Wyoming teachers tour the root cellar that is undergoing restoration near the
Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Powell and Cody. The Heart Mountain
Wyoming Foundation and UW’s Malcolm Wallop Civic Engagement Program are collaborating
to make the foundation’s resources available to K-12 Wyoming social studies and English
language arts teachers. (Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation Photo)
The University of Wyoming’s Malcolm Wallop Civic Engagement Program recently collaborated
with the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation (HMWF) to make the foundation’s multimedia
resources available to Wyoming social studies and English language arts teachers.
HMWF preserves the site where approximately 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly
incarcerated from 1942-45. Their stories are told through the foundation’s museum
-- the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Cody and Powell.
“The Wallop Program’s partnership with the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is an
opportunity to highlight the important work they are doing, including the incredible
resources they have put together, and to make this Wyoming story available to teachers
and students across the state,” says Jean Garrison, UW’s Malcolm Wallop Civic Engagement
Program co-director.
This partnership has allowed the Wallop Program to create resource guides for existing
Heart Mountain educational resources -- in modules focusing on topics ranging from
artistic expression by incarcerees to barriers and opportunities for voting at Heart
Mountain, to notable women and first-generation Japanese Americans incarcerated during
World War II.
Each of the modules aligns with Wyoming state standards for easy integration into
Wyoming classrooms. The materials are now available on the Wallop K-12 social studies
and English language arts catalogs -- free and available to the public -- in UW’s
WyoLearn catalog at https://civic.catalog.instructure.com.
“At Heart Mountain, we strive to spark curiosity and inquiry about this painful part
of our state and national history,” says Aura Sunada Newlin, HMWF executive director,
UW graduate and a descendent of Heart Mountain incarcerees. “We love working with
our friends at UW, and we are thrilled that our content can reach more Wyoming students
through the Wallop Civic Engagement Program.”
The UW-Heart Mountain partnership is made possible through a grant funded by the National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) titled “Integrating the Humanities Across Civics
Education in Wyoming.”
Wallop, whose distinguished career included serving in the U.S. Senate for three terms
and in the Wyoming Legislature, is remembered for his commitment to civil discourse,
public education and public service.
For more information about the Malcolm Wallop Civic Engagement Program, email wallop@uwyo.edu or visit the website at www.uwyo.edu/wallop.
More information about Heart Mountain can be found at www.heartmountain.org.
About the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, NEH supports research and learning
in history, literature, philosophy and other areas of the humanities by funding selected,
peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation.
For more information about NEH and its grant programs, visit www.neh.gov.
