Andrew Phelan Internship

This week with Full Measure Content & Consulting, working on the Catholic Textbook Project, I took my most active role so far. As my previous two posts have discussed, the beginning of this internship was focused on teaching me the flow and expectations of the project. After our meeting last week about the upcoming plans, my supervisor, Mrs. Magnuson, and I felt like it was a good time to start on making me a more involved member of the team. My tasks this week involved me doing research and presenting quality images to be used in the textbook. While the task seemed small, it gave me a great opportunity to work with the project and my peers while also using research and design skills I developed during my undergrad.

The textbook and curriculum have an accompanying reader for the children that introduces historical events and figures in a storybook style while maintain accuracy and prioritizing retainability in children. The Middle Ages Reader that I was working with this week is designed for grade 2 and spans from St. Augustine of Hippo to Johannes Gutenberg, spanning 34 different historical figures in a chronological order while also tying together thematic strands across figures. I was able to discuss with Mrs. Magnuson what the research and writing process was like for this reader in particular. The team works with historians from universities such as the University of Southern California (USC) and the Catholic University of America, as well as a number of other scholars and educators. Their expertise on the subject of history is then connected with the writing of children’s authors who then write the stories to fit the vocabulary of children and meet age-appropriate standards. Their process is currently changing, but as they go forward it will include historian involvement in chapter outline that will then be followed up by historian review after the chapter has been written by the authors. This makes for an extremely comprehensive historical survey of these key figures that had me distracted reading quite a few times while trying to do my work for this week.

As for where I was able to help in this project, the reader features a running timeline throughout the book that helps orient children to when a person was alive and who else was active around those times. For example, on the first page on Richard the Lionheart, the timeline also shows Thomas Becket and Maimonides within 100 years prior, whom the kids would have just finished reading about. It was my task to find images for each of these figures to be featured on the timeline. The expectations were that the picture was historically significant or accurate, the pictures were varied (two similar images could not be next to each other), and they had to be able to be featured in the book (copyright free). I worked with a guide and spent time sorting through manuscript portraits, contemporary accounts, artefacts, effigies, seals, and statues to accumulate a set of pictures for each figure that fit the criteria. All images were copyright free, different from the ones next to them, and were significant to the figure. Upon completion I presented to the team and am waiting to hear back with notes.

I enjoyed getting to work hard on this project and am looking forward to seeing how I will be able to help the project next week.