Nate Sleeter Becomes RRCHNM’s Director of Educational Projects
The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce that Dr. Nate Sleeter has become our new Director of Educational Projects. The K–12 and college educational resources that RRCHNM makes freely available to teachers, students, and parents regularly receive millions of visits per year, and they are used in the curricula of schools from Virginia to California.
Nate has for several years been RRCHNM’s primary specialist in creating educational resources. His new role as Director of Educational Projects reflects both the results he has achieved in creating educational materials at RRCHNM for more than a decade, and the renewed emphasis that RRCHNM is making on history education in schools.
Nate began his career as a K–12 educator. For eight years, he taught middle school and high school social studies as well as special education. He gained experience as a classroom teacher in Madison, Wisconsin, in Annandale, Virginia, and in Germany. At the same time, he earned a M.Ed. in special education and an M.A. in history from George Mason University. In 2012, he became a graduate research assistant at RRCHNM while working on his PhD in history. He earned that degree with his dissertation on the cultural history of gifted children in the United States. In 2016 Nate began a full-time position at RRCHNM, working first as a Digital Teaching and Learning Specialist and next as a Research Assistant Professor. His experience as a teacher in the classroom, his research as a historian and educator, and his practical experience creating dozens of educational resources equip him well for this new role.
Among the many things he has done at RRCHNM, Nate currently directs World History Commons, an open educational resource with peer-reviewed content for world and global history teachers, scholars, and students. The website provides more than 1,700 annotated primary sources, 100 teaching guides, and 30 overviews of methods and approaches. He regularly teaches two online courses for K–12 teachers, titled “Hidden in Plain Sight” and “Virginia Studies.” These courses follow an inquiry-based approach to learning about history, and they also explore how historians analyze evidence. He has also published extensively on history education and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Most recently he has received a series of grants from the Library of Congress from their Teaching with Primary Sources program. These grants allowed RRCHNM to create eight teaching guides for difficult topics in history, including histories of race, labor, and religion. Those resources appear on teachinghistory.org.
Mills Kelly, RRCHNM’s executive director, has worked with Nate since he joined Mason. “Nate Sleeter began his career at RRCHNM as a graduate research assistant over a decade ago working on education projects with our former colleague Dr. Kelly Schrum. Nate and Kelly’s collaborations resulted in a number of digital history projects that are still heavily used by K–12 and college teachers. What is less well known about Nate’s career at RRCHNM is what a wonderful mentor he has been to graduate students working on education-related projects. In his quiet way, Nate helped a number of our PhD students grow as digital historians.”
Lincoln Mullen, the incoming director of RRCHNM, says this about Sleeter. “Everyone who works with Nate comes away impressed with the care and expertise that he brings to history education. Nate cares deeply about supporting teachers and students, and about teaching them to understand the past. RRCHNM is fortunate to have had Nate as a key staff member for the past decade, and doubly fortunate that he is taking on this new leadership role.”