The Yale National Initiative is built on the model begun by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, a partnership between Yale University and New Haven Public Schools, to strengthen teaching and learning in public schools. Each summer, K-12 teachers from around the country attend two-week seminars led by Yale faculty, develop new teaching strategies, and forge collegial bonds with Yale faculty and other teachers. In addition, the initiative supports the establishment of similar teachers institutes in other cities. Read more about the program.
What brought Tara McKee to teaching was its creativity: the possibility of learning deeply and then finding engaging ways to draw students into a topic. She’d spent two years in fashion design in New York City before deciding to return to her hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma to teach high school English. But it wasn’t always easy to come up with something fun for her students, and on weekends she often found herself searching for new ideas for her classroom.
That’s how she first encountered the Yale National Initiative — through the hundreds of curriculum units made available online through the initiative’s website, created by teachers from across the country who had participated as fellows in the initiative’s intensive summer seminars with Yale faculty.
“I didn’t really know what it was, but there were all these really creative units,” McKee, who teaches 11th-grade English at Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, said. After that first accidental encounter, she was selected by her school district to apply to the Yale National Initiative in 2017; this summer, she attended her seventh seminar at Yale.
Coming to the Yale sessions, she said, “has given me confidence in my teaching and in being a teacher-leader. And the units I’ve created are the best.”
These include asking her students to create movie trailers for an imagined adaptation of either Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” or J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” which grew out of a 2018 seminar on “Adaptation: Literature, Film and Society,” led by Brigitte Peucker, then the Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and professor of film studies (now emeritus) in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Science (FAS). “We have popcorn and watch all the trailers and everybody claps for one another,” she said. “It’s the cutest thing.”
This year, she took part in a seminar with Feisal Mohamed, a professor of English in FAS, on “Resistance from Aristotle to Star Wars.” She plans to use two texts centered on the Iranian revolution — Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” and a memoir by Behrooz Ghamari called “Remembering Akbar” — to prompt her students to think about tyranny.
“I really want to bring it to life and have them understand the gravity of that time period,” she said. “I think I’ll try to simulate a revolution, a little resistance. I’m going to be the tyrant Queen McKee and have my kids create either propaganda to keep me in power or propaganda to tear me down.”
In addition to coming to Yale for the summer seminars, McKee has also participated in a local teachers institute, run in partnership with The University of Tulsa; as a city representative for the Yale National Initiative, part of her work is to facilitate the partnership between her public school district and an institution of higher education. While funding cuts have put the Tulsa institute on pause, McKee is hopeful that it will be renewed in the near future.
“I am super passionate about public education in Tulsa,” she said. “I think it’s so important to have a local institute that mimics the Yale program, that empowers teachers and reinvigorates them and makes them feel like they have control over what they teach.”
At the Yale National Initiative, she said, she finds new inspiration each summer from the Yale faculty members leading the seminar and from her peers. “Teaching is often an isolating experience. So when you can come to something like this and see and appreciate the different levels of craft that you see in teaching — elementary versus middle school versus high school — and to talk to people about stuff that I don’t normally talk about, like science and math, it forms a bond,” she said.
“It creates a community and support system that I think is much needed to retain teachers,” she added. “I probably would have left the teaching profession if I did not have a support system like I have gained here.”
