Bridging the Divide: The Stanton Sharp Symposium

Alexis McCrossen

No civic crisis should be more alarming than the increasingly anemic historical consciousness of the American people. Depending on the political climate and the critic’s politics, the blame for “not knowing much about history” is placed upon revisionist historians whose books undermine the meaning and constancy of “historical truths,” theoretically-inclined historians whose books are inaccessible to ordinary intellects, or K-12 history teachers who “teach to the test” or, worse yet, don’t teach at all. Academic historians run the gamut in terms of their opinion of revisionist and theoretical historical research, but few of us would wish to return to the days when history connoted a single narrative of unyielding truths, events, and great men. By the same token, many of us sense that while the resources for bringing history alive in K-12 classrooms have never been more abundant and accessible, due in large part to communications innovations, the constraints under which history teachers are working in middle schools, high schools, and community colleges have never been more severe. Thus, over the past few years, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and even the U.S. Government pled with university history departments to assist in the improvement of history teaching. Some departments opted to engage in large-scale programs meant to assist in the education of history teachers by participating in the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History program and others devoted energy and resources to developing accessible teaching resources, most notably George Mason University’s fabulous Center for History and New Media. Unfortunately, most college and university departments have not heeded the call. My own department at Southern Methodist University only last year devised a low-cost and simple way to help high school and community college history teachers: a day-long teaching symposium for local history teachers.

Recognizing the urgency of the crisis in history education, the AHA’s 2007 report “The Next Generation of History Teachers” challenges departments of history in U.S. colleges and universities to enter into sustained conversations with history teachers with the goal of assisting in the improvement of history education in the U.S. SMU’s history department was reaching teachers in a piecemeal fashion through our lecture series, occasional evening courses, and the programming of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, but none of our efforts were aimed directly toward the needs of history teachers. In all, the lectures, brown bag lunches, and conferences we sponsored might have inspired history teachers, but we thought we could do more than that if we addressed directly their needs for updated content and approaches to the study of history. So we decided to put together a program for local K-12 and community college history teachers. With more than a dozen independent school districts in the Dallas vicinity, innumerable private high schools, and two large community college systems, there were literally hundreds, if not more, history teachers we could reach. What is more, a teaching symposium allowed us to feature our own faculty, who, in some cases, are better known on other campuses than they are at SMU. As teachers ourselves and as active researchers, we had much to offer in terms of guiding history teachers toward new interpretations of historic events, new subject matter, and new resources for studying and teaching history.

When the Stanton Sharp Teaching Symposium came together, with the tremendous organizational acumen of two staff members and the generous funding from an endowment made in honor of a SMU benefactor’s son, it featured nine ninety-minute workshops led by SMU faculty members, with an average attendance of twenty-three history teachers per workshop. The workshops on teaching the Russian Revolution, the American Revolution, Nazi Germany, and the Vietnam War were especially popular. The workshops about Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and “Americans from Africa” (as my colleague Ken Hamilton brilliantly puts it), met the needs of history teachers grappling with how to diversify their curriculum and how to teach what can, at times, be charged material. A workshop about Egypt in the age of King Tut helped teachers plan lessons that would coincide with a blockbuster museum show coming to the Dallas Museum of Art in the fall. I led a workshop that explored digitized resources for incorporating U.S. cultural history into the curriculum. The SMU faculty corresponded with registrants before and after the teaching symposium, sharing materials and outlines and links to websites. Each of the sessions received rave reviews from instructors and participants alike.

Altogether, seventy history teachers registered for the Saturday workshop: nine worked in community colleges, forty-five worked in eleven public school districts, and twelve taught in ten private high schools. In addition, four graduate students registered for the symposia, while a handful more than that number filled the extra seats in the workshops. High school teachers in most states are required to amass a certain number of continuing education units every five years or so; participants in the Stanton Sharp Symposium earned seven CEUs and took home a certificate in honor of their participation. The $15 registration fee included three workshops, lunch, coffee, and snacks for each participant. The Stanton Sharp endowment subvened the symposium, whose costs included modest marketing materials, the coffee, snacks and luncheon, and an honorarium for each of the participating faculty.

As rewarding as the workshops were, it may be that the coffee breaks and luncheon were the best part of the Stanton Sharp Teaching Symposium, largely because conversation and exchange that began in workshops spilled over into these informal settings. The thirty-minute coffee breaks flew by, with all of us engaged in lively conversation about the practice of teaching and doing history. Much was learned about how the other half works. For instance, over lunch I learned that AP history teachers at one of Dallas’s best public high schools faced such severe time constraints in the classroom that they had phased out research papers!  Armed with this knowledge, I revised my approach to assigning the undergraduate research paper, taking more time to focus on research skills in particular. I also begged the history teachers to bring back the high school research paper. Next time the department of history offers a teaching symposium, I just might offer a workshop on the U.S. history research paper. Its disappearance from high school curricula might be a harbinger of its elimination from college history courses as well, so I plan to do what I can to keep it alive.

In all, my SMU colleagues and I encourage other college and university history departments to adopt this simple template for a teaching symposium. It is an effective way to reach, teach, and learn from K-12 and community college history teachers. Perhaps small grants to departments without institutional funds for such programming could be administered by the AHA, OAH, and even local, state, and federal government agencies. If just ten departments followed suit, 700 history teachers might be reached; 100 such symposia might serve 7,000 or more history teachers. These efforts would likely foster other such local collaborations and exchanges, enhancing the work of both academic historians and history teachers.