Russell B. Olwell | James Conant's Uncompleted Revolution: Methods Faculty and the Historical Profession, 1978–2004 | The History Teacher, 39.1

James Conant's Uncompleted Revolution: Methods Faculty and the Historical Profession, 1978–2004

Russell B. Olwell
Eastern Michigan University

Every institution awarding a special teaching certificate for secondary school teachers should have on its staff a clinical professor for each field or combination of closely related fields.

—James Conant, The Education of American Teachers

WHEN JAMES CONANT, former president of Harvard University, took on the topic of teacher preparation in his 1963 report The Education of American Teachers, he demanded sweeping change. Conant's reform agenda which focused on reshaping the educational establishment in America took on the National Education Association and National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. He sought to end the monopoly of colleges of education and locate more teacher preparation coursework in subject matter departments, such as history, in colleges of arts and sciences.¹ Conant insisted that teacher preparation was an "all university responsibility" with roles for an education faculty, psychology professors, college of arts and sciences departments, and "clinical" faculty members who specialized in training teachers. By "clinical" faculty he meant persons who had actual experience and expertise in school teaching and he asked that they be accorded a new status.

Like clinical professors of medicine who were top practitioners, not necessarily researchers, these clinical faculty members were envisioned by Conant as possessing expertise in teaching. Calling them "professor of the teaching of subject x," he proposed that they should be talented teachers, hired for a period of three to five years, and employed to supervise practice teaching and teach methods courses designed to train prospective teachers in the nuts and bolts of instruction, skills that other department members could not teach. Conant suggested, further, that the optimal arrangement would be for clinical faculty members to be teaching simultaneously at both the college and secondary levels, thus tying the school district and university closer together.² This new clinical professor would be paid at the rate of pay of a full professor, and also would have a role in educating his or her departmental and university colleagues: "Most important of all," clinical professors could "keep the subject matter departments in the college or university alert in regard to what a future high school teacher needs to know. To this end, the subject-matter departments would have to go more than halfway to meet the clinical professors."³

What happened to Conant's vision of methods faculty as clinical professors of teaching? In the historical profession, the answer is mixed. Since Conant's book was published, many external factors have pushed history departments into educational fields. State and national accreditation requirements (such as those of the National Council for the Social Studies) have pressured departments, even small ones, to hire someone with a specialty in history or social studies methods, though these individuals might be housed in history departments or departments of teacher education. Federal grant programs such as the Teaching American History program have pumped resources into teacher in-service training and college-university collaboration. In some states (most notably California) statewide curriculum and professional development projects have brought college faculty and K-12 teachers into close contact. However, without changes in way history teachers are trained, in-service programs offered by history faculty will amount to remediation of poorly trained K-12 teachers, instead of true collaboration.⁴

These developments, while promising greater attention to history teaching, miss Conant's aim. He believed that academic departments and disciplines needed to be involved in teacher preparation for reasons of intrinsic motivation—to better train the next generation of secondary teachers, and to increase student achievement in K-12 schools. External factors, such as grants, government support and accreditation could change with a vote or the stroke of a budget pen unless academic departments claimed teacher training as their own, extrinsic forces would wax and wane, leaving the situation essentially unchanged. Revolutionary change was needed and for this change adopting a new commitment to training teachers by departments, including adding clinical faculty was essential. Clinical faculty in particular, he believed, would influence curriculum and teaching at the college level and that in turn would help train future teachers better.

In order to quantify the extent to which this revolutionary change in the profession has taken place, I looked for a way to measure the number of history departments with methods teachers and the status of these faculty within their departments. For lack of a more sophisticated tool, I turned to four volumes of the American Historical Association's Directory of History Departments and Organizations in the United States and Canada—1978, 1988, 1998 and 2004.⁵ Among other aims, Conant had hoped that locating the center of teacher training in academic departments would mean a better allocation of a student's time between instruction in pedagogy separated from subject matter content, and more time in content specific instruction. The data from this source shows that the extent of Conant's influence was not as great as he hoped. In the field of history, Conant did not reshape the profession. The clinical methods faculty and positions that Conant championed have been marginal from the 1970s to the present, and the specialization in "history education" or "methods" has remained a marginalized category. Though directories that list faculty fields of specialization are not full evidence of what people do in history departments, they are evidence of how faculty and departments present themselves to the profession, and therefore, speak to what the profession values.

