High School and Community College Historians and the OAH

From the OAH President
Nell Irvin Painter

Painter

It’s all too easy to assume the Organization of American Historians’ constituency is entirely collegiate, but that is not the case. Of our approximately 9,100 members 5,400 teach in four-year colleges and universities, 1,600 in high schools, and 400 in community colleges. In recent years high school historians have been among the fastest growing and most active of our members. One facet of the 2002-2003 Strategic Plan addressed the needs of historians in community colleges.

I want to begin by stressing the overlapping nature of the work of all historians: whether we work in high schools, community colleges, colleges, or research institutions, we all teach youngish people, and most of us feel some kind of pressure or influence from the public sector, whether through compulsory testing, legislative mandates, or attention paid to enrollment numbers and teaching evaluations. Even the most dedicated research historians also function as teaching-historians. At all levels of our profession, moreover, lack of tenure—experienced as part-time and contingent employment—aggravate the pressures on our work.

High school and community college historians, however, are seldom required to produce original scholarship as a job qualification, and, consequently, they usually lack support for their research. The ambitious among them do produce new scholarship, and they attend OAH annual meetings and read OAH publications to keep in touch with developments in their fields. In concert with the U.S. Department of Education through Teaching American History grants and with the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s travel grants, the OAH has sought to sustain these historians. Needless to say, more can be done, much along lines already laid out by the OAH Committee on Teaching.

The OAH Committee on Teaching meets regularly, both face-to-face and by conference call. Its members very graciously invited me to take part in a call last fall, which I found extremely useful. That conversation encouraged me to share some thoughts with you.

Teacher-historians value the OAH in two main ways: attendance at the annual meeting, where they learn about current scholarship and speak with authors whose work they use, and the OAH Magazine of History, which specifically addresses issues related to precollegiate teaching. These are not the only OAH activities teacher-historians participate in, of course, but they come up most often in discussions of teacher-historians in the OAH. In our discussions, members of the Committee on Teaching told me they very much miss Talking History, which is no longer being broadcast. Committee members also wished program committees would emphasize the existing invitation to take part in annual meetings, to make sure teacher-historians recognize the sincerity of the invitation.

I would add that teacher-historians, by dint of their immersion on the public sphere, are ideally placed to make unique contributions to annual meetings: they can analyze many issues that research-historians often ignore, such as heritage tourism’s use of history, the impact of legislative mandates on the presentation of history, the relationship between historical scholarship and testing, and the various topics of National History Day. Teacher-historians are on the front lines of the public’s consumption of American history, and research-historians need to know about that as well as the details of their own particular scholarly concentrations.

The interests of teacher-historians and research-historians diverge in a way we need to attend to, particularly in the OAH Magazine of History. Whereas recent history attracts dissertation writers and skews research toward the near past, teacher-historians deal with the whole sweep of American history, often without reaching the late twentieth century in survey courses—and survey courses are what nearly all of us teach. At the same time, the presence of large numbers of immigrants in all levels of education offers a means of bringing research and teaching closer together. Recent immigration interests researchers; teachers deal with immigrants on a daily basis.

Technology presents ways to bring teacher-historians together with one another and with research historians. The 2008 annual meeting will feature one means for teacher-historians to reach out to one another: At the reception the Gilder Lehrman Institute is sponsoring on Friday, March 28, the Committee on Teaching will be circulating a short survey and collecting email addresses toward the creation of an listserve for OAH teacher-historians. Beyond the annual meeting, and as the OAH gets its finances under control, it should be possible to offer pod casts of presentations by OAH Distinguished Lecturers. Finally, the editorial board of the OAH Magazine is being revised to better reflect the interests of people actually teaching history. Crucial to all these endeavors, of course, remains the engagement of the Committee on Teaching and its representation on the OAH Executive Board.

As this is my last message to you as president, I will not be able to speak with you on two matters I had hoped to address: first, a closer rapprochement between the fields of art history and just plain history, second, my experiences as an undergraduate art student, which the super egos in Bloomington judged unpresidential, as, in fact, they are.