There was a time early in the century when the leading historians of the day were directly involved in school history. A cohort of luminaries, including Charles McLean Andrews, Charles Beard, Carl Becker, James Henry Breasted, Edward A. Channing, Charles Homer Hoskins, and Frederick Jackson Turner, left their imprint on the school curriculum. While structural changes in the professions make it unlikely that we will again see this kind of involvement, historians have recently shown more interest in educational questions and have participated actively in collaborative projects between schools and colleges. Some of these initiatives have been reported in Perspectives, such as the pressure successfully exerted by history departments in Pennsylvania on behalf of history in the state’s public school curriculum regulations.
The state humanities councils have become an important set of institutions for bringing historians as well as other humanities scholars into projects that involve the schools. Especially popular with the state councils are in-service institutes for teachers. In the past few years, eighteen councils have either established teacher institutes or contemplated the step. The attraction is easily explained. The state councils are mandated to mobilize scholars for nontraditional and nonacademic audiences. Because of the unfortunate division of scholars and school teachers into separate professional spheres, the latter form an obvious audience for the councils. Moreover, compelling criticism of preservice and in-service teacher education in the recent national reports on education as well as in educational journals, make teacher institutes a sensible programmatic departure.
While most of these programs of in-service institutions range across the humanities or are interdisciplinary, the New York Council for the Humanities designed a program in one discipline in order to create the optimal opportunities for network building. During the summer of 1984, the New York Council for the Humanities introduced its History Teacher Institute (HTI) with four week programs for eighty-two social studies teachers at the City University Graduate Center, the University of Rochester and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. HTI was designed to revitalize teachers by taking them seriously intellectually, to serve their practical needs by enabling them to work on the “translation” of historical scholarship for classroom use, and to promote long term collaboration among the participating schools and colleges. While it is still too early to know where all of the follow-up activities will lead, the results of HTI are already encouraging enough to call to the attention of those interested in history-teacher training and in bridging the gap between school and college.
Planning
During the planning stage of the project in 1983, New York State’s secondary social studies curriculum was being revised and we were told that, without additional in-service training, teachers would be hard-pressed to do justice to whatever new courses were mandated. There was also a real danger that history would lose its traditional place as the synthesizing element in the social studies. The original draft of the state’s curricular guidelines for the new ninth- and tenth-grade global studies course was organized around broad concepts, like “human rights,” which changed meaning or lost all meaning as they were traced over time and place. This thematic approach was a historian’s nightmare. Anomalies like introducing the Common Market before World War II were justly ridiculed in the editorial pages of the New York Times. The Council decided that, in addition to its other virtues, a program of history institutes would be an important contribution to the public debate about the shape of the social studies curriculum.
The local environment influenced us in another way. New York State is well endowed with colleges and universities and with collaborative projects of all kinds between schools and colleges. A catalog of such collaborations involving just the institutions in the City University of New York and New York City schools in 1980–81 mentions 130 projects covering everything from schemes which enable high school students to earn college science credit or to attend special Saturday lectures on campus to others which send college professors into high school classrooms. This rich endowment gave us confidence that the habit of collaboration was sufficiently strong in New York State to enable teacher institutes to be planned and carried out by institutions in a collaborative manner.
The New York Council carefully studied the history of in-service training in order to learn from the past. Summer institutes proliferated after the launching of Sputnik and, by the 1960s, institutes in most basic subjects were being sponsored by the National Science Foundation, under the National Defense Education Act; Educational Personnel Development Act, and John Hays Fellowship Program as well as by the State of New York. The evaluations of these programs and interviews with their alumni make it clear that participation in institutes can transform teachers and actually become turning points in their professional lives. Last generation’s institutes struggled with issues that still have not been resolved: residential vs. commuting? content vs. methodology? how to ensure follow-up activities? how to ensure school support for teachers after summer study?
