OAH Distinguished Lecturers are venturing beyond college campuses in increasing numbers. Here is a sample of the events in which they spoke during the past year:

• An October assembly for 400 high school students, faculty, and parents at a private school in Tucson .
• A summer evening lecture in San Antonio , sponsored by the College Board and attended by more than 500 high school teachers and college professors who gathered to read AP U.S. history exams.
• A Teaching American History teleconference attended by 35 middle and high school teachers in January, originating from a public television station and spanning two time zones in the Florida panhandle.

More than twenty-five OAH Distinguished Lecturers have addressed high school teachers, students, and others involved in secondary education during the current academic year. Their number has grown steadily over the last few years and represents nearly a quarter of all OAH Lectures scheduled this year.

Most of these lectures have been sponsored by school systems or other local educational agencies that are administering federal Teaching American History (TAH) grants, an initiative championed by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) and first funded in 2001 to improve the quality of instruction in American history as distinct from general social studies education. In addition to lecturers, OAH offers a variety of other resources to TAH grant writers and recipients, including history educator memberships, OAH Magazine of History subscriptions, and reduced registration fees for annual and regional meetings.

TAH gatherings across the country, from Florida to California, have hosted OAH Lecturers. (A complete list of the hosts of this year’s teacher-focused lectures accompanies this article.) Ramon Gutierrez and Virginia Sanchez Korrol worked with teachers in Puerto Rico this spring, in conjunction with TAH grant partner Universidad Interamericana in San German--the first OAH lectures outside the continental U.S.

When choosing guest speakers for a primarily middle- and high-school teacher audience, TAH grant administrators seek specific history content as well as pedagogical ideas. “I need to cover the time periods specified in our grant,” said lecture host Kathy Nobles of the Panhandle Area Education Consortium in Florida, “but I also want to pursue topics not normally covered in the textbook.” For example, she invited lecturer Merritt Roe Smith to talk about military technology during World War I, giving participants a new angle on teaching about this conflict.

Lecture host Lynn Baca of the Page Unified School District in Arizona added that she chooses areas that will be popular among the teachers, such as Native American history since her district’s student population is more than two-thirds Navajo. “We also choose topics that are relevant to the standards being taught. You cannot ignore the power that standards hold over what teachers need to teach and thus want to learn,” Baca said.“Teachers are anxious, and increasingly so, about how to incorporate the latest scholarship into a curriculum increasingly driven by high-stakes testing,” agreed lecturer Tom Bender. He spoke to the AP exam graders in San Antonio last summer.

TAH workshops can sometimes be small (fewer than twenty people), but their impact is powerful: this spring in Newport News, Virginia, for example, lecturer Peter Onuf talked about early national history with a group of sixth-grade teachers who had just been assigned to cover the first half of U.S. history, rather than the second half that many had been teaching for years. Through the lectureship program, scholars also visit teachers in rural or isolated communities such as the Four Corners area in the Southwest or the Florida panhandle.

When working with teachers’ groups, lecturers usually present formal talks with question-and-answer periods; sometimes these events are also open to the public. Speakers often engage in workshop interactions and informal discussions as well: examining research techniques, sharing handouts, providing bibliographies, linking new research to state history standards, brainstorming about how to use artifacts or primary sources to make history come alive in the classroom. After giving conference keynotes at the Idaho National Council for History Education meeting last fall, for example, lecturers David Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen spoke with a small group of local AP teachers and their students about what it is like to write a U.S. history textbook.

“Teachers need to connect with important writers and important thinkers in history and social studies,” said Russ Heller of the Boise Independent School District, organizer of the Idaho NCHE conference which involves not only secondary school teachers and college professors but also undergraduates who are studying to be teachers.He praised the lectureship program for facilitating access to “top-notch scholars with an added talent for communicating ideas.”Ellen Emerick, organizer of last fall’s Kentucky Association of Teachers of History conference, also complimented the lectureship program for its roster of “engaging speakers who offer new and original perspectives.”

Teachers’ desires to bring new material to their students are at the core of the lecture hosts’ and lecturers’ planning. “Like any other learners, teachers need interesting visual content,” said lecture host Nobles. Visual aids and handouts help her teachers, she noted, especially since they cannot count “seat time”--conference attendance alone--toward recertification; they must demonstrate that they have implemented in their classrooms what they learned. “K-12 teachers, while of course generally interested in the substance of one’s research, are also eager to gain insights on a topic that will assist them in curricular planning, class preparation, and the development of rhetorical and increasingly audio-visual techniques to reach and inspire students,” agreed lecturer Michael Bernstein, who spoke to Nobles’s teachers in Florida last January. Most important, perhaps, according to Nobles, “teachers also share with their students that they are still learning and excited about learning” by attending TAH and other workshops and conferences. Several lecturers remarked that teachers are challenging, invigorating audiences. “Teachers are accustomed to being listened to, so the Q&A is always quite lively,” said lecturer Doug Monroy, adding that his mother is a retired teacher. He spoke to a TAH workshop in Jamestown , N Y, last summer.

