Five days before the 2008 commencement exercises at Ashland University, Karen Dombrowski found herself in the hospital, laid low by a stomach virus that had left her severely dehydrated. But by Thursday she was back in her 8th grade history classroom, and on Saturday she walked proudly across the Jones Terrace in front of Founders Hall to receive her Masters diploma.

She is the first graduate of the Masters in American History and Government program, and her capstone project advisor, Christopher Burkett, praises her as "well worthy of the honor." She has a reputation for seriousness among both faculty and students in the program, making steady progress toward her degree since she entered with the first class of students in 2005. She began planning the capstone project she would eventually complete "during her first year, set a calendar and stuck to it," Burkett said.

"I was determined to get through this by May of 2008," Karen said, "because I had to plan the wedding of my daughter during the summer." But it was a deep interest in the topic she chose—the creation of the Bill of Rights—that motivated her to use mornings before school began, afternoons in her classroom after students had departed, and evenings at home to push forward her work. "Ive always been interested in that period of the Founding," she said, and "I wanted and needed to know more about it, so as to give more to my students."

She wrote two sets of detailed lesson plans. The first traces the origins of the Bill of Rights in British political history and in American revolutionary thought. The second conducts students in an exploration of whether a Bill of Rights was necessary to complete the American Revolution.

In keeping with the MAHG program emphasis on primary documents, Karens lesson plans center around original statements of rights. "She did a great job of digging up all manner of relevant documents," Burkett said. Lesson plans included such documents as the Magna Carta, which asserted the rights of English nobles under the sovereignty of their king and the declarations of rights that appeared in state constitutions after 1776.

In her plans, students might, for example, be divided into cooperative work groups, each group reading a specific document and analyzing it with the help of guiding questions. As groups present their findings to the rest of the class, they would learn that "while the idea behind the Bill of Rights has its origins in the British tradition, the American understanding of the rights of the governed has a very different basis; it is rooted in an understanding of natural rights that apply not merely to an elite class, but to all people," Professor Burkett noted.

The lesson plans Karen devised are so comprehensive that "you could probably take at least a semester to cover them," Karen noted. Although she herself teaches in middle school, the lessons she developed might be most thoroughly mined by high school teachers. To show how they are applicable to a variety of grade levels, Karen aligned each lesson not only to the curriculum standards of the state of Ohio for eighth grade, but also to a set of national norms that span middle and high school grade levels, outlined by the National Council for the Social Studies.

Karen hopes that her capstone project may eventually be made available to teachers online, perhaps through one of the sites in which the Ashbrook Center has involvement. In the meantime she continues to craft new teaching approaches in her own classroom. She just finished designing a "Colonial Jeopardy" game for her students, which included a category of questions not normally seen on the TV program, called "Put it in Writing"; it challenges students to recognize key quotations from primary historical documents.

She is also working on a Teaching American History grant (funded by the US Department of Education) in partnership with her school district (Berne Union in Ohio), the Ohio Historical Society and Dr. Ken Heineman, Professor of History at Ohio University-Lancaster. It will develop field trip possibilities, lesson plans and other resources exploring the rich history of Ohio, especially the southeastern area. Because of geographical features such as the Ohio River, this area played a key role in the Underground Railroad during slavery times as well as in infrastructure projects that promoted industrial expansion in the 19th century.

Not least of all, Karen vows to stay involved in Ashbrook Center teacher education programs, especially the MAHG summer sessions. "I dont want to miss a summer from here on out," she said, noting her appreciation of the program that, even as a graduate, she can still visit.