From a survey of eighty-four history institutes held in the summer of 1965 and involving a total of 3,200 teachers, one unambiguous and “overriding conclusion” emerged, “namely that the single most important factor was the quality of the instruction offered.” The quality of instruction was apparently related to whether the director and staff “are sensitive to problems of content and of materials that face teachers.” We took this to mean that the Council should find experienced scholars who, ideally, had taught teachers, and that there is no conflict between content and methodology when methodology means discussing and developing materials for use in the classroom.
In October 1983 the Council issued its request for proposals for the History Teacher Institutes, with the following features built in:
- an open competition for three nonresidential institutes;
- applications were to be made by an institution of higher education in conjunction with a group of high schools, which were prepared to send a total of at least twenty-five teachers to the institute (should it be funded);
- the planning of applications by local committees consisting of the prospective directing scholar and teachers or administrators from each participating high school (this and the previous condition ensured collegiality, guaranteed school input, and created the preconditions for institutional cooperation);
- the clustering of teachers from the high schools to promote collaborative support groups which are essential to enhancing impact in the schools once the summer study was over;
- use of experienced master teachers to work with participating teachers on materials and curriculum development;
- some financial or in-kind support by the high schools;
- meaningful follow-up act1vltles, in particular, scheduled visits by professsors to the high schools and return meetings by participating teachers on campus.
The Response
Despite a hurried start-up time that allowed applicants only three months to complete and file rather demanding proposals, the response was overwhelming. We received applications from twenty-four colleges and universities incorporating nearly 200 high schools, Clearly there is a hunger for serious study in the humanities on the part of teachers, and great interest among their administrators and the professoriat.
Most applications emerged, as we intended, from a collaborative process. Some professors reported spending as much as fifty to sixty hours on the whole process. There was the problem of expectations raised and disappointed at the 150 high schools which were not part of the funded proposals. On the other hand, historians at one prestigious upstate liberal arts college which did not receive a grant wrote that “meeting the social studies teachers and administrators was worth the entire effort.” A faculty member at a rural community college found the application process “inspirational.” One university in an upstate city along with a group of neighboring high schools developed sufficient momentum to organize their own scaled-down summer institute without Council funding. All of this lends support to the HTI requirement of collaborative applications.
The Institutes
In screening the two-dozen proposals during February 1984, a special advisory board of social studies educators and historians looked at the quality and coherence of each course of study, its value in relation to the social studies curriculum, and the experience of the proposing scholars with secondary education. Given the New York Council’s continuing preoccupation with reaching the vast and underserved upstate region, geographical distribution was also a factor.
The selectors made grants to the City University of New York Graduate Center where Professor Thomas Kessner directed a survey of American History from the colonial period to the present; to the University of Rochester where Professor Lynn Gordon directed a program on American Social History; and to Sarah Lawrence College where Professors Amy Swerdlow and Persis Charles offered an innovative “Gender Perspective on Political and Social History: Europe, the United States, and Latin America.”
After the awards were made, three local planning committees recruited teachers from their cooperating high schools, and the committees received more applications than they could accept. As planned, a large majority of the eighty-two participating teachers came forward in groups of between two and five from the same schools or small school districts. The City University and the University of Rochester strategically enrolled assistant principals and chairpersons of social studies. Sarah Lawrence College attracted seven teachers from the nearby and relatively poor Westchester cities of Yonkers and Mount Vernon. Most participants were highly qualified. The recruitment of groups of colleagues did, however, enable the program to enroll teachers who ordinarily would not have taken part in this kind of activity, especially the junior members of social studies departments who were brought in by senior colleagues. This may be one of the few tactics available for widening the circle beyond the predictable group of already excellent teachers who are naturally attracted to summer institutes.
Evaluators and visitors reported that each of the institutes had its own distinctive character. Kessner, a highly regarded scholar of American immigration with considerable experience with in-service education, provided what social studies teachers arguably need the most: a coherent synthesis of American history with deep reading in the literature of the subject. Kessner maintained continuity while also inviting in a notable series of guest lectures: Betty Caroli, John Blassingame, Eric Foner, Walter LaFeber, Richard Morris, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., James Shenton, and Gaddis Smith.
