Spring 2005

Breathing life into history

Evanston teachers participate in Northwestern’s program to make history more engaging to students

In addition to teaching history at Northwestern, Nancy MacLean and Lane Fenrich co-direct the Community of Scholars grant.

Mary Hanlon

While their students may have been relaxing at the beach, 36 Evanston middle and high school history teachers were participating in an intensive summer institute about teaching led by historians at Northwestern University.

The institute’s goals were to enhance teacher content knowledge of American history with the presentation of cutting-edge research by Northwestern historians and to discuss potential ways to integrate that research into middle and high school history teaching. In addition, the sessions included discussions of how history can be made more engaging to all students, particularly students of color.

No walk on the beach, the institute was a serious exchange between the individuals who teach history at the secondary level and the historians who interpret and write history. By its end, the teachers had created a unit plan that they then implemented upon returning to their classrooms in the fall.

“The participants were a very strong group of teachers who worked hard, put in long days and read lots of material at night,” said Lane Fenrich, who teaches American history at Northwestern and, with history professor Nancy MacLean, is the academic co-director of a grant titled “Community of Scholars.” “For many of the teachers, it was a very powerful experience.”

The nearly $1 million grant procured by Evanston Township High School from the U.S. Department of Education funded last summer’s sessions on Northwestern’s Evanston campus and will fund two additional summer programs designed to eventually bring together Evanston’s American history teachers and just about every one of Northwestern’s American historians. Additional activities aimed at enhancing history content and pedagogy are taking place throughout the current academic year.

The June 2004 summer institute included presentations of cutting-edge history research by T.H. (Timothy) Breen, Northwestern’s William Smith Mason Professor of American History and a prominent scholar of America’s colonial period; Josef Barton, a Northwestern history professor specializing in U.S. ethnic immigration and labor history; and Northwestern professor and urban historian Henry Binford.

At the summer institute, Professor Breen told teachers that his goal as a historian is not to look at the past as a series of micro histories of interesting, quirky people who lived long ago. Nor is it to maintain a traditional history that only looks at the founding fathers or constitution framers and “floats above ordinary people.”

Instead, Breen is interested in how ordinary people who lived during the colonial era related to the social and political events of their day and made sense of their lives in relation to those events. He emphasized that history is a discipline with rules about how to tell stories, and that “doing” historical research is the act of interpreting the past by exploring the voices of the past.

As a result, he and the summer institute participants spent a lot of time examining primary documents and discussing the role that these documents play — biases and all — in understanding the past. “The creative act of our discipline is in the moment of interpretation, and proper interpretation requires honest effort to understand the past on its own terms. We have to fight the temptation to project on a document the concerns of the present,” he said.

For ETHS history teacher Chayla Holland, the institute was an opportunity not only to discuss content and pedagogy but also to develop relationships with the history scholars. “Working with them definitely helped me enhance my teaching and make history come more alive in the classroom,” she said.

Charles Brady, an ETHS history teacher who wrote the grant proposal with ETHS teacher Paula Frohman and now administers the teaching initiative, said building those connections is a vital part of the grant. “We want to establish long-lasting relationships so that when the grant runs out in two years, we’ll know the professors of history at Northwestern and they’ll know us.” Hence the teaching initiative is titled “Creating a Community of Scholars.”

Nancy Alexander, a teacher at Evanston’s Nichols Middle School, said the activities resulting from the initiative “forced me to rethink a lot of what I’ve been teaching. It made me reframe (my teaching) within the context of new technology, new resources and new points of view.”

Alexander found discussions of the role of literacy and the importance of designing lesson plans around the reading abilities of students particularly intriguing. The grant has made possible conversations between the teachers and nationally prominent adolescent literacy researchers Louis Gomez, professor of learning sciences at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy, and Donna Ogle of National Louis University.

The activities of the “Creating a Community of Scholars” initiative have involved high school teachers and scholars at Northwestern, the Newberry Library, the Con-stitutional Rights Foundation Chicago and National Louis University.

Participants in the initiative meet once a month for after-school lectures and discussions. A recent one revolved around the ramifications of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the landmark 1954 decision by the Supreme Court aimed at ending segregation and public schools. In April, Northwest-ern’s Fenrich and a group of six teachers will fly to San Jose to attend the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians.

In the fall, teachers participated in an after-school session at the Chicago Historical Society with Northwestern University Professor Carl Smith, a pioneer in creating document-rich history Web sites and prominent Chicago historian.

“I loved working with them. They’re my colleagues,” the Northwestern professor said of the teachers with whom he discussed electronic resources and ways to use them in the classroom.

Summer camp scholarships available

This summer Northwestern’s athletics coaches will again make scholarships available to Evanston children so they can attend summer athletics camps held at Northwestern free of charge.

Summer camps are conducted by the coaches of Northwestern teams, including basketball, football, wrestling, soccer and tennis.

The typical camp can cost as much as $300 and run several days, providing campers the chance to work with coaching staffs on the fundamentals and stratagies of their sport.

Local non-profit organizations will determine how to grant the scholarships.

For more information, or to find out how to receive a scholarship, contact Lucile Krasnow, special assistant for community relations, at (847) 467-5762.