Interest in training secondary school history teachers waned then waxed within the historical profession in the years 1978-2004. The total number of methods faculty in departments rose over that time period, but did not keep up with the expansion in number of departments or number of historians. In the 1980s, the interest hit a comparative low, while the "history wars" of the 1990s seem to have brought attention back to teaching issues in many departments. The most notable lack during this time period has been building an infrastructure to keep this issue on the front burner of the historical profession. Departmental and professional interest in history teaching has relied on a few key individuals to press for attention and resources, generally without real institutional support. Without the development of much more infrastructure, the current increase in interest in history education could decline in the next decade, particularly if grant support for history education efforts evaporates.

Methods Faculty in History: A Statistical History

In examining the American Historical Association's Directory of History Departments for 1978, 1988, 1998 and 2004, I looked for faculty with identified responsibilities for teacher education, student teaching, methods of teaching, and history education. I did not count historians of education as methods faculty, as it traditionally denotes a research specialty, not a teaching area. I kept track of how many departments had history methods faculty, how many methods faculty were in each department, and whether they were full or part time department members or affiliated faculty. I was especially on the lookout for departments with a critical mass of methods teachers, as it is in these departments that one would expect to find the resources for educational outreach, curriculum development, and influence within the department strongest. I also expected to see an increase in the number of methods faculty over the decades, as national and state accreditation agencies have become firmer on this point.

In 1978, over a decade after Conant's proposal of methods faculty, only 30 out of 268 history departments included a methods faculty member. Only 38 historians reported history education or teaching as an interest out of over 5500 listed in the directory. This means that while 14 percent of departments had at least one methods faculty member, only 0.7 percent of historians identified themselves as methods specialists.⁶ Departments with more than one history methods faculty member were few and far between. Topping the list in 1978 was Carnegie Mellon, with five, three (adjunct) at Ball State, two at Northern Illinois, two at Trenton State and two at Teacher's College, Columbia University. These centers of strength for methods positions should not be surprising to anyone in our field. Most of the above were traditionally associated with teaching, and most are state universities. Carnegie Mellon developed a strength in this field early, a specialization that persists to this day.

However, the 1978 directory reveals the real weakness of methods faculty in the field. Of the 38 methods faculty, at least five were adjunct or joint appointments. This lack of full departmental status meant that Conant's goal of methods faculty influencing the department would be thwarted. While Conant may have hoped to foster an increase in departmental methods faculty, his own institution did not follow his advice. Harvard lacked any methods faculty, while Yale stood alone among elite universities in having one faculty member with an interest in history education.

Ten years later the 1988 directory lists many more historians but the number of methods faculty as a proportion of the profession fell. While the decade saw a massive increase in the number of departments, numbers of methods faculty remained flat. Out of 492 departments, only 33 had methods faculty, with 34 faculty members total. The areas of strength found in the 1978 directory were thinned in 1988, with fewer departments having even two methods faculty. The proportion of departments having a methods faculty member fell to 6.9 percent, and methods faculty fell to 0.34 percent of all historians.

Some of this apparent change may be caused by the changing status of departments. Many small departments may not have been included in the 1978 directory but were included in the 1988 directory. Faculty members may also have been incorrectly listed or left out of the departmental listing. However, the overall trend seems clear across institutions—methods faculty were not an increasing or a substantial part of the historical profession, but were a marginal specialty area.

The 1998 directory reverses this trend. In an increased number of departments (now 648) there was an increase to 44 of departments with methods faculty, with 54 total faculty members claiming expertise in methods. While this is an absolute increase, departments with even a single methods faculty member comprised only 8.33 percent of all history departments, and methods faculty made up only 0.42 percent of total history faculty. Nine departments included more than one methods teacher, including such teaching-related institutions as Buffalo State, Illinois State and Eastern Illinois University.

