The Role of History Educators in a Time of Crisis: Building Bridges Between Historians and K-12 History Teachers

Nearly twenty years ago, I was a participant in several Teaching American History Grant (TAHG) programs, as well as the coordinator for one designed for New York City elementary school teachers. Thanks to this federally-funded program (defunct since 2012), history teachers, like myself, worked with historians for the sole purpose of improving their content knowledge as well as pedagogy. I still integrate many of the documents and practices from my TAH days into my lessons. Most importantly, TAH played an integral role in bringing together historians with K-12 history teachers, an important partnership that is missing in the field today.

Although there has been an increasingly robust conversation around this topic in the Twitterverse, I was excited to attend an IRL discussion on Sunday, January 5th at 8:30AM at the AHA conference. Organized by the AHA Teaching Division, “The Role of History Educators in a Time of Crisis” panel was chaired by Joe Schmidt (New York City Department of Education) in conversation with Trevor Getz (San Francisco State University), Christopher Martell (University of Massachusetts Boston), and Judith Jeremie (Brooklyn Technical High School). I left the session determined to redouble my efforts in finding more ways for historians and history teachers to join forces in meaningful ways.

Chris Martell’s Two-Way Bridge Between Historians and Teachers 

I have been a longtime fan of Chris Martell’s efforts to actively connect historians with history teachers on Twitter. Based on his paper, “A Two-Way Bridge: Building Better Partnerships between Historians and History Teachers/Teacher Educators,” Martell’s main message was that we need to move from historian/history teacher interaction to collaboration. That means we need to start presenting at each other’s conferences and utilize more digital platforms for sharing our resources and teaching strategies. He began by discussing how there are a few thousand self-identified historians and professors in the United States, but there are currently 1.1 million elementary school teachers. These educators are often overlooked when we talk about who teaches history. Meanwhile, beginning in 2008, we have experienced the steepest decline in history majors. Considering that 18% of 300,000 history majors report they wish to pursue careers in K-12 education, this does not bode well for the future of public education. How do we stoke the flames of enthusiasm for the study of history?