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

4. Relations between Education and History Departments

It is a truism that university departments of education and history exist in separate worlds. Pedagogy and content are assumed to be entirely distinct, intellectually or institutionally. But an increasing number of historians, and in some cases history departments, are becoming closely involved in teacher licensure or teacher outreach proApril 30, 2007 same token, within schools of education there is ongoing discussion about how to balance methodology with content, or about how to provide pre-service teachers with current and relevant history knowledge.18

If anything, content has been gaining in importance in licensing programs nationally. As early as 1965 the State of California, responding to concern that content has been sacrificed for method, ended all education degrees for the Bachelor of Arts and required that all students concentrate in a disciplinary field. Other states have followed this approach. Many states have also required a fifth year for licensing, in some cases deferring education courses until that time. In other areas universities have been considering dramatically downsizing education schools into departments or programs or moving to graduate degrees only (which include licensure requirements).19

Schools of education are now becoming much more closely linked to academic departments through the requirements of their certifying bodies, namely the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), to which schools of education may choose to belong, and the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification (NASDTEC), which governs requirements for teacher licensure within each state and the District of Columbia. When each body evaluates teacher preparation programs, it considers a set of guidelines that an education school must meet. It used to be the case that only the pedagogical programs for teacher preparation were reviewed, but as of 2000, NCATE directed a lead organization within each discipline to conduct evaluation of the programs by which future teachers learn their subject. In the case of history, that is being done by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), and the great majority of history departments will have to be involved at least to some degree. Universities and colleges seeking accreditation for their teacher preparation programs in secondary History/Social Studies must prepare a portfolio demonstrating that the course work required of their graduates has successfully taught historical items that relate specifically to the standards of the NCSS. The portfolios are reviewed by teams of historians and history educators. The AHA has developed a document to advise departments how to undertake the review.

Since 1989 another standards body has been in place that attempts to set a specially elevated standard for individual teachers. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) invites teachers to demonstrate their ability to meet standards that reflect exceptional teaching based upon a deep knowledge of their subject. It uses a model for requirements and testing related to that of the medical profession. This voluntary process is attracting participation by teachers in numerous states, many of which offer increased salary and recertification points to teachers for successful completion of the process. The National Board currently offers certification in Early Adolescence Social Studies–History (students aged 11–15) and in Adolescence and Young Adulthood Social Studies–History (students aged 14–18+). 20 The program is focused upon five core principles that have been adapted by NCATE for inclusion in its evaluation of teacher preparation programs:

  • Teachers are committed to students and their learning.
  • Teachers know the subjects they teach and how to teach the subject to students.
  • Teachers are responsible for managing and monitoring student learning.
  • Teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience.
  • Teachers are members of learning communities.

The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) is attempting to use these standards as a basis upon which to unify guidelines for teacher training institutions all around the country .21

History departments might usefully take into account these guideline statements in considering the relevance of their curriculums for teacher training. Right now, with some important exceptions, the task of specifically evaluating teacher preparation is left to education departments. Yet schools of education can only do so much without the collaboration of university history departments and school history-social studies departments. It appears that different constituencies hold pieces of the whole picture. A 1995 study of 400 history departments by John W. Larner of Indiana University of Pennsylvania found that in most higher education institutions, the work of training history teachers is done outside history departments. The greatest amount of collaboration (35 percent) occurs in advising education students, while as few as 8 percent shared responsibility for teaching the history-social studies methods course.22 Since that study, the AHA has taken a leading role in encouraging these K–16 collaborations and reporting them on their web site. 23 Stronger collaboration in just this one area could potentially create a stronger teacher, a better prepared student, more effective research, and a better place for history in academic institutions in the future.


Last Updated: April 30, 2007