The 2004 directory shows that interest in history education has risen again, with 74 methods positions listed in the directory. This puts the percentage of methods faculty in the historical profession at 0.54 percent and means that there are roughly twice as many methods positions as existed in 1978. Looking at the three decades together, however, the "U-shaped curve" illustrating the number of methods faculty for the four years analyzed contrasts with a steadily rising curve of departments and total numbers of historians. If methods faculty were a small percentage in 1978, their relative numbers declined into the 1990s and even by 2004 had not reached the same percentage as in 1978. It is obvious that as departments opened more Ph.D. programs, and intellectual and student interest spread to new areas such as public history and world history, the historical profession's attention to the welfare of history and history teaching in K-12 apparently did not similarly expand.

Why Are There So Few Identified Methods Faculty?

Interesting as the above statistics are, they may reveal only part of what must be examined. Departmental faculty who actually teach methods courses and supervise practice teaching may not identify themselves as methods faculty in the AHA directory. In a research-oriented profession, such as history, faculty tend to list a research interest even if teacher training is an important part of their professional commitment. Indeed, in times of increasingly stringent promotion and tenure standards, listing this specialty might have seemed detrimental. I have observed this in my own department at Eastern Michigan University where faculty with decades of high school teaching experience have ignored or de-emphasized this part of the professional life while underlining their research interests. A contributing factor has been the movement of departments and the profession as a whole in the direction of M.A. and Ph.D. programs and away from any engagement with the K-12 sector.

Consequently the category of history methods faculty member or clinical professor probably does not accurately reflect the range of faculty working in the field of history education, which includes many faculty with both research interests in history and a commitment to K-16 history education. Many of the faculty working on United States Department of Education-funded Teaching American History grants would not categorize themselves as methods faculty at all, but as research historians with a commitment to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or to K-16 history teaching, for example.

There have been noteworthy efforts to bolster teaching issues in the profession. Gary Nash and others at the National Center for History in the Schools have labored against the political tide to create quality national history standards and curricular materials; the OAH has sponsored the expansion of Organization of American Historians Magazine of History into an excellent journal on K-16 history teaching, and prominent historians such as Peter Stearns and Leon Fink have attempted to turn the American Historical Association's attention to teaching issues. Historians have also taken advantage of Federal programs to fund improvement of history education, and have created several noteworthy projects with that funding.

The American Historical Association's Teaching Division has offered teaching workshops at Annual Conferences and this is another measure of the historical profession's commitment to teaching and teacher training issues, though this interest has waxed and waned over the years. The number of sessions related to teaching at the AHA's annual conferences has varied substantially between meetings—for example, the 1978 annual meeting featured fourteen sessions on teaching, the 1979 held ten, the 1980 meeting dipped to nine. The low point in the time period 1978–2004 came in the 1980s, when each annual meeting had an average of somewhat less than seven teaching sessions per year, with the 1990s rebounding to between ten and seventeen sessions devoted to teaching at each annual meeting. This pattern is also a U-shaped curve, with a good deal of interest in teaching issues in the 1970s, followed by a drought in the 1980s, and a resurgence in the 1990s and 2000s. These efforts, however, have been limited by the historical profession's image of itself as one of researchers, not teachers. Even while the AHA has attempted to renew interest in history teaching, its rewards structure remains firmly tied to research—thirty-four of its awards and fellowships honor or support historical research, four do so for teaching K-16. The AHA's website on K-16 collaboration, launched in 2002, is now inactive.

Conant's Legacy

If Conant's ideas of the methods professor did not transform the historical profession in 1963, what is the value of reexamining them? I would argue that Conant's vision, though overly ambitious, had some important insights. Conant clearly recognized that left to themselves, Colleges of Education were not likely to integrate more disciplinary knowledge into teacher education; only greater involvement of subject-matter specialists would accomplish this. He also focused attention on making teacher preparation a whole-university enterprise. Above all, the addition to history departments of one or more Conant type "clinical professors," provided also that they had been listened to by their colleagues, would have moderated the curriculum and teaching offered by history departments.

