Building and Sustaining Collaborations

Vicki L. Ruiz

As turbulent air buffeted the small plane headed from Phoenix to Page, Arizona, I momentarily questioned my devotion to the Organization of American Historians. As part of the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program, I had agreed to participate in the Glen Canyon lecture series, sponsored in part by the Page Unified School District Teaching American History Grant (TAH). The TAH collaboration by the district, the history department of Northern Arizona University (NAU), and the Arizona K-12 Center serves as a model for community-school partnership programs. Its impact extends beyond the classroom, but has become interwoven within the cultural scene of this small Arizona town in which local residents have become stakeholders in this endeavor.

Directed by Lynn Thompson Baca of the Page Unified School Direct, this TAH grant began with a goal of recruiting and retaining good teachers given the area’s isolation. Two hours from Flagstaff, Page is located adjacent to Lake Powell and surrounded by spectacular public lands and the Navajo Nation. The town’s population is approximately 7,000 residents with 3,020 students enrolled in local schools. Seventy-one percent of district students are Navajo, 26 percent EuroAmerican, and 3 percent Latino. The grant covers an array of activities including a curriculum and assessment component, instructional materials, student field trips, and summer academies for teachers.

 Of the seven programs funded by TAH, a distinguishing feature has been the development of a Master’s program in secondary and elementary education with twelve graduate hours in history. Sixteen local teachers took part in this innovative program headed by Linda Sargent Wood. She and her colleagues in the history department at Northern Arizona offered a combination of well-attended graduate seminars held on-site in Page, online courses, televised distance learning, and summer workshops. According to the chair of the NAU history department Cynthia Kosso, “Most everyone in the department went to Page at least once, even the non-Americanists.” Professor Kosso herself offered a workshop on Athenian and Roman foundations of democratic practices. Fred Hoxie, Jeff Mirel, Virginia Scharf, Ira Berlin, and I were among the OAH speakers who participated in the Glen Canyon lecture series held at the Townhouse.

When Lynn Baca and I arrived at the Townhouse, I expected that my audience would be primarily local educators and a few students desirous of extra credit, but what I encountered was a lively cohort of interested community folks, people who represented the community’s generational and racial/ethnic diversity. Setting out the plates of chips, nuts, and crudités, I was enveloped by the sense of neighborliness among those who had arrived. People pitched in to arrange chairs and prepare refreshments. In addition to their gracious hospitality, I remain humbled by their palpable engagement with history. Most came with little knowledge of the subject area (I presented on Spanish/Mexican women on the borderlands), but they seemed intrigued by the stories, the evidence, and the interpretative context. As a veteran of public humanities programs, I have a good sense of when a general audience connects with the scholarship and when it does not. According to Lynn Baca, this lecture series has become an important community event. “It has been fascinating to have high profile historians doing cutting edge scholarship come to our little town. You can’t imagine how many claps on the back I get for these lectures.”

Throughout the district, there has been a fluorescence of activity around the teaching of history. “Teachers are more excited about history, “ noted Baca History clubs have taken off at the local schools and this year twenty area students qualified to enter the National History Day competition at the state level. The grant also partially supported a group of middle and high school students to attend opening ceremonies for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Professional development for all educators is also key to the success of this collaboration, one that extends beyond the teachers enrolled in the Master’s program.

The summer academies brought educators from across the state for week-long workshops. In 2003, historians from Northern Arizona University, University of New Mexico, and Villanova focused on multicultural approaches to U.S. history; in 2004, James Brooks led a summer academy on Native Americans and the borderlands and this year George Lubick focused on environmental history. Page educators have also been involved with their colleagues in the Phoenix Unified School District in workshops devoted to such topics as water in the West and oral history.

Even though the Teaching American History Grant is winding down at Page and fourteen of the educators will receive their MA in December, colleagues at Northern Arizona University remain committed to continuing school-university partnerships. In Cynthia Kosso’s words: “This initiative has been more than a good experience; it has really galvanized us.” Indeed, as Linda Sargent Wood leaves Page and NAU to accept a tenure-track position in the history department at Arizona State, part of her new appointment involves building and sustaining these collaborations. Historians at Northern Arizona and Arizona State are working together to develop new initiatives, including a teaching certificate in U.S. history for undergraduates and graduate students.

I left Page with a profound appreciation for the concrete impact of the Teaching American History Grants and for the roles of the Organization of American Historians and its members in contributing to these vital educational partnerships. Lynn Baca and Linda Sargent Wood are to be commended for their vision, commitment, and corazón. Teaching American History Grants do make a difference in the classroom, in our profession, and in the community. Adelante!