Project Vietnam | Partners

Partners

Faculty Partners

Dr. Margaret Crocco, Professor of Social Studies, Teachers College

"Working on Project Vietnam offered an extraordinary opportunity to re-engage a painful moment in American history using a contemporary pedagogical and research tool. Students' use of the digitized outtakes from the PBS series prompted a series of reflections on the historical enterprise, teaching, war, politics, and citizenship. Vietnam remains a controversial issue. The abundant new "primary sources" made available by this archive suggest why the wounds of war have not yet healed for many Americans. Our students--and their instructors--profited greatly on many levels from this unique educational experience." - Margaret Crocco

Dr. Bill Gaudelli, Professor of Social Studies and Education, Teachers College

"Teaching Vietnam Now was a terrific experience as it allowed me to engage students the way I normally would, with multiplicity, incongruities and about the usable past, but in a open context that encouraged students to explore a trove of digital materials to support their analysis. There was great value in having these primary source materials readily at-hand and rendered visually both for the course we taught and for the implementation of teachers in the course with their eventual students." - Bill Gaudelli

Dr. Charles Armstrong, The Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences

"Project Vietnam has been a very important experiment both in teaching and in the utilization of sources. I think there are many other areas of history in which this type of format can also work so I hope this is just the beginning of expanding outwards to really rethink the way use media in our teaching." - Charles Armstrong

James Lap, lecturer in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Columbia University

"Language classes are more attractive and successful if they are taught in a cultural and historical context. Vietnam Project provides us with abundant and valuable resources to this aspect of teaching Vietnamese language. From the language point of view, students are assigned to watch video and/or listen to audio clips to understand and appreciate different language accents of the three regions of Vietnam and their variations of six tones. From the cultural point of view, students are asked to pay close attention to the clothing and customs of different regions. From the historical point of view, students are required to listen to people who played important roles in Vietnam's recent history. For the final examination, students have an opportunity to incorporate video and/or audio clips into their projects with James's guidance and input all along. Some students have made good progress and can contribute to translating some WGBH video clips into Vietnamese." - James Lap

Grant Partners

WGBH Boston

WGBH Boston is America's preeminent public broadcasting producer, the source of fully one-third of PBS's prime-time lineup, along with some of public television's best-known lifestyle shows and children's programs and many public radio favorites. WGBH is the number one producer of Web sites on pbs.org, one of the most trafficked dot-org Web sites in the world. WGBH is a pioneer in educational multimedia and in technologies and services that make media accessible to the 36 million Americans who rely on captioning or video descriptions. WGBH has been recognized with hundreds of honors: Emmys, Peabodys, duPont-Columbia Awards...even two Oscars. In 2002, WGBH was honored with a special institutional Peabody Award for 50 years of excellence. For more information visit WGBH.org.

WGBH Media Library and Archives

With a repository of over 50 years of public broadcasting history, both TV and radio, the WGBH Media Library and Archives has embraced new developments in online media in its efforts to bring its archived materials to a broader audience and to serve the needs of the academic community.

The MLA, formed in 1979, establishes the policies and procedures for the acquisition of production materials, access to the collection, intellectual control and preservation standards for physical media and digital production and administrative resources. Since the 1990s, the MLA has focused on making its unique and valuable collection accessible to scholars and the general public. The growth of the Internet has allowed the MLA to launch a rich Web site to provide access to selected WGBH media material. Inspired by continued public interest in material from programs that are no longer being broadcast, WGBH has become a leader in building public and educational Web sites to enhance access to content and program materials.

Today the MLA collection consists of more than half of a million production and administrative assets including film, video, audio, computer and print media. The collection is extensively used by WGBH television, radio, web and educational projects. External scholars and students have also used the collection. Over the past couple of years, students and scholars from Harvard University, New York University, the University of British Columbia, Northeastern University, Brandeis University, the University of California at Berkeley and high schools in the Boston area, have been to the MLA to conduct research. Their research focus has ranged from the legal issues relative to the Boston school busing mandate in the 1970s, children's programming from the 1970s and television cooking shows to interviews with artists, academics and politicians who have appeared in WGBH programs.

University of Massachusetts Boston

The University of Massachusetts Boston is nationally recognized as a model of excellence for urban universities. A comprehensive, doctoral-granting campus, it provides challenging teaching, distinguished research, and extensive service which particularly respond to the academic and economic needs of the state's urban areas and their diverse populations. UMass Boston's Joseph P. Healey Library supports the curricular and research needs of the university's students and faculty by providing a wide variety of library materials in traditional and new media formats.