OAH Lecturers Collaborate with  Teachers

Elizabeth R. Varon

On October 20, I travelled as an OAH "distinguished lecturer" to Rockford, Illinois, for a Teaching American History symposium organized on behalf of the public schools by Betsy Homewood. I had jumped at this invitation, as it was a chance to reunite with Nancy Cott, my longtime friend and mentor, and to meet Nancy Mirabal, whose work I admired but whose path I hadn't yet crossed. We three OAH lecturers anchored a program on women and gender in U.S. history; each of us delivered a lecture, and then we participated in an informal roundtable and breakaway discussions on aspects of pedagogy.

The first thing that struck me was the dedication of the sixty or so teachers who were willing to give up their Saturdays to assemble, bright and early at 8:30 a.m., for a day of intensive collaboration. I came, over the course of the day, to appreciate that dedication even more fully, as the teachers' questions, comments, and insights dramatized the challenges educators face in the "no child left behind" era. As a parent of two children in public elementary school, I found my interactions with these Rockford teachers to be eye-opening and inspiring.

I had imagined, given the pervasive pressure to "teach to the test," that public school teachers have few opportunities these days for creativity and improvisation. But it was clear from the teachers' questions and comments that they work tirelessly to transcend local and state educational mandates and to supplement the standard curriculum. They wanted us to discuss: 1) how to integrate women's and gender history into the curriculum in ways that were not merely "contributory," tokenistic, or superficial; 2) how to supplement terribly outdated social studies textbooks with compelling published primary sources and cutting edge scholarship and; 3) how to harmonize the goal of confronting America's historical flaws and failings with the goal of imbuing civic pride in students. 

After sharing ideas, strategies, and book titles, we broke into small groups to grapple with the particular challenges of teaching the different grade levels; as my own son is in fifth grade, I volunteered to join the fifth grade teachers' group. Their observations rang true and clarified so much of what I had observed in my sample of one. For instance, these teachers explained that fifth graders are only just arriving at the stage, developmentally, in which they can grasp "change over time" writ large. They cannot yet think across the centuries, so they must focus on generational change.  Thus assignments that ask them to do oral, family, and local histories are particularly efficacious.  Moreover, fifth graders are, I learned, not only naturally drawn to family history, but also to public history and material culture. So these teachers had devised countless ways to incorporate artifacts and local historical sites into the curriculum. This was no simple "teaching to the test."

After our breakaway sessions we reconvened as a group to compare notes.  Hearing these teachers contrast, starkly, the capabilities and affinities of fifth graders with those of eight graders and twelfth graders (and so on) only reinforced my dawning sense (it gets stronger the older I get!) that in some ways the college years are just another developmental stage of childhood. And that is one reason why these sorts of teaching forums are so invaluable for college professors: if we want to help our students get where they are going, it helps immeasurably to know where they have been.