Judith Moyer, Joseph Onosko, Charles Forcey and Casey Cobb | History in Perspective (HIP):A Collaborative Project Between the University of New Hampshire, SAU #56, and 13 Other School Distr | The History Teacher, 36.2

History in Perspective (HIP):A Collaborative Project Between the University of New Hampshire, SAU #56, and 13 Other School Districts

Judith Moyer, Joseph Onosko, Charles Forcey and Casey Cobb
University of New Hampshire

IN OCTOBER 2001, public school Supervisory Administration Unit #56 in Somersworth, New Hampshire, received a $645,000 Teaching American History grant for the History in Perspective Project (HIP). Our three-pronged plan was simple, straightforward, and, in some ways, experimental, though not wildly so. From observation and experience, we knew that teachers had the desire but usually not the time to search out and keep abreast of current research and debate in the field of American history. Using a questionnaire we asked area teachers what events, issues, and topics in United States history they would like to explore in greater depth. The project then brought middle school and high school social studies teachers to the University of New Hampshire to participate in seminar-style discussions on American history with their peers and UNH history professors. To help solve the problem of distance and to better equip teachers in an electronic age, we included a strong technology component, providing instruction, hands-on experience, and support in using the Internet and e-mail. (See Figure 1 in Appendices for an organizational diagram.) To speed the transfer of history understanding and classroom activities into middle and high schools, we provided time and assistance in developing and sharing lessons. To eliminate barriers to attending the seminars, we provided funding for books, substitute teachers, modest per diems for participants, free parking, and, of course, lunch. To take part, twenty teachers per seminar committed to reading about, thinking about, and discussing recent scholarship on a given topic in United States history. As a culminating activity, each teacher would develop and share a lesson activity that would engage students and challenge them to manipulate and interpret primary and secondary source materials. Before leaving, participants would give feedback on each session and offer suggestions for the future.

Project Goals

Our project's vision is to serve an increasingly sophisticated community of teacher/scholars who are both exploring problems and issues in historical inquiry and generating engaging and challenging lesson activities that can be discussed and shared with colleagues. If we are successful, our American History teachers will emerge from the project with:

increased factual and conceptual expertise on a variety of major topics in American History;
improved ability and increased confidence to explore issues in historical interpretation of topics in American History, to analyze primary and secondary source materials, and to critique historians' interpretations;
enhanced skill at constructing classroom tasks that (a) challenge students to think and (b) improve students' basic knowledge of history (i.e., to understand chronology, explore issues, analyze primary and secondary source materials, and understand historians' competing interpretations of historical events);
increased understanding of the Internet (i.e., how to access resource materials to enhance students' subject matter knowledge, how to use the Web in the classroom, and how to evaluate the quality and accuracy of Internet resource materials); and,
enhanced commitment to and understanding of how to dialogue with colleagues about planning and instruction—with immediate school colleagues as well as with the other project participants through the project's listserv and school visits.

Target Population: Teachers and Students

The fourteen participating school districts that include eleven middle schools and thirteen high schools are located in southern New Hampshire and nearby southern Maine. Each school has been or currently is a training site for one or more field-based components of the University of New Hampshire teacher preparation program, especially the year-long internship experience. All of the participating districts require their own students to take at least one course in United States history at both the middle and high school levels, ensuring that our project serves low as well as high achieving students.

After eight events (six seminars and two summer institutes), eighty-seven of an estimated total pool of 120 possible teacher-participants have attended our seminars and institutes. Fourteen percent of the eighty-seven teachers have attended three or more seminars, while twenty-one percent have participated twice and a little over fifty percent have participated once. Teaching experience ranges from first-year beginners to thirty-five-year veterans, with the average at approximately thirteen years. Despite national data indicating a disproportionate number of male social studies educators, HIP participation is roughly equal: fifty-two percent male compared to forty-eight percent female. Despite a near equal number of middle and high schools in our project, seventy-three percent of participants are secondary level teachers compared to twenty-seven percent at the middle school level. Mostly all of our teachers, over ninety percent, report that their classes contain a mix of high and low achieving students.

