Brown County High School history teacher Emily Lewellen will once again represent Indiana on the national stage, after being selected to work on a project with the National History Day program.
During the next several months, Lewellen and 14 other selected teachers from across the country will work with NHD and the Library of Congress staff to write and test five student guides based on the NHD project categories: documentary, exhibit, paper, performance and website.
Lewellen will work on the documentary guide. “I’m very excited about this, as documentaries are my personal favorite project type for National History Day. I love how documentaries enable you to take visual images and film to invoke empathy and emotions in your audience,” she said.
Lewellen and fellow history teacher Alecia Adams lead Brown County High School’s History Club, which has made documentaries on local veterans that were shown during the district’s Veterans Day ceremony.
According to NHD, the guides “will help students find, analyze and integrate primary sources from the Library of Congress into their NHD projects.”
This is not Lewellen’s first time working with NHD. Previously, she participated in the Memorializing the Fallen program where she studied World War I in France. She also participated in the Operation Liberty program where she traveled to the Netherlands with a student to study World War II. She also has written a lesson plan for an NHD collaboration with the National Endowment for Humanities.
In addition, she has received statewide honors related to history.
Lewellen was asked to represent Indiana on the Women’s Suffrage Float in the 2020 Rose Bowl parade in California. That year was the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women their right to vote.
At the school district’s 2018 Veterans Day program, Lewellen was named Teacher of the Year for the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 6915 in Brown County. Her students nominated her for the award, and Lewellen then had to write an essay detailing her work with veterans in the schools and in the community. She was selected as the district competition winner, then named the 2018-2019 High School Teacher of the Year by the VFW for the entire state.
Lewellen said this year’s project is completely different from her past work with NHD.
“For the other programs of study, we have focused on a specific time period and then I wrote a lesson plan and, in some cases, a eulogy for a fallen soldier,” she said.
“This program gives me the opportunity to learn more about an amazing resource that can be utilized in my classroom. Then, I will write a chapter of a book on how to incorporate those sources into a National History Day project.”
NHD reached out to Lewellen about the opportunity a couple of months ago and asked her to apply. She had to find a primary source through the Library of Congress website and write a couple short essays on the source.
She decided to go with a political cartoon that dealt with the assimilation of Native Americans during the 1800s.
“I had to place the cartoon into historical context, analyze the source, connect the source to this year’s NHD theme — Communication: The Key to Understanding — and explain why I chose this source in particular,” she said.
She also had to submit a resume.
NHD has been a part of Lewellen’s life for a while now.
“Each year, I have had students attend the national competition, and I have learned a lot about the process both in terms of research and putting together a project,” she said.
“National History Day is a program that I see as vital for students. It teaches them about more than just a particular topic in history. It teaches them historical thinking skills, which can be applied into their everyday lives after high school. It teaches them to corroborate and vet their sources, to analyze and synthesize information, and to look for the impact of the past in the present day.”
Once the project is complete, it will be available online to all students so that they can learn to incorporate these sources into their NHD projects or other research projects.
