UW’s Wallop Program Partners with Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation on K-12 Catalog Expansion

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.