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

6. Successful School–College Collaborations

There are an increasing number of collaborative efforts to enhance history learning in all parts of the country. Just how a collaborative effort becomes successful is a complex problem, but there are plenty of examples of projects that have found solutions to it. They basically provide diverse professional groups strong common links by which to work together, thusApril 30, 2007ls and in colleges and universities collectively. The movement of college-school partnerships goes back to National History Day of the 1970s and the History Teaching Alliance of the 1980s; the National History Education Network (NHEN) in the 1990s was sponsored by the AHA, the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS).

Yet the key to collaborations lies in local effort, and for that reason this discussion can only skim the surface of the subject by outlining national programs that encourage such efforts. In general, school-college collaboratives tend to offer one or more possible types of program: an annual day of panels either on content or pedagogy; on-going study groups or courses for teachers; and college participation in teacher preparation.29

One of the oldest, still existing collaborative programs takes place within the Advanced Placement Test program of the Educational Testing Service. It gathers together teachers and college faculty every summer to mark the AP exams, and in so doing has established an extremely important link between faculty in the two sectors of education. The accelerating growth in the number of students taking the history exams has brought about a need for more representatives from colleges and universities.

National History Day has established by far the most widespread and permanent program of local collaboratives. Founded by David Van Tassel in Cleveland in 1974, it provides a platform for historians and teachers to interact with public school students about history. The process of creating a project for the annual National History Day provides an opportunity for students to do the historical inquiry that historians value and wish to instill in students. At all levels (local, state, and national) historians can be involved with schools and students in grades 6–12 (as resource persons, judges, or supporters) through the National History Day summer institutes for teachers or at the national competition, held annually in June at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.

The Council for Basic Education (CBE) has sponsored annual conferences that bring to the nation’s capital faculty in education and the liberal arts who are active in partnerships. It works closely with a variety of organizations concerned with teacher preparation; in June 2000, for example, its conference was devoted to the PRAXIS II examination designed to assess the content knowledge of students working for teaching credentials. The CBE focuses its work on consortia of colleges with particular areas of interest in different parts of the country.

A particularly active sponsor of collaboration, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, has grown up in the last five years. It sponsors or lends assistance to a wide variety of programs for history teachers, chiefly but not exclusively on the East Coast. Of particular interest is its leadership in developing the “history high school,” the program by which a school makes history the focus of its curriculum to a particular degree.

The National Council for History Education sponsors a variety of programs of collaboration between teachers and professors. Its annual meeting is the main regular gathering devoted to discussion of history teaching between people in colleges, universities and the schools. Members of the organization lead programs within Teaching American History grants as well as other projects. The leadership of the NCHE includes prominent historians and public school history teachers.
Historians also work with projects supporting the teaching of civics or government. For example, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), in collaboration with Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center, has developed a First Amendment Schools Project. It involves schools, communities, and experts in content and curriculum development in reframing how schools model and teach democratic principles of the first amendment.

Leadership has also been very important at the regional or state level. For example, the Ohio Academy of History, currently housed at the University of Akron, is a professional society bringing together teachers, scholars, public historians, and students interested in all fields of history. It seeks to promote high standards of historical scholarship and teaching and the development and dissemination of historical knowledge in the state’s schools and colleges. The Academy issues awards for outstanding publication, teaching, service, dissertations, and public history. It also monitors and comments on the dissemination of historical knowledge in Ohio’s schools.

The most important new entry into this field has been the Teaching American History project (TAH). Written into legislation by Senator Robert C. Byrd in 2000 and administered by the U.S. Department of Education, it awarded about 60 grants in 2001 and 114 in 2002. It is intended to “assist local educational agencies (LEAs), in partnership with entities that have extensive content expertise” to improve the teaching of history in K–12 classrooms. [link to DOE web site] As of the second year, the grants have required that schools collaborate with content specialists from universities or museums or professional organizations with history expertise. The availability of federal money for history education is a relatively new phenomenon and one that recognizes not only the need for improved history education, but also the value of collaboration


Last Updated: April 30, 2007