Introduction to An Adventure of the American Mind

The Adventure of the American Mind (AAM) project is designed to train in-service and pre-service classroom teachers and college teacher education faculty to access, use and produce curriculum utilizing the Internet and the digitized primary source materials from the collections of the Library of Congress.

The objectives for this multi-year program are to:

1. Demonstrate a Library of Congress American Memory Fellows Program pilot that teaches educators how to utilize technology and primary resources in their classroom instruction.
2. Train in-service and pre-service teachers to use primary resources in their classroom instruction.
3. Further validate the American Memory Program with a broad group of teachers in local settings (K-12).
4. Demonstrate and evaluate a training program that can be exportable to other communities at minimal cost.

" ...[We] want to share our resources with the American people, who, through their elected representation in Congress, have created the world's largest repository of knowledge."

Dr. James Billington, Librarian of Congress

To help realize Dr. Billington's vision, Congressman Charles H. Taylor acquired the necessary funding to bring the AAM program to Western North Carolina. The program began in the fall of 1999, and now through the efforts of farsighted Senators and Congressman, has expanded to many states.

An Adventure of the American Mind is made available through a Library of Congress grant funded by the U.S. Congress. AAM is administered through the Education and Research Consortium of the Western Carolinas Inc.
For site-related problems, e-mail aam@ercwc.org..