Presenting teacher seminars since the late 1980s has taught lecturer Ed Countryman a lot about classroom interaction. “My teaching style is much more give-and-take as a result,” he said. “Simply presenting myself as an authority does not work, any more than it would in an OAH convention setting. My working creed always is that I approach any audience with the proposition that I want to show something well enough that the audience can argue with it. Teachers are very willing, even eager, to argue.”

“I find teachers to be a very engaged audience,” observed lecturer Cohen. “They also tend to be fairly progressive, so we often end up making links to contemporary American politics and society.”

“The teachers who tap into the OAH lectureship program are also experimenting with other creative and imaginative ways to reach their students,” lecturer Steve Gillon said. “These teachers are also among the hardest working and most dedicated in the profession.” (For more of Gillon’s thoughts on speaking to a Tucson high school assembly, see page 17.)

Countryman added, “If they’ve read anything I’ve written, it’s as active users, passing it on, rather than as passive consumers. They have studied history at college, at master’s and sometimes doctoral levels. They are aware that they’re dealing with a zone of inquiry, rather than just a set of facts and stories.” “They also have constraints that few professors face,” Countryman continued, “in terms of legal mandates on their content and often their approach and the possibility of community sanctions for heterodox positions.”

When working with teachers, lecturers also enjoy exploring the connection between research and teaching.“ I found the talk very gratifying because I gave the same kind of scholarly talk I would give to any audience of historians, yet was able to speculate about implications for teaching,” lecturer Alison Games described her keynote address to the Kentucky Association of Teachers of History [KATH] conference last fall. “I really like the idea of this one-day gathering to discuss matters related to teaching--common ground for all historians regardless of the level of student they teach.” KATH membership includes K-12 teachers as well as college and university professors.

“In speaking to university faculties, I rarely get any questions about how one would teach this or that point, where it might fit into a constrained curriculum,” Bender said. “Those questions do come up in presentations to teachers. But otherwise their questions and comments are little different from university audiences--some penetrating, some not, some self-serving, some deeply serious. But students are always a presence in discussions with teachers in a way they are not with university faculties, whose research is foregrounded.” Games added, “It is always interesting to learn what colleagues are doing in different settings. It is also important as a college teacher to understand what students are learning in high schools and to think about ways in which the newest scholarship might be deployed in a high school setting.”

“These are some of my favorite speaking engagements,” Cohen concluded. “We can provide teachers with some renewed stimulation and ultimately benefit their students as well.” 

Lecturer’s P.O.V.: Steve Gillon on visiting St. Gregory College Preparatory School, Tucson, AZ

At St. Gregory’s in Tucson I was part of an innovative year-long project designed to educate students about the 2004 presidential election developed by [OAH member] George Rising. The students created parties, elected candidates, developed platforms, and campaigned for votes. There were special interest groups and members of the media playing their assigned roles. They were remarkably well read in many of the details of party politics, and they turned the school into a political laboratory.

During the day, I attended classes (including Rising’s AP U.S. government course), ate lunch with representatives of the various political parties and interest groups, and then went from room to room where the candidates were holding caucuses. Later in the evening, I attended a dinner and gave a lecture to students, teachers, parents, and other members of the local community. There were probably three hundred people in the auditorium.

It is possible that over the course of the day the students picked up a few scraps of knowledge from me. But I left Tucson energized by the event, filled with new ideas to use in the classroom. More than anything else, however, I left with a renewed sense of pride in my chosen profession. I spent a day with a group of teachers who love what they do and who do it far better than I ever could.

OAH Lecture Hosts

These groups hosted OAH Distinguished Lecturers during Teaching American History grant workshops and other gatherings of teachers in 2004-2005.

• Clayton State College (GA)

• College Board/Educational Testing Service

• Constitutional Rights Foundation (Los Angeles)

• Danbury (CT) High School

• East Central University (OK)

• Fitchburg State College (MA)

• Idaho Council for History Education

• Jamestown (NY) Public Schools

• Kentucky Association of Teachers of History

• New-York Historical Society

• Newport News (VA) Public Schools

• Ohio State University

• Page (AZ) Unified School District

• Panhandle Area (FL) Education Consortium

• Region 16 (TX) Education Service Center

• Richmond County (GA) Board of Education

• South Georgia History Project

• Stafford County (VA) Schools