners have found the INSPIRES pilot to be successful, and they expect it will be part of future visits. UMBC’s work with teachers of the Iksan District represents the university’s second partnership with a South Korean academic institution. UMBC also has a student exchange program with Seoul National University.

Banner image: President Freeman Hrabowski with Jonathan Singer at the 2018 Celebration of Teaching event. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

“The term ‘medieval’ is used to mean something bad and backward—a period where travel was mostly viewed through the exploits of male merchants, pirates, sailors, soldiers, and clergy, not a period to help us gain insight into restrictive laws and gender roles,” explains UMBC’s Susan McDonough, associate professor of history. She’s just earned a 2019-20 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to further research that is more inclusive of women’s experiences in the medieval Mediterranean.

“I want to look into the lives of medieval prostitutes to help us understand the gendered and political influences that fostered their roles as businesswomen and community members,” says McDonough.

McDonough initially learned about the important role of female prostitution, a legal practice in the medieval Mediterranean, while researching her first book about witness testimony and civil court records in late medieval Marseille, France. “There aren’t many criminal court records that are still left from that period,” she notes. “I have one court record from 1380 and almost twenty percent of the cases deal with prostitution.”

McDonough explains, “Prostitutes are not twenty percent of the criminals or of the population, yet they’re overrepresented.” This fact piqued her curiosity about the benefits prostitutes might have gained by using the court system.

Defying municipal statutes

As she continued to investigate, McDonough found that prostitutes were going to court not because men had accused them of stealing or “respectable” women charged them with wrongdoing, but because of accusations and slander by other prostitutes. Beyond protecting their reputation, it seems they were using the court system as a way to access barred spaces.

“In Marseille, the criminal courts are outside and are next to an important church,” describes McDonough. “The statues for the city of Marseille say that prostitutes aren’t allowed to be in the spaces near churches. By going to criminal courts they are defying municipal statutes.”

Understanding migration

Beyond the deliberate choice of using the court system to maneuver around restrictive laws, there is also a question of migration. McDonough noted that despite the fact that most prostitutes were working in port cities around the Mediterranean Sea, they were not locals but had migrated from other places.

“The notion of migration inspired more questions about the reasons these women move. Is it out of choice or because they don’t have strong family ties? Are they going to port cities because they feel there is an economic benefit to being in a port city?,” asks McDonough. “I want to know more about what it means to travel in a body that is gendered female in the middle Mediterranean.”

Connecting the medieval Mediterranean to the classroom

The fellowship will give McDonough an opportunity to complete a year of archival research in Barcelona, Marseille, and other Mediterranean port cities, which will be the foundation for a book.

McDonough is also equally excited about bringing the research back to the classroom. “It is hard for me to leave for a year because I love teaching,” she says. “But this story will resonate with students because of how it informs us about how reputation and stereotypes affect the way people move through society and bear challenges and burdens because of them.”

Banner Image: Archive Latin manuscript about a case of a prostitute named Moneta de Nicia, from Archives Départementales du Bouches-du-Rhône 3B96 fol. 32r. Photo by Susan McDonough.

Congratulations to Conor Donnan, (History MA, 2016) who is currently pursuing a PhD in History at the University of Pennsylvania, for winning a Hibernanian Research award for his project: “An ‘Empire for Liberty?’ Irish Immigrants, Native Americans, and American Imperialism in the trans-Mississippi West between 1841 and 1924”

https://cushwa.nd.edu/news/research-funding-in-2019/