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K-16 Collaboration Committee

Report from the Secondary Education Committee 1998

The Council discussed the report and recommendations of Doris Meadows and Robert Tisdale, Co-Chairs, of the Committee on Secondary Education.

Annual Meetings

The Committee on Secondary Education organized five workshops for the Washington, D.C. meeting. Attendance was approximately the same as for Kansas City, ranging from 10 to 25 persons, many of them university teachers. Participation by local secondary school teachers was good although not overwhelming, except for the luncheon. Mary Helen Washington spoke to a very appreciative audience at a luncheon packed with secondary schools teachers. She provided several useful examples of how the inclusion of African American materials in textbooks may valorize or marginalize, represent or distort cultural history. Participants in morning and afternoon workshops seemed to find them helpful and, as usual, shared their experiences and exchanged addresses and pedagogical resources.

A full day of workshops is planned for Seattle. Topics are diverse and include “Teaching Class: a Conversation,“ “An Experiment in Community-based Multicultural Education,“ “Applications of Asian American Studies in Secondary Schools,“ and “What’s Appropriate and What’s Appropriation.“ These workshops deal with important topics of current and lasting interest. The last session, for example, will include an administrator and teacher from a Seattle area Native American school and will focus discussion on the inclusion of oral narratives in textbooks, as well as the centrality to the curriculum of sovereignty and treaty rights, and “the American Holocaust.“ The emphasis in most of these workshops is on identifying resources and helping teachers anticipate and solve problems in dealing with significant, difficult topics.

This year’s luncheon will feature Johnnella Butler meditating on “the Joys and Frustrations of Incorporating Ethnic Studies.“ We expect many participants for this event, given the popularity of last year’s luncheon and Mary Ellen Washington’s talk.

Setting aside a whole day, especially Saturday, for such presentations has obvious advantages for secondary school teachers visiting the convention. They can attend all the sessions dealing explicitly with secondary school issues and not have to pay a substitute to teach their classes. It does, however, tend to segregate those teachers from university faculty, except to the extent to which the latter attend these sessions. Our committee will discuss whether it is possible to schedule such sessions to enable secondary school teachers to attend sessions on topics of their choice as well as those focusing explicitly on secondary school teaching.

The Committee on Secondary Education will plan a “Focus on Teaching Day.“ But the Committee asked that the program committee, after selecting sessions from those voluntarily submitted in response to the call for proposals, should send to the Secondary School Committee the accepted proposals that deal with (secondary) teaching issues. These would be assembled together with a luncheon speaker as the Committee’s package for Focus on Teaching Day.

National Resource Guide to American Studies in the Secondary Schools

Since last year’s meeting, the guide that Lois Rudnick compiled and edited so masterfully has been available—both physically and electronically. Model programs in it are very impressive and useful in their present form, and our committee may want to discuss ways to extend their utility—perhaps by making available on the web not only teaching plans but study guides, quizzes, essay topics, and other resources that will help teachers prepare efficiently and improve the quality of discussion and writing in their classrooms. Our intent would be to help secondary and university teachers share assignments that work and resources that students and instructors need.

The Crossroads Project

Steve Hilsabeck, committee member and American Studies teacher at New Trier H.S. in Evanston, Illinois, has been moderating the Highroads Project for secondary school teachers. Steve reports favorable reception of material provided at that Website, but as Steve said: “Crossroads is a rich resource. The big problem is to make teachers aware of it.“ One thing that might be done is to have time set-aside during in-service days for teachers who use the web and Crossroads in particular to demonstrate its wealth to others who are not yet familiar with it. He also has suggestions how school systems might configure labs to make them most useful, but he notes that even in New Trier, one of the best-endowed and effective schools in the country, “classrooms are still mostly chairs and a blackboard.“

Many teachers elsewhere simply do not have the time or machinery to permit students to use Crossroads or any other resources of the net. As Doris Meadows implies when she says that her school needs working telephones, many schools do not have computers at all, or if they do, there are not enough hooked up to a phone line and a printer to enable adequate access and practical use. So there continues to be an inequitable distribution of resources from one school district to another, and unless state or federal income taxes replace real estate taxes in funding for schools, this problem will persist.

Rarely are there enough computers to enable a teacher to permit an entire class to use the net, even if students share two or three to a machine. Some schools that have many computers place them in labs separated from classrooms, and teachers are often forced to schedule some of their students into a lab without being able to leave the classroom themselves to oversee computer use. They and their students may also struggle with traffic problems, which seem to be encountered everywhere.

The latest findings of the Educational Testing Service that computers do not necessarily contribute to improvement in learning, although focused on mathematics in grades 4 and 8, may be replicated in research on social studies and literature, the major players in American Studies in secondary schools. Access to computers and the net by no means assures effective use or improvement in learning. It may continue to be the case for some time that the most effective use of computers is in providing curricula and primary documents for teachers rather than direct, unmediated learning experiences for students.

The Committee noted the content of the wonderful material available through ASA’s website. Primary documents are essential for students who are being taught to do primary research. If these documents are heavily edited, students are not confronted with problems of identifying and selecting relevant material. Perhaps that is wise for most secondary students or others with many courses and little time, but for other students, masterful editing may minimize the real problems of research and writing. Clearly the web, exciting and useful as it is, does not solve all our problems.

University Outreach to Secondary Schools

The Committee also plans to discuss possibilities for enabling university and secondary school faculty to meet collegially for discussion of current scholarship and resources for teaching. Some school districts already invite local scholars to make presentations at in-service training days. Some regions have active networks scheduling discussions of scholarly work of mutual interest to secondary and university faculty. Often university scholars appear as featured speakers or seminar leaders for high school teachers, as in seminars sponsored by the National Faculty. Effective and enjoyable though these seminars are, they limit the interchange possible and reinforce stereotypes of “expert” and “novice.“ New structures need to be tried to bridge this gap and encourage collegiality. Crucial to such collegial interchanges would be funding to buy time and materials for secondary school teachers to participate in colloquia with university faculty, as well as inclusion of the former to set agendas for reading and discussion, and encouragement to share their own research, which, when involving local topics, is often more informative as that provided by university faculty. Perhaps the very term “outreach” should be discarded for other terms that express more collegial structures and processes.

The problems the Committee hopes to address require time, strength, cash, and patience. But cash, according to the chairs, may be the least of their worries. Many university teachers want to work with secondary school teachers, and the chairs sees it as their task to continue to explore and support truly collegial relationships in whatever forms can work to their mutual benefit.