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K-16 Collaboration Committee
Report from the Secondary Education Committee 1999
The committee is engaged in critical review of its past contributions to the ASA, especially through the annual convention venue, and is establishing goals for future initiatives. Besides rebuilding the committee to benefit from new membership, we are reaching out to other networks serving secondary educators.
Focus on Teaching Strand for ASA Conventions
The committee helped plan a number of sessions for the Focus on Teaching Day at the Montreal convention, including two sessions sponsored by the committee and built around highly successful collaborative programs linking American Studies scholars and secondary schools. The first, “Creating New England: Regionalism, Cultural Studies and the High School Curriculum,“ grew out of a project involving faculty in American and New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine and included among its participants committee member Ardis Cameron. The second, “‘American Identities’: A University and Secondary School Collaborative Course,“ shared ideas and resources from a cross-level curricular program used both in classes at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and in area high school classrooms. With the Focus on Teaching luncheon for 1999 offering a talk by past ASA president Paul Lauter, the program strand continued a tradition of inviting conference attendees from both secondary schools and universities to consider teaching issues as central to the association’s work.
Evaluating the strengths of the Focus on Teaching Day activities at the Seattle convention helped promote development of the strong sessions for Montreal, while also highlighting some aspects of the strand that merit the ongoing attention of the committee. The quality of the sessions and very positive audience reactions in Seattle are signs of the important role this strand can play for multiple constituencies at the convention, as indicated, for instance, by the lively discussions during the session on the American Mosaic, which committee member Ardis Cameron reports “was well-attended and gave the audience a very clear and visually astute method for teaching American Studies through community history and with high school students.“ Efforts to include secondary educators as program presenters as well as audience members helped encourage similar sessions like those outlined above for Montreal.
For example, the Seattle session “What’s Appropriate and What’s Appropriation” drew an engaged audience of both university and secondary American Studies teachers, as well as graduate students, as it benefited enormously from the practical yet highly reflective perspective of a local administrator and teacher from a Seattle area Native American school. Another session including secondary educators was on “Teaching Class.“ Chaired by Doris Meadows, this session included papers by Ron Briley and secondary committee member Vicki Adamson, which generated a very lively discussion with the audience regarding the extent to which high school students are aware of social class. However, questions about how best to make more secondary school colleagues aware of the applicability of many such convention sessions to their professional needs, so as to increase the number attending the conference, remain a challenge for the committee, and one which we are revisiting in 1999-2000, as outlined below.
Looking ahead to Detroit 2000, the committee has identified several elements in “The World in American Studies/American Studies in the World” annual meeting call for proposals that could be especially interesting to secondary educators, including issues associated with new technologies’ position in the teaching of American Studies (e.g., equity of resources, ways of identifying and encouraging effective technology-enhanced teaching approaches) and topics related to the convention site in an urban area whose public schools are facing multiple challenges in a new century. As the committee’s responsibilities for collaborating with the convention program committee to shape and promote the Focus on Teaching strand are further clarified, we look forward to sponsoring one or more specific proposals as well as assisting the program committee’s work on this vital element in the convention’s overall content.
While recognizing the resources for secondary school teaching represented in many conference sessions outside as well as within the Focus on Teaching strand, the committee is especially eager to identify and promote new convention session formats that will encourage collegial, cross-level exchange. As committee member Marsha Ehlers of the Montebello School District in the Los Angeles area has observed, we may want “to consider planning some informal times” during the conference “to share teaching ideas, resources and materials,“ especially in secondary school settings where “an integrated curriculum” like that envisioned in American Studies at the university does not have a formal instructional identity in course requirements and sequences. Certainly, such efforts would be consistent with the ASA convention program committee’s wish “to look at the ways in which the supposed boundaries between academia and the ‘real’ world can be challenged and crossed, and [to] use the conference as a site where this cross-fertilization between the scholarly and the public can happen.“ With all these aims in mind, the committee will build upon shared evaluation of the Focus on Teaching Day activities in Montreal to shape our contributions to the Detroit and Washington annual meetings.
Long-Range Planning based upon Committee Mission and Objectives
The committee has begun to develop a fuller statement of mission and to define short-term as well as long-term objectives in light of the ASA bylaws’ description of its function: “to keep the council and the association’s membership informed of the current interests, needs, and professional orientations of secondary educators involved with American Studies programs or curricula.“ An informal survey of committee members’ own ideas about future initiatives consistent with the group’s basic role in the ASA has produced several potentially generative items for discussion in Montreal and over the coming months. As committee member James Hall of the University of Illinois and Chicago has observed, we need to “insure that the kinds of changes that have come to American Studies scholarship of the past 10 years—especially questions of geography, race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality—are being communicated to high school teachers, and that there are opportunities for American Studies scholars to learn from the experiences of teachers in the secondary schools.“ Part of that agenda will entail improved communications on several fronts—exploring new ways of working with the Crossroads project, for instance.
High on the agenda for our Montreal meeting is the need to think beyond the convention itself for additional venues and programs through which we can connect the ASA with secondary educators. (Hall, for example, has suggested we consider facilitating workshops and interactive events outside of the national conference, perhaps along the lines of the National Council of Teachers of English summer seminars for teachers. We may also be able to identify ways that the committee and its individual members can support ASA affiliates’ efforts to develop individual programs at their own institutions, as with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and/or regional humanities organizations (as in the Maine humanities council-sponsored program described above).
Another important aspect of improving communications and program development, we believe, will center in enhanced connections to other professional groups. Besides looking forward to participating in a university-and-schools initiative sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, we are exploring ways of making connections with other professional organizations that have secondary teachers in their constituencies, such as the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Writing Project, the League of Professional Schools, and national/regional associations for teachers of social sciences, history, and the arts. We already have reason to believe that such efforts will be greeted very favorably by such groups, since a few informal discussions with colleagues in NCTE have already led to that organization’s executive committee unanimously passing a resolution favoring exploration of possibilities for collaborations with this committee.
Although such organizational/logistical efforts will be important to our work in the coming months, we want to continue to focus on broad cultural issues as well—particularly those with major implications in both secondary and university teaching. Thus, we hope to identify and explore—both within the committee and hopefully with other members of the council and the general membership—key questions in secondary education which the ASA as a whole might want to address as part of its commitment to providing public leadership. In this vein, topics for ongoing concern that the ASA may want to address via innovative program initiatives (such as those envisioned in Vicki Ruiz’s idea for a Community Development Fund) could include the following: certification programs for secondary educators, and their frequent incompatibility with American Studies models for undergraduate education; ways of promoting the scholarship of teaching in the academy and cross-level collaborative initiatives for curriculum development; and public school trends that are related to themes receiving ongoing emphasis in American Studies scholarship (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, border studies, language difference).
Finally, and speaking very practically, the committee would welcome opportunities to work with other ASA members on the development of specific proposals to submit to the ASA Community Development Fund, including colloquia with secondary educators, curriculum development projects, and special events bringing together ASA university scholars with community organizations serving related groups (such as arts organizations, history societies, and regional humanities councils).
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