Seminars and Institutes

Each seminar and summer institute features a three-member team from UNH consisting of an expert historian, a computer-based media specialist who is also a professional historian, and a social studies curriculum/instruction specialist. The project director, also a professional historian and member of the UNH history department, attends and helps facilitate all functions.

During the project's first twelve months, the project staff constructed and pasted together program pieces, discovering and sorting out the junctions and possible disjunctions between grant writing and real-world project building. We used the first three months of funding to get organized. In spring 2002 we held three seminars of two days each:

Seminar 1 — The Civil War with Prof. J. William Harris
Seminar 2 — The U.S. Constitution with Prof. Lucy Salyer.
Seminar 3 — The Cold War with Prof. Kurk Dorsey

During the summer of 2002, we held two summer institutes, each running four full days in one week:

Institute 1: Inventing New England: History, Memory and the Creation of a Regional Identity with Prof. Laurel Ulrich
Institute 2: History in Film: Focus on the Civil Rights Movement with Prof. J. William Harris and Producers Terry Kay Rockefeller, Judy Richardson, and Eric Stange

In Fall 2002, we held three more two-day seminars:

Seminar 4 — The Vietnam War with Prof. Harvard Sitkoff
Seminar 5 — Muslims in America: Making Religious Space with Prof. Sara Wolper
Seminar 6 — Slavery in the North & Slavery and the Founders with Prof. J. William Harris

Each seminar and institute included: (a) reading and analysis of primary and secondary source documents; (b) a lecture/presentation by an expert historian; (c) a seminar style discussion focused on historical interpretation of key issues and questions; (d) a computer lab session to enhance teachers' critical use of the Internet; and, (e) teacher sharing of lesson activities and resources for use in the classroom. (See Figure 2 in Appendices for a sample syllabus.)

We created quite a stir among teachers who were hungry for intellectual stimulation, conversation with peers, and an updating of their historical knowledge. The strong, positive response from teachers forced us to decide if we truly needed to limit participation to twenty teachers per seminar. We decided we did, primarily to ensure a seminar format that involved rich conversation and opportunities for dialogue with the visiting scholar and among teachers. (See Photo 1 in Appendices.) In conformance with our objective to help teachers become more comfortable with e-mail and Web sites, we decided that the best and fairest way to handle registration for seminars would be electronically. Our Web master added a registration page to our Web site that logged the time when each registration was submitted. Using e-mail, letters and posters, we publicized upcoming seminars and institutes and established a 6:00 A.M. registration time. At 6:00 A.M, we reasoned, teachers would be awake but not yet in the classroom. We'd accept the first twenty, and everyone had an equal chance. For our first topic, we had nearly the full complement of twenty teachers by noon of the first registration day. That pattern has continued for most topics.

Electronic Components

The HIP project's "electronic world" includes a password-protected Web site for our eighty-seven current participants and is designed to facilitate communication, disperse articles and other resources, and post lesson plans. A modified public Web site with downloadable, copyright-free lesson plans is currently under construction. We believe that a critical element of the Web site's success is the fact that our Web master is also a professional historian. Understanding the issues and possessing the requisite skills in both United States history and digital technology allows the Web master to provide specialized technical support and suggestions for researching and learning about topics in history.

We have worked to support teachers' technological literacy in three ways: (1) to expose teachers to the outstanding and constantly growing digital archives of primary source documents, available chiefly over the Internet but also on CD-ROM; (2) to direct participants to new interactive tools that enhance an instructor's ability to present complex historical information and allow students to explore historical materials at individual speeds, including but not limited to interactive maps, timelines, and historical argument outlining tools; and, (3) to provide participants with instruction in the use of Internet-based software to improve communication between teachers and students as well as among a larger community of teachers (i.e., Blackboard). (See Photo 2 in Appendices.)