At the University of Rochester, a partnership was struck between Lynn Gordon, a historian in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, and faculty in the Department of History, including Milton Berman, Stanley Engerman and Eugene Genovese, who advised on the course of study and gave visiting lectures. This was a most fruitful arrangement. It is similar to Project Clio, in which Berkeley’s History Department and School of Education have joined forces to improve the California social studies curriculum, and to the Resource Sharing Project, which links four Manhattan high schools with faculty members from Arts and Sciences and Education at New York University. Reflecting on the benefits of the partnership, one of the historians at Rochester wrote “again and again, as questions came from students on how to use this material in the public schools (Professor Gordon) intervened to help the history professors as they fumbled for answers.”
The Sarah Lawrence program was driven along by the excitement of working on the cutting edge of gender studies and pioneering its integration into the school curriculum. Of the twenty-eight participants, seventeen were men. With its lush suburban setting, the Bronxville campus was the ideal site for summer study.
All three programs were structured in the same way, with lectures and discussions in the morning followed by field trips or workshops conducted by master teachers and focusing on the development and use of materials. With what results? Unanimous high praise in the evaluation reports of the participating teachers, master teachers, scholars, and outside observers make it certain that the institutes fulfilled their prime mission of revitalizing social studies teachers by offering them high quality courses in history. In the fall term following the institute at City University, a number of the teachers were preparing to register for graduate work in history.
An important factor contributing to this result was the opportunity to spend several afternoons each week in workshops or colloquia devoted to historiographical discussions or curriculum development that was related to the morning’s topic. Each institute produced durable sets of curricular units. Some of the more imaginative components at Sarah Lawrence, for example, included Frontier Men and Women, Songs and Gender in History, and Men and Women in Nineteenth-Century England. A university press is considering one of the three sets, and several of the units have already been introduced into courses and disseminated in follow-up meetings at schools not participating in the summer program.
The topics of the institutes were broad enough to be appropriate to meet the needs of high school teachers. Teachers found the duel emphasis on the content of a subject and the translation of new knowledge for classroom use to be mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive. Firstly, a process of creative destruction goes on at summer institutes, with old lesson plans rendered inadequate and consigned to the dustheap of history. Secondly, talking about history means talking about sources. Teachers should want to sort out primary materials and combine them into curricular units for their own students.
Mildred Alpern, one of the master teachers at Sarah Lawrence College, with long experience and service in social studies education, pointed out that the 1984 institute was superior in design to others she had attended. (She is also co-editor of the Teaching History Today column in Perspectives.)
By serving as facilitators or mediators and running the workshops, master teachers were instrumental in making this success possible. Experience with master teachers in earlier institutes has been mixed, with these individuals sometimes earning resentment for presuming to know more than their peers. This was not a problem in the History Teacher Institutes because the participating teachers came from a circumscribed locale in which the master teachers were already acknowledged to be leaders in their profession.
As follow-up activities proceed, evidence is beginning to accumulate that in addition to the professional lives touched and the classrooms influenced, new institutional arrangements may materialize. The University of Rochester and a local school district are exploring a formal arrangement in which release time would be provided for teachers to enable them to study in specially designed courses at the University. Networks of social studies teachers have been strengthened immeasurably in Monroe (University of Rochester) and Westchester (Sarah Lawrence College) Counties, with visits taking place across district lines. With the support of The Booth Ferris Foundation, the New York Council for the Humanities has moved HTI into its second year, and is expecting many proposals again to materialize on behalf of the same pool of under served and hungry professionals.
Edward Bristow is Academic Affairs Associate at New York University. As a program, officer at the New York Council for the Humanities, he designed and ran the History Teacher Institutes.
