Building Successful Collaborations to Enhance History Teaching in Secondary Schools
By Kathleen Anderson Steeves

7. Areas of New Opportunity

Computer Technology and History Collaboration/Learning

Technology is affecting the historian's way of doing business, and it is an integral part of the discussion on learning. More and more is available in the education market in the way of electronic media for teacher and student use. Some of these provide access to vast databases; some use data to create programs for student use. AltApril 30, 2007lve students in history, they often provide nothing more than a pre-set list of choices that move students through a prescribed cause and effect process to arrive at a previously decided end point. There are a number of very significant issues involved in the use of technology, especially computers, in K–Grad classrooms that involve decisions about validity of approach and value of content. In this case, evaluation of effective materials could be an area of collaboration. The Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University provides tools that historians can use to evaluate web sites. 30

Partnerships with organizations, both in other schools and outside school walls, may also advantage resource poor schools with training and collaborative development of effective lessons that can maximize the technology resources they have. Joint seminars or learning opportunities that expand computer knowledge and at the same time develop teaching ideas for students could be another base for significant school university collaboration.

Off-Site Study

Resources outside the classroom are underused at all levels of teaching history. Every community has something within its boundaries that reflects a time in our past and in many cases communities support local museums or historical societies. If there is a partnership with a local college or university, historians and their students can work with secondary students to research, analyze, and write from documentary, photographic, or oral sources. In so doing, students can build a relationship with their own community and its people in ways a text, a lecture, or a computer can not provide.

Classroom Connections between History and Education

There has long been a disconnect between the practice of historians teaching in the classroom and the research and theory about teaching history. In liberal-arts institutions there is an ideal opportunity to combine new historical knowledge with new research about learning. Mary Crystal Cage, for example, has written about a program in which students majoring in the liberal arts may also learn about teaching. The course focuses upon the special skills required for effective teaching.31 Moreover, some universities are linking upper-level history courses with students who are working toward a teaching credential. This has happened, for example, at George Washington University between the Schools of Education and Arts and Sciences . The approach increases the content knowledge of college students who are planning to teach and at the same time increases the knowledge of all history majors and faculty in the varied teaching methods applied to history.

Strengthening the Content Core

History has a lot to gain from the growth of public interest in standards as a central principle of public education. The efforts on the part of many states to develop their own history standards indicate that they value the knowledge and ways of thinking about and analyzing material that students gain by studying history. The basis exists to reemphasize the significant role of history in the curriculums of public secondary schools. This could not be more effectively illustrated than with the recognition of the frequency with which history and historians were called upon to provide context for discussion and action as it relates to current events.

Secondary school teachers value the support of university historians in processing the historical debates, updating their learning, and gaining confidence in the message they bring to their students. At the same time, if the collaboration is to be completely effective, university history teachers need to address the learning issues of their students; to add the new knowledge gained by learning theorists, museum educators, and other applied historians that expands the reach of their teaching.

Evaluating the Relationships between History Curriculums and Teacher Training

Since the great majority of colleges train future history teachers, commitment to a strong history major, and possibly a related minor, constitutes the most important basic requirement needed for contribution to this training. At the same time, some programs might profitably reevaluate elements of their offerings in light of the teacher training role, to make sure that appropriate range, exposure to analytical skills, guidance in coordinated interdisciplinary work, and imaginative assessment mechanisms are available—along with consideration of relevant opportunities to interact with existing history teachers. Such a reevaluation should be perfectly compatible with the other purposes of a history curriculum and is reinforced by NCATE/NCSS requirements for program certification for teacher training. Departments training history teachers must not only indicate that students have taken certain history courses, but that students can demonstrate and apply the knowledge gained in the course work. This requirement should provide an opportunity for history departments to collaborate in teacher training, if only to provide information about their content courses.
Two-year colleges also play a strong role in the development of the historical knowledge of potential teachers. Recent efforts to bring together educators from high schools and two- and four-year schools in California have greatly enhanced the conversations about the content and pedagogy of teaching history.32

The American Historical Association will be posting on its web site details about a few programs where history departments direct teacher preparation programs. It will include syllabi of methods courses for history teaching and Capstone courses where future teachers review American and World History.


Last Updated: April 30, 2007

 
 
April 30, 2007