We experiment and at the same time let the participants' needs and ideas help direct the evolution of the above three efforts. At the most basic level, we manage the entire project's source materials, communications, and assignments through the state-of-the-art courseware offerings of Blackboard.com, housed at the University of New Hampshire. Blackboard allows us to communicate regularly and efficiently with our growing community of United States history teachers by e-mail and a "bulletin board." Blackboard also hosts our presentation of carefully selected links to digital library resources for each topic. Blackboard has also served as a repository for other unique sources that we have digitized ourselves. For example, in one seminar we digitized and posted more than one hundred hard to locate artifacts/images that were critical to our presenter's fresh look at early New England history.

As part of our effort to develop a community of scholars, all participants use Blackboard's "discussion group" feature to post their lesson activities. These model lessons are designed to engage students in careful analysis of primary sources and in historiographical analysis that mirror aspects of HIP seminar discussions. The discussion board—and, in fact, the entire Blackboard system—has emerged as an important hub of collegial communication, allowing teachers to benefit from each others' ideas and, equally important, to stay in contact with each other and the visiting scholars. (See Figures 3–5 in Appendices.)

Because the Internet varies tremendously in the quality and authenticity of its information, with each seminar we present information and handouts on developing a "flight plan" for historical research, starting with the richest and most reliable archives. Our handouts present a set of criteria for evaluating the quality of Web sites and instructions on how to accurately present Web site citations. As part of our goal of increasing participants' Internet skills and comfort zones, we also review some of the more challenging sites to discuss issues of downloading, printing, and saving historical images. This allows teachers to help their students visit and use challenging sites when conducting research.

From the beginning we have tried to go beyond the use of new media as merely a more efficient means of communication and information distribution. In particular, we seek to explore with teachers where they think interactive technologies might either enhance their understanding of primary sources or allow their students to visualize complex historical information in new and more effective ways. In short, we regularly ask how technology might help address difficult teaching issues. For example, one of the most widely recognized challenges of history teaching has been locating and displaying authentic, facsimile documents, art work, and photographs. Most of our teachers have experienced the excitement of handling real letters and diaries or viewing full-size paintings and photographs in all their original detail. To help teachers bring these source materials into the classroom, we direct them to Internet sites that feature high quality facsimiles of documents. Likewise, we provide some of our own digitized materials through Blackboard. We also model the use of hardware and software during seminars and discussions to make the use of digitized sources more practical and comfortable for teachers, and we encourage teachers to use digital media when presenting their sample lessons to fellow seminar participants. Along the way we discuss and answer questions about the availability and use of LCD projectors, PowerPoint, and other computer tools.

Most of our participants make heavy use of maps in their teaching. They, like generations of teachers and historians, have tried showing change over time by using static maps, often resorting to a series of slides or physically hiding one area on a presentation to highlight another. For several of our seminars—including "The Constitution," "The Civil War," "Inventing New England," and "The Vietnam War"—we have taken scholars' and participants' input and developed interactive maps that display ten or twenty layers of information, each of which can be turned on or off. (See Figures 6 and 7 in Appendices.) Some of the layers are organized along timelines and allow teachers to show, for example, the westward spread of cotton and slavery in the antebellum period. Other layers are static and highlight, for example, the critical roles of geography, topography, or climate. Many of our teacher participants have used these maps in their own classrooms.

As the project enters its second year, we plan to continue with Blackboard, digital source materials, and interactive maps. Our biggest effort, however, will be the construction of a public Web site featuring an interactive database of the lesson plans our teachers have created during the course of the project. By the end of the project, we will have roughly three hundred lesson plans that follow a standard format and present, wherever possible, sample resources and links to support their objectives. We hope that this virtual cookbook of lesson ideas will extend the influence of our community of participants to social studies teachers throughout the state and, thanks to the Internet, the nation and world.

