The Tadler Grant provides extraordinary professional development opportunities to exemplary GUS teachers - who then bring those first-hand experiences and knowledge back to the classroom. Established by former Trustee Richard Tadler and his wife Donna P ’05 ’09, the grant has provided GUS faculty members a wide range of amazing experiences from attending educational conferences to travel to foreign countries.

This year, we are pleased to announce that the 2022 Tadler Grant has been awarded to fifth grade teacher Julie Wyman. The grant will allow Ms. Wyman to travel to Ghana, where she will attend the Witness Tree Institute of Ghana (WTIG) for an immersive two-week professional development experience for K-12 educators to deepen their knowledge of African culture and its impact on the world, and to explore their pedagogical competencies.

Q+A with Julie Wyman

Why Ghana?

My switch to teaching Social Studies and Math in fifth grade this year (2022-2023) has been an amazing experience. I am learning so much as a teacher and I feed off the engagement of my students. While I am as enthusiastic as ever teaching math, the experience of teaching Social Studies – specifically, U.S. History – has been fantastic. My students have a strong sense of social justice and have demonstrated impressive maturity while learning about the horrors of slavery and the duplicity of many of the iconic events and people involved in the founding of this country. The nefarious slave trade inexorably links Ghana and the U.S. I believe this opportunity to study in Ghana with WTIG will infuse my teaching with a perspective not to be gained in textbooks or documentaries. I want to learn about the history of Ghana - pre-colonization, colonial, and post-colonization - through a Ghanaian lens. I am most excited about experiencing the WTIG program with fellow educators from Ghana. My work this year developing the Social Studies curriculum will be further enriched by this educational endeavor with WTIG. My students have loved learning about Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti in our studies of the history of the United States. I would love to continue to personalize and enrich my Social Studies curriculum by including a unit to understand the relationship between the U.S. and Ghana.

What are your plans?

The WTIG program includes tours of: The St. Georges Castle and Cape Coast Castle (Slave Fortresses); Kakum National Park; the Assin Manso Ancestral Slave River; Asante Museum and the Manhyia Palace Museum; Ananse Akuraa Botanical Gardens and Nature Preserve; W.E.B. Dubois Center for Pan-African Studies; Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park and Museum. Workshops that I plan to attend include: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; Nature Journaling; Music, Proverbs, and Royalty; Exploring Ghanaian Identity Through Dance and Movement Systems; Cocoa Stories and Economic Matters; The Role of Arts in Ghanaian Culture and Education; Teaching Life Through Adinkra Designs.

What do you hope to learn?

I have found that my students learn best when the lessons I teach come from a passion or experience of mine. I am look forward to continuing the development of a Social Studies curriculum that is rooted in understanding the connection between the U.S. and the world, especially descendants of the slave trade. The U.S. would not exist as it does today without its dependence on chattel slavery. I also expect to develop and connect cross-curriculum parts of the WTIG program with dance, science, music, and art. The cross-curricular elements of the WTIG program will give me an opportunity to collaborate with GUS colleagues and connect across grade levels and curricula to make anti-racist learning visual and communal. The WTIG program will enhance my ability to develop and provide an anti-bias, anti-racist, and multicultural curriculum at GUS.