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K-16 Collaboration Committee
Report from the Secondary Education Committee 2001
Current Members: Shelli Fowler, Janice McNeil, Jay Mechling, Sindy (Sara) Parrott, Sarah Robbins (co-chair), Deb Schmalholz, Careda Taylor
Assessing the Relationship between the Committee’s Constituency and the ASA
In the past year, the links connecting this committee’s constituency with our organization have been strengthened in several key ways. Building upon a foundation of work by such former committee leaders as Lois Rudnick, members have been working to strengthen ties to groups within the ASA (such as the graduate student committee and the regional chapters) and to make productive contacts with professional organizations serving secondary teachers (such as teachers’ unions, the National Writing Project, and the association for educators of gifted students). At the same time, committee members have taken advantage of opportunities such as a pre-convention collaborative at the Detroit convention to connect schoolteachers with the ASA through discussion of shared issues. Similarly, we have helped advertise ASA-associated events of potential interest to schoolteachers, such as the winter conference in Chicago which brought together regional affiliates of ASA with local secondary educators to explore issues of race in American culture and, more specifically, in the school curriculum. Along related lines, the committee continues its efforts to make the lives and challenges of secondary schoolteachers more visible to the general membership of ASA. For example, Careda Taylor and Deb Schmalholz have collaborated recently with Lois Rudnick to write an article for the ASA newsletter based upon the invigorating discussions at our pre-convention collaborative in Detroit—“American Studies in the REAL World of the High School Classroom.”
Committee Support Systems
Support systems for the committee’s work have continued to improve over the past year. One sign of this trend is that ASA affiliates who have served in recent years on the committee continue to stay involved in its mission. Ardis Cameron and Jim Hall, for example, are frequent contributors to discussions on the committee listserv, even though their official terms of service have ostensibly ended. (See also reference to Lois Rudnick’s co-authorship of a newsletter article, above.) Meanwhile, the growth of a personnel network of university-based ASA members who are engaged in ongoing collaborations with schoolteachers has been and is being supported by the committee—as evidenced in the luncheon program for Focus on Teaching Day during the Washington convention, a roundtable on university-schools collaborations. Equally important, the committee has established an approach for building connections with local schoolteachers in the region where the convention is held in every year by seeking out potential nominees for committee membership from the upcoming host city at least a year in advance. Along those lines, adding Janice McNeil to the committee before this year’s Washington gathering has allowed a strong, experienced voice from the schools in Houston to help guide our planning for 2002, including making contact with potential attendees (and thus potential ASA members) and tailoring some of our session proposals to topics of particular interest in that region. (Significantly, we made initial contact with Janice through the help of colleagues on the ASA student committee.) As we continue this pattern of bringing a secondary educator on board well in advance of a convention being held in any particular city, we are already looking ahead to Hartford, with the help of Paul Lauter, to identify schoolteachers there who can make contributions to the convention program and to bring one of those colleagues onto our team in the coming year. Overall, we have achieved a notable strengthening of the infrastructure, processes and practices that are needed to make the committee’s work for ASA and for colleagues in the schools even more successful in the future.
Projects and Prospects
Our ongoing efforts to attract secondary educators to membership in ASA are based in a commitment to collegiality. Knowing that ASA has much to offer schoolteachers, we are also well aware that teachers can also benefit and help lead the ASA. Shared interests in issues that affect all of us can provide rich fields for collaborative projects. For example, groups within ASA or the organization as a whole might build on work already done through the Crossroads project to imagine new collaborative programs focused on interdisciplinary teaching that is supported by new technologies. Similarly, the new regional centers of the National Endowment for the Humanities should also offer outstanding opportunities for collaborations linking ASA members to colleagues in the schools. Worthwhile aims for this committee’s work in the coming year might well include making ASA members more aware of such opportunities for partnerships, while making schoolteachers more aware of the resources ASA can already provide to support their work (e.g., the ASA guide to model American Studies programs in the schools).
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