Classroom Applications

The culminating activity of each seminar and institute is the sharing of lesson activities in small groups of six or seven participants. All lessons are posted on Blackboard. Having completed six two-day seminars and two summer institutes at this point, we now have well over one hundred lessons posted to Blackboard by our teacher participants. For ease of access and quick review, each Blackboard lesson follows the same format or outline: topic, a brief summary or abstract of the lesson, targeted audience, estimate of in-class and out-of-class time, the central question(s) or problem(s) that focus the inquiry, source materials to be used, suggested sequence of activities, assessment possibilities, and other notes/suggestions.

Selecting an example was difficult due to the number of excellent lessons that have been posted by teachers. For our Civil War seminar last spring, Winnacunnet High School teacher Chris Spiller created a lesson that asks students to determine if there are limits to the constitutional guarantee of the writ of habeas corpus. The historical question that focuses the lesson is, "Were President Lincoln (and later the Congress) justified in suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War?" The broader, perennial question that provides additional relevance for students is, "How should the United States balance national security and civil liberties in wartime, whether it be during the Civil War or during our current war on terrorism?"

In his lesson plan, Chris suggests a variety of possible classroom activities. Using Internet Web sites and other resources Chris provides, students analyze the merits of President Lincoln's actions by creating three timelines (1860–65): one on the sequence of events surrounding the Merrymen, Vallandigham, and Milligan cases, another on some of the major social issues and events facing Lincoln on the home front, and a third showing major battles and their outcome from the perspective of the Union army. Students are then to study these timelines to determine whether or not the suspension of habeas corpus was justified, given the many difficulties Lincoln and the Union faced. A second activity finds students working in pairs as they examine various political cartoons that either support or challenge the curtailment of civil liberties in wartime. Each pair is to (a) identify two cartoons from each position, (b) explain the cartoonist's message in writing, and (c) be prepared to share their selections (and explanations) with the class. A third activity points teachers to some contemporary sources to help students determine if Attorney General Ashcroft and President G.W. Bush are constitutionally "inbounds" or "out-of-bounds" when detaining terrorist suspects and proposing the use of military tribunals rather than civil courts.

Finally, Chris provides teachers with a few other interesting notes and suggestions. He informs teachers that martial law, including the suspension of habeas corpus, was imposed twice prior to the Civil War, once during the War of 1812 in New Orleans by General Andrew Jackson and once in Rhode Island in 1842 during Dorr's Rebellion over voting rights. Chris also provides information and resources regarding the U.S. government's suspension of habeas corpus in Hawaii immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and how a writ of habeas corpus ultimately put an end to the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II.

Evaluation

A professional evaluator has worked as part of the core project team from the first stage of proposal writing through each stage of implementation. Using findings from various questionnaires, we are building a picture of the project's impact and identifying features that may need adjustment. For instance, teachers have indicated they are using primary and secondary resource materials from the HIP project when working with their own students. When asked to identify the number of times they have "experimented with HIP-related ideas and lesson activities when working with students," thirty percent of the teachers marked "1–2 times," thirty-five percent "3–4 times," twenty-four percent "5–9 times," and six percent marked "10+ plus times." Only six percent marked "0."

Our participants are also directing their students to relevant Internet sites during research phases of instruction, and the students use information from HIP to evaluate materials found on the Internet. For example, one teacher said, "I often direct students to the Library of Congress/ American Memory site to find primary source documents. I did not know about it before the HIP seminars." Quantitative findings support the above quote. When asked on a survey questionnaire using a five-point scale (from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree"), eighty-two percent of participants "agree" or "strongly agree" that the "HIP project has enhanced my ability to facilitate student use of Internet archives of primary source materials in the classroom."

In addition, teachers use their deepened knowledge to formulate central questions and supply students with related primary documents drawn from sources that they have obtained through the HIP seminars. Using the same five-point scale, eighty-two percent "agree" or "strongly agree" that the HIP project "enhanced my ability to construct classroom tasks that reveal to students competing interpretations of historical events." The remaining eighteen percent were neutral or undecided. Interestingly, nearly forty percent recommended "more time" be spent on Web-based explorations at future seminars. (The remaining sixty percent marked "just right.") A very sizeable portion of participants (forty-four percent) also want more time allocated to lesson design and sharing.