If the numbers of history methods faculty in departments from 1978–2004 did not fulfill Conant's vision, what remains of his ideas today? A good deal. There is renewed attention to teacher preparation as an "all-university enterprise," there is a new focus on getting school districts and universities to build more extensive partnerships, and there are many experiments going on now about how to create positions that straddle the secondary and university classroom. However, without a concerted effort to change our profession and to increase the number of history educators in history departments, each of these reforms may simply give way before the same institutional forces of inertia that doomed many of Conant's proposals.

At the level of the historical profession, historical organizations such as the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians desperately need to reengage the issue of teacher training and accreditation. At present, history organizations provide no leadership in this field, and have handed history teacher preparation to the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education and the National Council for the Social Studies. The latter organization has been the graveyard of in-depth history teacher preparation, because history comprises only ten percent of the organization's thematic standards. The rules for accrediting history programs set by NCSS have consistently emphasized breadth of interdisciplinary social studies teaching, in spite of a research base in the field that suggest that historical instruction needs to be discipline specific and in-depth in order to be effective.

At the disciplinary level, we may even want to consider changing the category of history methods to that of history education. First, changing the name would include a larger number of faculty interested in how students learn history, K-16, as well as those interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Second, history methods was without a research base for over a century. In the last decade, researchers such as Sam Weinburg, Linda Levstik and Keith Barton have given us research on how students learn history, and history educators are applying and extending this research in their own classrooms.

In writing about history departments, Conant may have not been ambitious enough. History methods traditionally has been the realm of one person in a department, and frankly, not given the influence over departmental goals that Conant expected. History education needs to be an area in a department, like United States, European or world history. It needs to be a group effort, and the resources allocated to it need to be proportional to the number of students preparing to be teachers. Right now history departments with the most extensive, long-term, and successful programs are not staffed by one person, but by a group of interested and committed faculty. The idea that one person should run what amounts of an entire program should be retired.

This creation of a critical mass of history educators within a department is essential for the long-term development of our field. Opportunities are growing in our field to engage with schools, create new M.A. programs for teachers, and enter battles over accreditation and program evaluation. Work such as this can make history education an exciting field. However, with all the demands placed on methods specialists, especially the supervision of student teaching, faculty in our field face a real danger of burnout. Restructuring our field to become more collaborative is the first step in making involvement in this area a sustainable and sane endeavor for new faculty entering this area.

Notes

^1. James Conant, The Education of American Teachers, NY: McGraw Hill, 1963.

^2. Conant's description of the clinical professor appears on 140–145 of The Education of American Teachers.

^3. Conant, 144.

^4. See 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 Districts," The History Teacher February 2003 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/36.2/moyer.html> (1 Dec. 2004), Larry E. Hudson, Jr., "Oral History: An Inclusive Highway to the Past," The History Teacher February 2003 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/36.2/hudson.html> (1 Dec. 2004). Dorothy Zeisler-Vralsted, "The Wisconsin Collaborative United States History Professional Development Program," The History Teacher February 2003 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/36.2/zeisler-vralsted.html> (1 Dec. 2004). Stan Pesick and Shelley Weintraub, "DeTocqueville's Ghost: Examining the Struggle for Democracy in America," The History Teacher February 2003 <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/36.2/pesick.html> (1 Dec. 2004).
See also Peter Stearns' overview of the field, "Building Bridges between Historians and Educators" in Perspectives, May 2003, William Weber, "The Growth of Collaboration in History Education: Current Practices," Perspectives, September 1999, and William Weber, "Innovations in Collaboration": A Report," Perspectives, October 2003. All can be accessed online at <http://www.historians.org/perspectives/>.

^5. I chose one directory per decade, and added 2004 at the suggestion of reviewers who wished to have a more contemporary view of the profession in the article.

^6. The volumes used were the American Historical Association, Guide to Departments of History, 1978–79, Guide to Departments of History, 1987–88, and Directory of Departments of History Departments and Organizations in the United States and Canada, 1998–99.