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The Legacy of the Teaching American History Grants: Statues on Easter Island?
Russell Olwell
Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan
| IT IS NOT TOO EARLY to ask what legacy the Teaching American History grants will leave behind. Or put another way, when all the money is spent, when all the seminars are done, when all the professional development has ended, what evidence will there be that the program ever existed? Will historians in the future look back at the evidence left behind and be able to reconstruct what happened, or will they be baffled, like archaeologists gazing at the mute statues of Easter Island? The following three papers attempt to answer these questions. |
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Wilson Warren's paper is an examination of American history as a K-16 enterprise, in which college faculty, the most vocal critics of secondary history teaching, are in fact often the culprits in their uncreative approach to the subject with their students, many of whom will be future teachers. Warren's group struggles to get teachers both to know that they should use primary sources and historiography, and then to implement this in the classroom. They found that opportunities to use materials that have multiple interpretations seem to scare teachers off, and that a traditional view of history and the importance of coverage continue to dominate the K-12 world. |
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Timothy Hall and Renee Scott find a similar blend of frustration and promise in their work with schools in Northern Michigan. Hall and Scott also have found project results to be mixed. Even using such interest-generating devices as a Great Lakes sailing vessel for professional development, teachers still do not all get the central point that Hall and Scott designed the workshop to teach—to connect familiar local objects to the broader issues, such as the development of the market economy. They bring the discussion back to the K-16 issue—the teachers we see in the field are the ones our institutions have trained. Only when teacher preparation programs (particularly elementary programs) demand more extensive and in-depth history coursework will the teachers enrolling in workshops be better prepared. |
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Stephen Mucher adds yet another question to the mix. What happens if teachers pick and choose some tools and techniques from Teaching American History (TAH) activities, but view the experience as just another professional development fad, not worth personal investment? His group found that for teachers to test out new techniques at full throttle or to change their conception of how to teach history, it took confidence and a willingness to fail in the short term. In an age of short-term accountability, however, many teachers feel they do not have the option to pursue the kind of deep professional change that TAH programs hope to bring about. |
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So I return to the question I asked in the introduction. Historians, one hundred years from now, will find evidence of our work on TAH grants. What do we want them to find? Changes in local, state, and federal policy as a result of these projects? Changes in the way we prepare teachers, particularly at the elementary level? Evidence of long-term collaborations and sustained conversations between university and K-12 teachers? It seems to me that we need to build the kinds of programs that will sustain themselves past the end of grant funding if we want these projects to have a lasting legacy. |
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