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

2. The Issues and Challenges

What are the numerous issues and concerns that all teaching historians share, and that collaborative programs may help to solve?

1. Students in both secondary schools and colleges often remain unaware of the breadth of the field of history as it has expanded in the late 20th century.

They lack an understanding of the field's complexity, often believing that all the answers have already been dApril 30, 2007of historical study broadened to include the new “social history,” the amount of material that historians have to deal with, and the number of subdisciplines they are studying increased considerably. Often the new forms of historical study are also interdisciplinary in nature.1 Another vital shift in content and conceptualization involves the expansion of world history courses in secondary schools. To be sure, colleges that train future teachers are increasingly likely to have an introductory world history course that at least discusses issues that must be faced when dealing with the breadth of world history content in the schools. But for secondary teachers, conceptualizing the world history course remains a challenge, all the more so when they have had limited courses beyond beyond introductory presentations.

2. When high school students or undergraduates enter a history class, they often have little background in history and almost none in its methodology.

History teachers at all levels have to confront this lacuna, especially when teaching survey courses. This is where students begin to develop their ideas about the subject, or lose interest completely, and also where history departments encourage talented students to select the field. Interesting solutions to this problem are being tried at both the school and the college level. In programs that students find challenging and rewarding, teachers and college faculty are making more use of primary sources, technology in presentations and research, textual analysis, and interdisciplinary courses that link English and history or anthropology and sociology.2

3. The traditional lecture and traditional assessment are increasingly regarded as major obstacles to good history teaching whether in a school or at a college.

Research studies indicate that the traditional lecture is not the most effective method for the diverse learners in today's classrooms, either for fostering retention of knowledge or for teaching critical analysis.3 Research also shows that teaching primarily through lectures in college history classes impinges directly upon what happens in the K–12 classroom. If lectures are the primary method of transmitting the ideas, theories, and data of historical inquiry to students, they will then perceive this method to be the only appropriate one when they themselves become teachers. Increasingly, college as well as high school teachers are acknowledging that they need to explore methods that include active discussion and exercises that involve the use of historical materials and historical analysis.

Similarly, the content and structure of college history courses and the related modes of evaluation will shape the methods of assessing history learning adopted by future teachers. For example, if rote memorization is heavily tested in college survey courses, the next generation of secondary school teachers will also resort to the same practice. Education courses (in pedagogy and assessment, for instance) will, no doubt, provide instruction on innovative testing methods; but it is the direct, practical experience of history courses and their evaluation methods that will linger in the students' minds, to be implemented when they become teachers. Unquestionably, assessment, and authentic assessment (reflecting actual practice in history) in particular, will become an increasingly important concern in testing history in schools. Authentic assessment measures learning by asking students to evaluate a document or develop an argument based on data, not just answer questions that simply require recall of information. An imaginative and varied array of exercises in college history classrooms and the research on their effectiveness can contribute directly to future applications of this type of assessment.

4. In required history survey courses, a balance must be struck between the need for content and the need for the development of critical thinking, writing, and historical research skills.

The need for this balance is a focal point for discussion among those who teach survey courses. Some suggested solutions have encouraged different thinking about teaching and learning, resulting in an examination of varying curriculum and presentation models. A volume edited by Peter Stearns, Peter Seixas and Sam Wineberg provides some excellent examples of how the questions are being defined and offers suggestions for common areas for discussion. 4 History departments that are training teachers need to emphasize the transferable habits of mind, from document assessment to evaluation of change and causation, as well as providing appropriate basic content. By the same token, history–social studies teaching standards developed in some states include a growing emphasis on discipline-specific analytical skills. This emphasis may provide context for some rethinking of curricular emphases and reading assignments in the history major, so that future teachers gain repeated experience in developing historical habits of mind (that is, developing perspectives and making reasoned historical judgments) in order to incorporate them in their own subsequent teaching efforts.

5. The content of history is increasingly in the public sphere.

The national debate over standards has moved the content of K–12 and college history curriculums onto the public agenda even though such basic questions as what information is important and how it is presented should be concerns primarily of history faculty at all levels. New questions continue to be raised about who receives schooling in our country and what is required in that schooling. The focus on what students know about history reinforces the need for more (and certainly not less) history in K–12 classrooms.5 If one implements the recommendations of the Bradley Commission, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Report Card, or National Standards documents, the need for increased history content learning becomes paramount.

Often history is perceived to be a story of who we are. Many individuals and groups not directly involved in history research or teaching have taken an interest in what the “story” of America and the world conveys about and to Americans. The outpouring of national feeling after the attacks of September 11, 2001, has increased the discussion about what kind of history is taught in schools and made those questions all the more relevant. 6

As conversations on campuses in recent years have often centered on the “canon” of history, those who know about history from research, teaching, and writing are now more often, and appropriately so, pulled into the public debate. Books that focus on this debate about what students should know and what they do not know in history have been on bestseller lists.7
This public evaluation of what history courses should contain should attract the attention of all historians, not just the secondary-school teachers who must respond to state standards, textbook selection committees, and their students' parents. How effectively we as historians articulate the method and materials of history can have repercussions on history's perceived value to an increasingly vocal, aware, and interested public.

College, university, and secondary school history faculties have similar objectives, but they offer varying depth and breadth of knowledge, use multiple techniques, and teach disparate student populations. Because one took a college course in history one is not a historian; because one attended high school one is not an effective teacher. In fact, university historians and secondary-school history teachers have the potential to create a productive symbiotic relationship that would benefit all instructors as well as the students they teach. Yet as Seymour B. Sarason and coauthors commented in their 1986 book, The Preparation of Teachers, “You have to know and experience in the most intimate and tangible ways the situations which your actions purport to affect.”8

Most educators have little opportunity for direct experience with what goes on in other sectors. Secondary school teachers have little time to pursue academic research, and university historians have no time to sit in secondary classrooms. But the increasing number of collaborations shows that even without direct experience, it is possible to increase awareness by meeting on common ground and thereby understanding better the important issues in each other's work.

 

Last Updated: April 30, 2007