ETHS's Corey Winchester Is 'Illinois History Teacher Of The Year'

EVANSTON, IL — Evanston Township High School faculty member Corey Winchester was last month named the 2020 Illinois History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Winchester is set to receive a $1,000 cash honorarium and eligibility for the institute's National History Teacher of the Year award, while ETHS will receive a core archive of American history books and other educational materials at a ceremony in the future, according to the New York-based education nonprofit.

"I'm humbled by this. I'm humbled anytime folks want to talk about the work that I do," Winchester told Patch. "I think the recognition that I have is emblematic of the collective environment that I have around me. My community, my supports, my students. So, to me, it's a manifestation of all the people that are part of my village."

Now in his 11th year teaching at ETHS, Winchester said he was nominated for the award by a colleague, but he had not been anticipating hearing back by any particular date.

"It came as a surprise to see that congratulations email," he said. "There's a lot of great history teachers out there, so I was super excited and humbled that they had selected me."

According to the institute, winners are determined by committees in each state that can be composed of teachers, former winners and other education professionals. It has awarded state and national history teacher of the year awards since 2004.

Winchester, 32, teaches courses on U.S. History and Sociology of Class, Gender and Race at ETHS, where he also works with the student group Students Organized Against Racism. Since starting at the school during his undergraduate studies at Northwestern University, the Philadelphia native has been repeatedly recognized as an outstanding educator. Last year, he was one of 10 Illinois high school teachers to win a Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching.

That honor is accompanied by a teaching sabbatical at Northwestern, which Winchester combined with a master's degree program at the university that had already accepted him into it. He said it allowed him to earn a Masters of Arts in Learning Sciences in one year instead of two, developing a thesis around the interdisciplinary, inter-generational program he was involved in piloting at ETHS that included both high school and college students in classrooms together. Winchester is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences at Northwestern.

RELATED: ETHS Teacher Corey Winchester Wins Golden Apple Award

Speaking on the second day of classes of the 2020-21 school year at ETHS, which are due to remain fully remote until further notice, Winchester explained the coronavirus offers a challenge to educators.

"I think the pandemic in and of itself is definitely a phenomenon, but what's most important, and I think something that we're all living through and experiencing, is how our nation has reacted to it. How our leadership, or the lack thereof, has really been negatively oppressive," Winchester said.

"So what I feel like I have to do, as a teacher, is: One, not only talk about the realities, talk about the fact that we have a white supremacist president in office, one that is disrespecting so many different communities in our nation and has been doing so since the start of the presidency and even before that," he added. "But I also have the task of helping, really working with, my students to make collective sense of what we are all experiencing."

Things need to be put into historical context to really make sense, Winchester said, and not just by history teachers, but by educators in other subjects and people outside of an academic environment as well.

"I think we all have to realize that we have a responsibility to really be interrogating histories, and situating all of our work in a historical context so we can realize that history isn't this thing of the past but it's something that we experience now, and the implications of our actions in the now is what's going to impact the future," he said. "So everything is all connected, and I just really wish that folks understood the magnitude of that — in whatever capacity they're in. "