Conclusion

While the History in Perspective project seeks to deepen teachers' American history content knowledge, enhance teachers' pedagogical skills, and improve their technological literacy, the grant guidelines weigh heavily on the side of content knowledge. Evaluations thus far tell us that HIP is right on target in its content knowledge efforts. HIP teacher participants feel very satisfied with the content knowledge that they have gained. A sizeable minority, however, feel the need for more technological support and a greater emphasis on curriculum implications, including more sharing of lesson ideas among colleagues. Our challenge for the remainder of the project will be to modify seminar and summer institute activities and formats to more effectively address all three of these critically important dimensions of outstanding history teaching.

Appendices

Fig. 1: With the exception of the advisory board, project organization has followed our original plan. We have not yet formed an advisory board because the project has been small enough to treat as a direct democracy. We ask our teachers their preferences and needs whenever an issue develops. For example, the original seminar hours of 9 a.m. through 3 p.m. have proven too late because of after-school meetings. We have, therefore, after speaking with participants, changed the hours to 8 a.m. through 2 p.m.

History in Perspective Organizational Diagram—2002

Fig. 2: The syllabus for our first seminar topic illustrates the approach and workload that we expect. Subsequent seminars have followed this general approach, organizing reading around central questions that could be transferred to the middle or high school classroom and looking at both content and historiography.

Syllabus: History in Perspective Seminar 1
The Civil War
A seminar/workshop for teachers
Prof. J. William Harris, University of New Hampshire
January 11 & 30, 2002

     This seminar/workshop will explore the Civil War, focusing on two broad issues that have been subjects of abiding interest and recent scholarship: (1) Abraham Lincoln, southern slaves, and emancipation; and (2) soldiers and civilians during the war.
     The seminar will focus on the enduring complexities involved in writing and teaching history. In particular, we will use the seminar to explore the ambiguities arising from the dual nature of historical understanding. On the one hand, historians' accounts of the past are built on the "hard" foundation of fact, as revealed in evidence (primary sources) left from that past. On the other hand, history is a work of interpretation; it is clear that different people, in viewing the same evidence, often come to different conclusions about what the evidence shows and what the facts mean.
     In the first meeting, January 11, we will consider and discuss some of the primary kinds of evidence on which our understanding of the Civil War is based—letters, speeches, and public documents of Abraham Lincoln, and a variety of kinds of sources left by soldiers and civilians during the war. In the second meeting, January 30, we will pay more attention to some of the interpretations of the issues by recent historians.
     You will also have time during both days to work with curriculum and media specialists to adapt what you encounter in the seminar to your own classes.

Background reading.
Reid Mitchell, The American Civil War, 1861–1865 (2001). This short introduction will provide an overview of the war and of the important questions currently being debated by scholars of the Civil War era. The appendix also contains a small selection of primary documents.
January 11. The historian's sources. Read these before the first day of our class.
1. Lincoln, slavery, and emancipation. Donald Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln: A Documentary Portrait Through His Speeches and Writings (1964): pp. 33–46, 66–77, 81–121, 132–143, 162–213, 223–28, 244–58, 277–79.
  In reading these selections, think about Lincoln's fundamental attitudes and beliefs about race and slavery (not the same thing). Are these consistent? How would you briefly summarize them?
2. Soldiers and Civilians. Selections (posted on the seminar website) from:
       Virginia Ingraham Burr, ed., The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848–1889 (1990), pp. 183–211; 261–67
       Lauren Cook Burgess, ed., An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, alias Private Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers (1994), pp. 19–29, 63–85.
       M. Thomas Inge, ed., Company Aytch, Or, a Side Show of the Big Show and Other Sketches [by] Sam Watkins (1999; 1^st pub. 1882), pp. 21–30, 35–37, 75, 168–69, 236–40.
       Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1997; 1^st pub. 1870), pp. 78–105.

