NEWARK, N.J. –   When Jazmin Puicón, Ph.D. was in high school, she loved history but not her history classes.

“I never saw the history that I knew ­– the history of immigrants, of people of color, of women – reflected in the material that was in my class,” said Puicón. “I used to get really frustrated about that.”

Now Puicón creates history courses that she teaches at Bard High School Early College, and one of those courses has led to her being named 2024 New Jersey Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the leading national organization that promotes K-12 history education.

Puicón’s award-winning course is “Innovative Newark.” Its website describes it as “an interdisciplinary course that utilizes project-based learning, community engagement, and student original research.”

But it is also a course about the history of New Jersey’s largest city that Puicón created at the request of her students.

Puicón asked her students what they wanted to learn about.

“They expressed, ‘We want to learn about our own history. We want to learn about the City of Newark,’” said Puicón.

In other words, they were experiencing feelings that were very similar to what she felt when she was a student. They wanted to see themselves in the history they were learning.

To be eligible for the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s New Jersey Teacher of the Year award, a teacher must be nominated. Puicón was nominated by a community member. Lesson plans, curricula, and letters of recommendation from colleagues familiar with a nominee’s teacher must also be submitted.

“Dr. Puicón’s ‘Innovative Newark’ course reflects Newark Public School’s core values of keeping our children at the center of what we do, committing to excellence, and leading our students to do the same,” said Superintendent of Schools Roger León. “I am thrilled to see Dr. Puicon get this prestigious recognition of educational ingenuity and responsiveness to our students’ needs.”

“Dr. Puicón brings great pride to Newark by leading her students to discover all that there is to be proud of in Newark and in themselves,” said Board of Education President Hasani K. Council. “We are grateful for the creativity and vitality she brings to her classroom, and we congratulate her on this outstanding achievement.”

“Dr. Puicón has a passion for the facilitation of student learning,” said District Director of Social Studies Carynne Conover. “She empowers students to be critical thinkers.”

Puicón, who is entering her sixth year of teaching at Bard, admits that there was a “perfect storm of events” that made it possible for her to create and launch the “Innovative Newark” course. It was during the time when students and staff were returning to schools after the COVID-19 pandemic had relegated everyone to remote learning. Also, local control had been recently restored to the Newark Board of Education, which meant that the decision makers who would greenlight the course were nearby and not in Trenton.

And there was also the uniqueness of Bard High School Early College, where students in the 11^th and 12^th grades take college-level courses to earn associate’s degrees and where many faculty members have earned their terminal degrees. Puicón finished her doctorate two years ago at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. For her dissertation, Puicón studied the Afro-Colombian working-class people in the Cauca Valley, a subject that connects with her own family’s history.

“I felt so strongly about this, I had to make sure that I saw this through,” she said.

After four years of teaching the course, Puicón has published research on student performance in the class. She reported that 100 percent of the students not only improved their daily attendance rates, but also improved their mastery of primary and secondary source analysis.

And behind all her data, Puicón has an overarching desire for her students.

“I want the students to be excited about studying history,” she said.