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.
In 2024, Sandy Alvarez, a first-grade English language arts teacher in Washington, D.C., took her students on a field trip to Rock Creek Park to make plein-air drawings of the natural world. They learned about plants, the U.S. National Park System, and Thomas Cole, the influential 19th-century American landscape artist. Then they visited National Gallery of Art. When they arrived, Alvarez said, her students recognized the work on the walls: “That’s Thomas Cole.” “And the parents were really impressed,” she added.
The unit had grown out of work Alvarez did as a fellow of the Yale National Initiative, which offers two-week summer seminars with Yale faculty for teachers across the country. Each fellow then creates a curriculum unit based on their seminar topic. Alvarez’s unit on art was part of a 2024 seminar, “Landscape, Art, and Ecology,” led by Timothy Barringer, the Paul Mellon Professor in the History of Art in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).
Joining these seminars at Yale, Alvarez said, “makes me happy. Being a student again is just so nice.”
This July, Alvarez attended her third seminar through Yale National Initiative (YNI), on “Latinx Histories, Cultures, and Communities,” with Albert Laguna, an associate professor of American studies and ethnicity, race, & migration in FAS. What sets the Yale National Initiative apart, she said, is the spirit of collaboration and partnership that pervades the program.
“I think sometimes people forget the teachers are actually the experts in their classrooms,” Alvarez said. “People talk about fixing education — and often they mean there’s something wrong with teachers, that what you’re doing in your class isn’t working.” But at YNI, she said, the message is, “We just want to support you. We want to enhance what you’re doing.”
While the two-week intensive session on Yale’s campus gives fellows the opportunity to focus on their topic through seminar meetings, one-on-one meetings with Yale faculty, and discussions among their peers, all do significant reading and research both before and after the on-campus session.
For Alvarez, that meant availing herself of Yale’s resources, even from home. “Many of the books I need come from the D.C. public library,” she said. “But anything that’s not there, I can reach out to the Yale library, and they’ll ship the books to your house.”
This year, she’s exploring the geopolitical influences that brought many immigrants to the District of Columbia and influenced her school’s turn to a bilingual curriculum. In another seminar, “American Global Power from Empire to Superpower,” led by David Engerman, the Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History in FAS, she delved into U.S. foreign policy and trade influence in Central America, which became a curriculum unit that used the banana as a focal point to engage students and teach them about international trade, fair pay, and the human labor behind the foods they eat.
As an early elementary teacher, of course, her challenge is to take college-level knowledge and adapt it for her young students in a way that feels connected to their experience — and fun.
“The year that I did the banana unit, I dressed up as a banana,” she said. “The great thing about YNI is that the professors are amazing, and I could listen to them talk all day long — and then you also have teachers who come in with a lot of knowledge and you can bounce ideas off each other and ask, how would you teach this? What would you do? We can all help each other.”
