Editor’s Note. At each annual meeting the Professional, Teaching, and Research Divisions, and the AHA Committee on Women Historians, sponsor sessions on issues that are central to a committee’s work and to the interests of many of our members. The 1985 Annual Meeting in New York City saw five sponsored sessions; the reports submitted by the session chairs are reprinted below. The chair of the Research Division’s session also includes the text of one of the session papers (on scholarly publishing) as an especially clear and urgent statement by the director of a major university press. Questions, comments, or requests for further information should be directed to session participants, or sent “in care of” to the AHA’s national office (400 A Street, SE, Washington, DC 20003).
Sponsored by the AHA Teaching and Professional Divisions
Linking Schools and Colleges; The Collaborative Approach to Teaching and Learning
CHAIR: Robert L. Zangrando, University of Akron and Professional Division
Academic Alliances in the Area of Foreign Language and Literature
Ray Mitton, The Hackley School
The Idea of the Collaborative History
Kermit L. Hall, University of Florida
The OAH-NCSS-AHA History Teaching Alliance
Deborah Welch, project director
Collaboratives in the Social Studies/Social Sciences
Theodore Lohman, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
COMMENT: George B. Tindall, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Professional Division
Marjorie Wall Bingham, St. Louis Park Public Schools, and Teaching Division
The session was well attended; the room had a capacity of about forty chairs, and throughout the two-hour period forty-three people attended, in addition to the seven of us at the front table. The interest level was obviously quite high, because there were few empty seats at the end of the program.
Knowing what I did beforehand about the internal content of the presentations, I took the liberty of changing the sequence of presentations from that listed in the printed Program. I managed to keep people to their time limits, so we had open discussion.
Kermit Hall led off; he spoke from his firsthand experience as Chair of the History Teaching Alliance Oversight Committee. His paper was direct and to the point in its explanation of why collaboration is needed for the general health of history instruction, and how it can be achieved in local areas with a mixture of mutual respect among teachers in the schools and college faculty. He also addressed the issue of incentives for new or continued collaboration.
Raymond Mitton chairs his Modern Language Department and has worked for several years with the schools-and-college cooperative format in that field. He was able to address the functional (“how we have done it”) and the philosophical (“why it must be done”) implications of a successful collaborative program.
Deborah Welch presented a very useful breakdown of the current efforts in history, the issues confronted, the projects underway, and the problems to be faced. She also explained how others could participate,
Theodore Lobman (formerly with the Hewlett Foundation, now with the Stuart Foundations) gave the final paper, in which he addressed the institutional problems at both the schools and the college/university levels that need to be surmounted for more effective collaborative work. He called upon the historical profession to confront these problems in creative and energetic ways.
George Tindall and Marjorie Wall Bingham offered provocative remarks as commentators. The open audience participation was varied and lively, and it revealed the continuing tensions that do exist and cannot be wholly discounted between the worlds and perspectives of the colleges (with their customary emphasis on publication as “doing history”) and the schools (with the diverse impacts from other disciplines in the Social Studies, from school administrators, from public officials, from curriculum specialists).
Robert L. Zangrando
University of Akron and Professional Division
