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Looking Back, Looking Forward
Gary B. Nash
University of California, Los Angeles
| TO ALL THOSE WHO ARRANGED the "Saturday Special," I give my thanks. I had no expectation of such a gathering and can only think that there are many other history educators who deserve at least as much recognition and probably more. |
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In the interest of full disclosure, I should say at the outset that I did not volunteer for service in the effort two decades ago to bring academic historians and K-12 history-social studies teachers together in common cause. It was through a person I wish was among us—a dedicated educator who is missed by all of us since her death several years ago. Charlotte Crabtree, longtime Professor of Education at UCLA with a special interest in elementary history-social studies curriculum, appeared out of the blue on a weekday afternoon at my office in Bunche Hall to cudgel me into the ranks of the army she was building. |
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Charlotte and I had taught on the faculty at UCLA for twenty years without ever having met. The physical distance separating Bunche Hall, home of the Department of History, and Moore Hall, home of the School of Education, is about one hundred yards. But the conceptual distance, so far as history education was concerned, was one hundred miles. For those of us on the history faculty, history education was about teaching undergraduates and graduate students in the Ph.D. program, with a decided preference for teaching advanced research seminars and guiding doctoral students toward completion of their dissertations. In the School of Education, the small number of faculty with specialties in history education focused on credentialing students for teaching history and social studies in the schools, in developing history-centered curricular materials, and in contriving ways of testing historical knowledge. I had put my toe in the water of history education across the K-16 curriculum through helping to organize a History Alliance, where community college and high school history instructors would meet occasionally at UCLA for late-afternoon sessions. But more often than not, these meetings turned into academic lectures on special topics dear to the hearts of the professor who was clearly the star on the platform. |
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So with a knock on the door and a spring in her step, in 1987, Charlotte Crabtree introduced herself and made her case: join me, she said, in applying for a million dollar grant to be awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (hereafter NEH), chaired by a woman named Lynne Cheney. Charlotte had written the proposal and only needed a member of the history department to sign on since the idea behind the grant was to build a bridge between two species of history educators—those who taught in the schools (or their mentors in schools of education) and those who inhabited the ivory tower with guild certificates commonly called Ph.D.s. The center at UCLA, the application promised, would launch a number of projects, each bringing history professors and history teachers in the schools together for interaction and collaboration. Among the projects were studies of exactly what history teachers taught in the schools and how much training they had; the creation of an institute of California K-12 teachers who would work with academic historians to create primary source-based teaching units; and the formation of an advisory council that would work to produce a book making the case for history and providing a scaffolding for teaching both history thinking skills and essential understandings of world and U.S. history. All of this was in the name of restoring history to the school curriculum and in the process to conquer historical illiteracy said to be rampant among young Americans. |
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Charlotte and I talked. I expressed reservations since I had my own research agenda moving along respectably and greatly enjoyed working with Ph.D. candidates. Charlotte countered that since Columbia Teachers College and other high-powered academic units at Indiana, Berkeley, and other universities were competing for the grant, UCLA was highly unlikely to win. I was only signing the application, Charlotte said reassuringly, to fulfill the requirements, and in all probability, she would darken my door no further. |
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So I signed the application after scanning its content, which seemed professionally written and had, at its core, the uncontestable goal of finding ways to build a bridge connecting two distant cousins in the vast and murky field of history education. |
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Some months later, NEH awarded the grant to UCLA, and I was now the Associate Director of the National Center for History in the Schools. It changed my life; it changed my understanding of what historical literacy means; it changed my professional priorities. So Charlotte Crabtree must answer in part for what ensued. It turned out to be an exciting collaboration. In retrospect, it was an opportunity to plunge into a new phase of my career. |
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Once involved in trying to bring history alive in the K-12 classrooms and in creating a bridge across what I figuratively have called the Grand Canyon that separates two categories of history educators, I discovered pleasures, problems, and possibilities that I never imagined. One was that, in education, water often flows uphill. At a research university, the mind imagines that at the lectern, the professor dispenses knowledge to the students sitting below with their sharpened pencils and notebooks. I had already had glimmers of insight in teaching a diverse set of students, and so understood that I had much to learn from them as well, particularly in small class or seminar settings where they could express themselves freely and ask questions, often tentatively phrased, that sometimes turned out to be challenging enough that I found myself rethinking what I thought I already knew. When I began to interact closely with K-12 teachers, it became all the more clear that the sage on the stage had a lot to learn from the teacher in the trenches. Particularly this was true in the matter of pedagogical techniques. The brute fact was that most academic historians do not give much thought to how students learn or how to develop teaching techniques that would make them as interested in history as their teacher. Deep knowledge and perhaps a touch of passion seemed enough to carry the day according to the old way of thinking. Now I learned that the teacher in the middle or high school classroom had a lot to teach me about reaching students, maintaining their interest, and constructing projects where they were truly active learners rather than passive recipients of knowledge delivered in fifty-minute lectures or through a list of assigned readings. |
