Topical Index of Curriculum Units

The Yale National Initiative is happy to share a topical index of the near 900 curriculum units created by National Fellows since 2005. Each year, the Initiative brings to New Haven dozens of teachers from high-poverty, high-minority school districts around the country to attend seminars led by Yale faculty, and each Fellow produces a curriculum unit relevant to the seminar topic based on their own research and understandings of the needs of their students. Since 2005, we have made the curriculum units available on our website organized into volumes by seminar. A chronological list of these volumes appears on the Directory of Volumes page of this website. The very bulk of the material, however, made it difficult to search through all the volumes to unearth the gems of special interest to the searcher. Therefore, in the fall of 2019, James Vivian, Director of the Initiative, commissioned the preparation of a topical index to include all units written from 2005 through 2019.

Building off the model established by the topical index of units produced by Fellows of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute since 1978, the index provides a new, more intuitive way for teachers to access the Initiative’s database of units created by scores of teachers on countless themes in both humanities and STEM subjects for all grade levels. It has been designed with the user in mind, especially teachers engaged in the process of creating their own curricula. It features up to four levels of subheadings differentiated by typeface with extensive cross-referencing. Because the index subheadings come from the topics of our national seminars and the units produced by our National Fellows, they reflect both the current interests of teachers and of contemporary scholarship. In addition, entries are organized chronologically beginning with those units produced most recently. We expect this feature to be especially useful for navigating STEM and STEM-related subheadings. All of these features and more are intended to make it easier for teachers to access our database of nearly 900 curriculum units and to find units on topics specific and related to their own curricular interests and needs. Searchers are encouraged to explore our database through the index in an open and explorative way and to make use of the content of the curriculum units either in their entirety or in part.