Collaboration: The Essential Element in the Teaching American History Initiative

Joseph W. Brysiewicz

Brysiewicz (right) with a symposia participant.

I had spent the earlier part of my summer defensive against the question of "You are doing McWhat?" I had signed on as a member of the second teacher cohort for a two-week institute based on the campus of Lake Forest College and at the Chicago Historical Society. It was funded by a U.S. Department of Education grant under the auspices of its Teaching American History initiative, inspired by United States Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia in 2001. The program I attended is formally entitled A Model Collaboration: Rethinking American History--McRAH <http://www.lfc.edu/mcrah>. This institute represents a unique alliance. Its key elements: history educators from the Chicago Historical Society; professors of education and history from Northwestern University and Lake Forest College; and secondary school teachers from Waukegan Unit School District and other districts throughout Lake County, Illinois (the third largest county in the state). The goal is to span the chasm of how American history is taught to students before and during their undergraduate years and ultimately to improve student achievement and engagement in American history. Furthermore, McRAH plans to make these changes meaningful for teachers through a model of professional development centered on continued, authentic collaboration among the variety of educators involved in the program (for more on McRAH, see the February 2003 issue of the OAH Newsletter or visit <http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2003feb/tah.html>).

Not an aspiration for the faint of heart, the institute was centered on what I discern to be two overarching principles. First, students at all grade levels should be "doing history," as opposed to passively receiving the grand narrative of textbooks. Second, enabling middle and high school teachers to incorporate this first principle in their own classrooms requires more than a refresher in undergraduate American history content. Instead, educators need to reexamine how content and pedagogy can work in unison to bring students insight into the art of American history.

To this end, McRAH is guided by an effective amalgam of history professors, education professors, museum professionals, and fellows (secondary teachers from Waukegan, IL who had been through McRAH's inaugural institute the previous year). The other teachers and I spent two weeks attending a wide variety of lectures and workshops meant to foster the notion of history as a process, or as something one does. One morning, I attended a lecture given by Northwestern University professor Carl Smith on the use of poetry and image in examining American industrialization. In the afternoon, I worked on using the vignette as a pedagogical tool in a session led by Lake Forest College professor Dawn Abt-Perkins. The following morning, Brian Jacks from Waukegan High School led a discussion among the teachers on the use of music in the history classroom.

The results of this configuration were rich; workshops in content were followed by sessions in pedagogy that both reaffirmed and complicated our understanding of the material and how to teach it. The fellows gave guidance and provoked all of us to use reflection as a means of achieving best practice.

True to the concept of "doing history," a crucial component of the McRAH institute was its "history project." At the opening of the institute, the small teams of secondary teachers were given the task of completing one traditional unit of American history using the tools and concepts learned in the content and pedagogy sessions. My group, guided by Lake Forest College professor Catherine Weidner, tackled the Age of Exploration. This was the most personally challenging assignment of the workshop. Trying to collaborate with other educators while still mastering McRAH techniques was not always a smooth process, but the discomfort I felt was positive: a product of the excitement and frustration of working new tools and a new schema into my existing instructional experience. At the end of the institute, I felt recommitted to passing on my passion for history and felt equipped to help my students create their own.

Nevertheless, the problems plaguing American history education at the secondary school level are overwhelming. Five classes a day, three or more different courses, cocurricular responsibilities, and minimal preparation time during the school day--all conspire to make most educators shy away from radical alteration of their practice. Each year--in newspaper articles, professional journals, and books--American history professors bemoan the undergraduate student's inexperience with primary documents and inability to think critically about history. Perhaps less chronicled, though no less important, are the countless teachers who feel their difficult role in American history education is encumbered by the non-instructional demands of the school environment and marginalized by professors who feel they must "disabuse [their] charges" of secondary school history instruction (to borrow the words of James Loewen).

I posit here that the most significant contribution of McRAH to the challenges facing American history education lie within the smallest letter of the institute's acronym. The collaboration of professor and schoolteacher is at the center of rethinking American history. For two weeks this summer, I watched as a wall between these two worlds was taken apart. Honorifics were put aside (Professor Ebner became Michael, Professor Binford became Henry), and a common community of interested educators began to dig at the problems of teaching American history. As I see it, this is the only way real change in American history education can occur. If professors want their students armed with the tools to "do history" they need to spend some time in the trenches, learning how best to bring the historian's craft to the highly regimented environment of high school. If teachers want to renew their sense of instructional purpose, they must fight to change school culture--away from passive students, textbook superficiality and content-coverage mentality--into the more messy world of primary documents and historical inquiry. This wall comes down faster if it is chipped at from both sides.

At Grayslake Community High School--with its supportive, progressive school culture--my Advanced Placement students have just finished struggling with the teasingly incomplete documentary record of Silas Deane's death, the lesson I constructed that hot August day. Some students were genuinely frustrated when I could not give them a clear ending to the controversy surrounding Deane. Afterward though, one student confided in me that this activity did not seem like history. I believe his words were "that was too undecided to be history." One brick at a time.

1. James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (McGraw-Hill Companies, 1999).

Joseph W. Brysiewicz teaches history at Grayslake Community High School in Grayslake, Illinois, and is the author of Lake Villa Township, Illinois (Arcadia, 2001).