On this day, 237 years ago, the Constitution of the United States was completed and signed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Founding Forward is proud to celebrate Constitution Day. Even more, we are proud to work year-round to educate students, teachers, League members, and the general community on the Constitution which serves as a core component of our mission. Our civic education programs enable citizens across the country to understand, appreciate, and practice the principles, rights, and responsibilities of American citizenship. Together, we are all working to make our country a more perfect union.
Among the most impactful programs that Founding Forward provides are our teacher programs. This summer alone, more than 300 teachers from 44 states attended our professional development seminars. Through our programs, teachers interact with historians, field experts, and experience history in the place where it happened. They return to their classrooms with a better understanding of our founding principles and values, and with tools that help them teach the next generation about American history and civic responsibility.
Tonight, at our annual Constitution Day celebration, one of our teacher participants, Candelle Richman, addressed supporters, partners, and volunteers of Founding Forward with a speech that expressed the belief in the vital importance of our programs. Her remarks were given in Lincoln Hall, at the historic Union League of Philadelphia.
We share her remarks with you, in the hopes that they will inspire you to support Founding Forward and our work.
Constitution Day celebration remarks by Candelle Richman
Thank you for inviting me to speak tonight in this historic building. I’ve always been curious to know what it looks like inside, and what better way to see it than by attending an event celebrating civic education on Constitution Day! Speaking of Constitution Day: Today, like I do most years, as students entered my classroom, onto the screen I projected the preamble to the Constitution. After everyone was settled and had time to read it, I asked them from where I pulled the text. To my delight, most knew the answer, which hasn’t always been the case. I took this as an encouraging sign.
I’m here tonight because I have been asked to share a few words about my experience with Founding Forward. I’ll start with a brief background: I’m a full-time business teacher and part-time history teacher of 20 years at a small school in South Jersey. The courses I teach include Intro to Business, Marketing, and Accounting, and U.S. History as needed. In 2007, I first learned about teacher professional development seminars and have been seeking them out ever since. Some of these seminars have allowed me to travel around the country, and others have taken me abroad, including to Germany and South Korea. Then, in 2021, I attended my first Founding Forward seminar, and I have returned every year since.
Why do I, and so many of my colleagues, keep returning/investing our time and money in this organization, when so many of these kinds of programs exist for teachers? The reason is simple and is something that I’ve heard repeated from my fellow educators: we feel seen and respected as professionals. The meaningful week-long programs help us to improve our knowledge and skills which directly impact our students.
The quality of speakers and historians that we get to learn from through Founding Forward is incomparable. It’s not every day that we get to rub elbows with top tier historians, learn from educators who teach at some of the most respected institutions in the country (including some right here in Philadelphia), and hear from experts and innovators in the field.
These transformative programs bring together educators from around the country who are willing to take time away from their loved ones and spend the week refining their craft. We are not required to attend a Founding Forward program, we WANT and CHOOSE to attend, to learn from the experts as well as each other.
As I learned this summer, the seminars held at Union League Liberty Hill offer teachers a comfortable setting to gather in their downtime and build relationships, which provides opportunities to brainstorm and process new information. In my experience, just as much learning and information-sharing happens over a tasty meal, a refreshing beverage, or a rousing game of cornhole.
Add to this the ultimate immersive learning opportunity, getting the chance to, as I like to call it, ”touch” history and walk in the footsteps of those who came before us, imagine the anxiety of our ancestors as they waited in the long lines at Ellis Island or gain a better understanding of the struggles of those who resided in the tenements of the Lower East Side.
Through an experience with Founding Forward, we bring back new strategies and knowledge to our classrooms and colleagues and first-hand experiences to students who may never have the means to venture beyond their towns or neighborhoods. It is an experience that invigorates our passion for teaching, and in turn, invigorates our students. And for some of us, we are able to offer new perspectives through non-history courses, like English, science, economics, or like myself business, intertwining our subject matter with historical foundations, because civic literacy is also essential beyond the history classroom.
An example of a recent takeaway, this summer at a Founding Forward program titled Freedom, Opportunity, and the History of Immigration, speaker David Bier of the Cato Institute, articulated the impact of immigration on our economy. Not many would consider economics an engaging topic, but the room was riveted by his presentation, and I, for one, cannot wait to incorporate some of the information he shared into the economics units for my Intro to Business and Marketing coursework.
As you can see, Founding Forward’s teacher programs are vital to the professional development ecosystem. They provide teachers with the tools to do what we do best: to bring history alive for our students; make it relevant to their lives; offer a space for constructive, civil discourse about hard topics; and demonstrate that we are more alike than we are different, regardless of where we were born.
When I look back to our country’s founding documents, I consider the meaning behind the three familiar words that lead off the Constitution – We the People. I take them to mean that the responsibility is ours. We are the ones our founders tasked with upholding the tenets of our democratic system. We do this by ensuring that our students have access to the kind of civic education that will support them in becoming educated, engaged, and responsible citizens.
So, reflecting on my students’ recognition of the preamble, I am optimistic about the future because civic literacy is being taught in our classrooms and we are, as Founding Forward’s tagline states, building “a future rooted in liberty.”
To close, I want to offer my appreciation.
Thank you to the Founding Forward team for their commitment to maintaining and expanding programs that enrich the work teachers do. My colleagues and I believe in the programs of Founding Forward so much that we also contribute to them as members of the Joshua Chamberlain League. In fact, I was not surprised to learn that 90% of teachers who attend a Founding Forward program make a voluntary gift to support future programming.
But more importantly, I want to thank every single one of you here tonight. Because of your support and generosity, teachers like me have this incredible opportunity to learn about our country’s history, its founding, and understand the role we play in this great American experiment. It has been invaluable to me, and I’m grateful to be able to pass this on to my students year after year.
On behalf of my fellow teachers and the hundreds of thousands of students we teach each year, thank you.
Candelle Richman is a proud veteran educator at Pennsville Memorial High School in Pennsville, New Jersey. She is a graduate of Rowan University with a bachelor’s degree in business marketing and teaching certifications in business and history education. Recently, she earned a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction with a focus on educational innovation at the University of Virginia. Candelle uses a multidisciplinary approach to inspire students to develop a passion for learning, critical thinking, and problem solving.
Her love for both history and business has been a driving force behind her ability to connect with students and make learning fun and engaging. She encourages her students to embrace curiosity, creativity, and cultures beyond their own as she believes education is about developing skills that can be applied to the real world. Personally, Candelle is a proud native of South Jersey, but lives in Delaware with her husband, with whom she enjoys traveling and sharing new adventures.