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When the National History Standards Project came along, beginning in 1992 and continuing through 1996, all of this became abundantly obvious. Constructing the standards, sanctioned by the U.S. Congress and funded by NEH and the Department of Education, required working with an array of educators—school administrators, K-12 teachers, academic historians, education policy makers, and statewide education czars. But at ground zero, the work of drafting the World and U.S. History standards fell to K-12 teachers and historians at college and universities. Coming from all corners of the nation, they met for three consecutive summers at UCLA and at many times in between. Charlotte Crabtree and I were the co-directors of this project, reporting to an august National Council of twenty-eight luminaries chosen by Lynne Cheney, Chair of NEH, and our National Center for History in the Schools. |
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Living in the UCLA dormitories for weeks on end, the teachers worked with professors of history to determine what young Americans should know about world and U.S. history, how they should learn it, and how the standards could be calibrated to different levels of learning; how historical thinking skills should be constructed; and a host of related problems. In all of this, the insights of the veteran classroom teachers were at the center of the work. Historians could guide them through the scholarship of recent decades on topics ranging from Neolithic human societies, to seventh- to tenth-century Islamic expansion, to the Cold War, and suggest approaches to complex historical problems. But only the teachers knew what a fifth grader was capable of understanding and how the standards could be expressed in ways that encouraged active and often collaborative learning. These daily workouts were highly charged and sometimes contentious, but usually disciplined. There were only so many days allotted to deal with a particular era, a particular region, a particular historical problem. At the end of each day, we had to agree that the process had been moved forward. It was an effort where all were aware that the river was flowing upstream and downstream simultaneously, from teacher to professor, from professor to teacher. At no time in the previous century had so many history educators from so many different sectors of the world of education worked collaboratively on a project of this magnitude—one that had the promise of changing if not transforming classroom approaches to World and U.S. History. As in counterpart efforts in science, civics, geography, arts education, and economics, the standards were to go forth into the marketplace of ideas as voluntary rather than mandatory standards. |
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Though the standards were met with a blizzard of criticisms, led by Lynne Cheney who had previously resigned from NEH and was now knee-deep in conservative Republican politics, they made their mark in several ways. Especially in establishing a fresh framework for studying World History, a largely uncharted curricular plan that was abreast of recent scholarship, the National History Standards offered textbook publishers as well as school teachers a more engaging and manageable way of teaching what everyone knew was a hugely complicated school subject. On the U.S. side, the standards offered what was largely already presented in the best textbooks—an inclusive framework for American history that paid attention to large groups that in our parents' and grandparents' time had not been part of the story: African Americans, women, Native Americans, Latino and Asian Americans, and ordinary people of every hue and persuasion. The standards were also important in crafting historical thinking skills that would urge teachers to recognize that powers of analysis and problem solving through studying history are more important than recalling facts, dates, places, names. But at least as important was that the standards project had built a bridge across the Grand Canyon of History Education. Thirty one organizations, many with large focus groups involving hundreds of teachers and professors, read successive drafts of the standards and added their criticisms and suggestions for improvement. Coming together from different levels of education, they found each other interesting and stimulating in ways they had not imagined. The attacks on the history standards, which were intended to obliterate them, in fact reinforced these new alliances. Today, more than ever before, K-12 teachers and university scholars are joining one another's professional organizations, are talking history with one another by e-mail, and are working closely through professional development institutes funded by the Department of Education, the Gilder-Lehrman Foundation, and NEH. |
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Finally, the controversy over the history standards triggered public awareness of the breadth, depth, and sophistication of historical research and writing during the past half century. The standards, after all, were built on the history profession's scholarship because the History Standard Project's mandate was to create world class standards. When charges of "historical revisionism" were hurled at the architects of the standards by those who claimed that un-American "pirates of history" or "history thieves" or "history hijackers" had authored the document, many of the unknowing public who had never read the standards were taken in by these charges. But this gave the hundreds of professional educators who had produced a consensus set of standards a chance to explain how the standards were built as only a democracy could have produced them. As Council member Professor Carol Gluck of Columbia University expressed it, if the standards were hijacked at all, "they were hijacked by America, through an admirable process of open debate that could probably only happen in the United States." The controversy thus redirected the spotlight onto the critics of the standards. At the same time, it gave dedicated history teachers a chance to tell the public that students will learn more history and understand it better when they are permitted to think, investigate, and interpret rather than merely memorize and recite. In short, they should be allowed to understand how written history is a never-ending quest for comprehending the past and pondering its connection to present-day circumstances, challenges, and crises. |
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The attack on the National History Standards was unpleasant. I hated the fight, filled as it was with much misinformation spread by ultra-conservative attackers in sound-bite warfare. But I loved the war—deeper questions about whether history instruction should be multicultural, inclusive, global, and based on the scholarship of this generation. And I loved the interaction with teachers in the schools that has occupied much of my time in the years since the war subsided about a decade ago. The National Center for History in the Schools (which the ultraconservative lampooners of the history standards hoped to send into oblivion) still functions with new projects abounding. It co-directs or participates in many Teaching American History institutes; has mounted an online, free access curricular framework in World History called "World History for Us All;" works with the National Park Service on history programs; produces primary source-based curricular units in U.S. and world history with teacher-academic historian author partnerships; directs an American History Academy at Benjamin Franklin High School in Highland Park, California where the largely Latino student population has made giant steps forward in their studies; and many other projects. Little did Charlotte Crabtree know what she had started in my life when she came to my door on campus twenty-one years ago. |
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