Lessons in U.S. History Help Build High School-University Partnerships

Eileen Luhr

For the past several years, California government and university representatives have sought ways to deploy financial, intellectual, and institutional resources of the university to improve the quality of history instruction in K-12 classrooms. Programs like the Teaching American History initiative have offered financial support for collaboration between school districts and universities, but creating productive partnerships remains a difficult task, in part because of the perceived divergence between the “research” oriented track of the university and the “teaching” focus in primary and secondary schools. Between 2001 and 2004, in consultation with OAH President-elect Vicki L. Ruíz and several high school teachers, I had the opportunity to address some of these differences by writing a curriculum that translates university scholarship into lessons for eleventh-grade history that are calibrated to content standards and allow students to engage directly with primary sources. This United States history curriculum integrates the diverse lived experiences of Americans&emdash;including California natives, African Americans, and Mexican Americans&emdash;into units on the American Revolution, Western conquest, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Cold War.

My experiences in K-12 education arose out of my involvement with two education partnership programs at the University of California, Irvine (UCI): Humanities Out There (HOT) and the California History-Social Science Project (CH-SSP). Instead of assigning me to work as a teaching assistant for survey courses, these programs placed me and other advanced humanities graduate students in local classrooms and, ultimately, within the larger network of educators and administrators in Orange County, California, school districts. As a consequence, I became more familiar with the protocols and politics of education in the state of California and have become better equipped to balance university-based scholarship with the varied learning styles of high school students, the time constraints of K-12 teaching, and the unique challenges posed by state-mandated content standards.

HOT is a partnership established in 1997 between the UCI School of Humanities and the Santa Ana Unified School District, an urban area in Orange County in which more than 90 percent of students are Latino and fewer than 2.3 percent of high school graduates meet the eligibility requirements for admission in the University of California system. HOT seeks to raise that percentage with curricular materials aimed at improving critical thinking, reading, and writing skills, and introducing precollegiate students to university students. While the HOT workshops allowed me to engage with students in Santa Ana schools, UCI’s CH-SSP presented me with the opportunity to work directly with teachers throughout Orange County. Founded in 2000, the CH-SSP brings together UC Irvine faculty (primarily in history) with K-12 teachers in discussions that focus on recent research in both U.S and world history.

As a graduate student participant in HOT, I designed university-level lessons and recruited and trained a team of undergraduates to conduct small-group discussions in eleventh-grade classrooms. My host teacher for HOT&emdash;Chuck Lawhon&emdash;showed me how to create exercises that were both appropriate and exciting for specific grade levels. For example, when I first began writing lessons, Lawhon suggested that I include short but densely worded primary sources along with reading comprehension questions and a glossary accessible to English language learners. Lawhon helped me understand how visual and textual primary sources could be used to reinforce one another. To a veteran educator, these tips may have seemed obvious, but to a graduate student who had taught exclusively at the university level, they were invaluable.

In my work with Orange County teachers, CH-SSP offers a variety of professional teacher development programs including summer history institutes that give teachers access to university resources in order to develop their own standards-based curriculum units in American and world history; literacy institutes that address how to raise language awareness and improve writing in the history classroom; and regular two-semester-long seminars in which content presentations by UCI faculty members are followed by brainstorming sessions on how to incorporate this new material into the primary and secondary school classroom. As a graduate assistant and presenter at CH-SSP events, I was charged with advising teachers on how to integrate academic scholarship into curriculum design. But the instruction turned out to be a two-way street, as teachers offered feedback on specific lesson plans, gave their insights into how to write instructional materials that they could use in everyday teaching, and made strong suggestions about what content or skills might be most useful in new instructional materials.

The institutional opportunities for dialogue between university and high school teachers provided by HOT and CH-SSP eventually led to more ambitious forms of collaboration. In the fall of 2002, I was invited to give a presentation on the Great Depression alongside Adam Wemmer, a U.S. history and government teacher at Pacifica High School in Garden Grove, California. Wemmer suggested that we write a comprehensive unit together. Over a two-month period, we met several times to outline a daily timeline of the unit, the standards to cover, lesson plan ideas, and potential primary sources. Following the guidance of the state’s main standard for the 1930s&emdash; “Students analyze the different explanations for the Great Depression and how the New Deal fundamentally changed the role of the federal government”&emdash;we focused on the concept of “economic citizenship” as expressed in politics and government, society, and culture. The result was a standards-based, ten-lesson unit on the Depression. The materials address political history through exercises such as a “debate” between two students representing the philosophies of FDR and Hoover on the role of government, the concerns over the expansion of federal power expressed in political cartoons, and the long-term debate over safety net programs in American society. At the same time, the unit focuses on the lived experience of average Americans as expressed in the photography of Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee, the letters written to the White House occupants from across the country, CIO songs and antipoverty activism like Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California plan, and working-class public art like the Coit Tower murals, the music of Woody Guthrie, and the novels of John Steinbeck. The unit culminates with a scaffolded writing assignment that requires students to assess the changes brought about during the New Deal using the primary sources available throughout the unit.

In most instances, the collaborative work described in this article would be an end in itself. However, thanks in part to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the curriculum has been edited and published under the title, Lessons in U.S. History. Copies of the five-unit curriculum, as well as a multiunit world history curriculum developed under similar conditions, are available, free of charge, to interested educators by contacting the Humanities Out There Program Manager, Peggie Winters, via e-mail at <pwinters@uci.edu> or by mail at the School of Humanities Undergraduate Office, 168 Humanities Instructional Building, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-3380.

Eileen Luhr is currently a Kevin Starr Postdoctoral Fellow in California Studies at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.