For these selections, think about how one can use them to try to understand the fundamental attitudes and motivations of different kinds of ordinary people during the war—the privates and civilians, rather than the generals and politicians. Howimportant are documents such as these, compared to, say, those of Lincoln? What are their limitations as sources?

— Schedule for January 11 —

8:30 – 9:00 a.m. Coffee and light breakfast

9:00 – 10:00 a.m. Discussion—Lincoln, race, slavery, and emancipation.

10:00 – 11:00 a.m. Lecture—Lincoln and slavery in historical writings

11:00 – 11:45 a.m. Lunch Break

11:45 – 12:30 p.m. Discussion—Soldiers and civilians

12:45 – 1:15 p.m. Question and answer session

1:15 – 2:30 p.m. Media Workshop. The class will convene in a computer-equipped laboratory in the UNH Department of Education, and be introduced to Internet sources for teaching the Civil War and Blackboard

2:30 – 3:00 p.m. Meeting with Professor Joseph Onosko, Department of Education, to generate ideas for lesson plans

The historians' Civil War. Before January 30, participants must complete three assignments:
1. Complete readings of secondary works on the key topics of the seminar/workshop (as listed below).
2. Prepare a teaching unit, teaching resource, or other teaching-related project on the Civil War. These projects will be posted on the course website through the Blackboard system at the University of New Hampshire, and should be completed at least one week before the second day of the seminar.
3. Read the lessons posted by members of the class on Blackboard.

Readings for Day Two: The Historians

Lincoln, slavery, and emancipation. (These are posted on Blackboard.)
     Mark Neely, The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (1993) pp. 95–122.
     Ira Berlin, "Who Freed the Slaves? Emancipation and Its Meaning," in Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War, ed. by David W. Blight and Brooks Simpson (1997), pp. 105–121.
     James M. McPherson, Who Freed the Slaves?, in McPherson, Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (1996), pp. 192–207.

   For these selections, compare each author's response to the question, "Who freed the slaves?" Which response do you find to be most persuasive?

Soldiers and civilians. (The first two are books provided by the seminar. The other readings are posted on Blackboard.)
     Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (1993)
     James McPherson, What They Fought For, 1861–1865 (1994)
     Jim Cullen, "'I's a Man Now': Gender and African American Men," and Joan Cashin, "'Since the War Broke Out": The Marriage of Kate and William McClure," both in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (1992), pp. 76–91 and 192–207.

For these selections, consider the motivations that led people to fight. What generalities can be drawn, if any? Do you find McPherson's analysis convincing?

— Schedule for January 30 —

9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. Discussion: the historians, Lincoln, and emancipation

10:45 – 11:00 a.m. Break

11:00 – 12:30 p.m. Discussion: Soldiers and civilians

12:30 – 1:15 p.m. Lunch Break

1:30 – 3:00 p.m. Teachers share lesson activities. Follow-up discussion led by Professor Joseph Onosko.

Fig. 3: The Blackboard system allows us to post primary source documents in a variety of formats in a password-protected environment for our teachers.

Fig. 4: Blackboard allows participants to post their lesson plans for viewing and comment by colleagues and seminar instructors.

Fig. 5: Teachers post their lesson plans on the Blackboard system.

Fig. 6: This screen shot shows an interactive map of Vietnam that was programmed especially for Workshop 5, on the Vietnam War, and made available to teachers for their own classroom use.

Fig. 7: This interactive map was developed for our seminar with Professor Laurel Ulrich, whose path breaking work, The Age of Homespun, showed the relationship between household economies and the American Revolution.

Photo 1: A seminar set-up limited to twenty participants ensures close contact with instructors and intense discussions based on readings and focus questions.

Photo 2: The HIP project provides technical support in the use of digital technology and equipment.

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