Bridging the Great Divide: Finding Common Ground among the Stakeholders in State Certification

Academic historians frequently comply with state teacher preparation standards which appear at odds with their own assumptions about the central objectives of history teaching and learning.  This paper will explore this puzzle by mapping some of the conflicting assumptions and interests confronting stakeholders:  K-12 teachers, school districts, professional development providers, and state departments of education, who all answer to differing constituencies and bring differing expectations to standards development and implementation.  The documents which emerge from this clash of interests result in heavy doses of political maneuvering and compromise, in which university history departments played at best a marginal role.  

This paper will take Michigan’s efforts at standards-setting and implementation as a case study, comparing the concerns Michigan’s social studies standards generated among teachers in service against how most faculty in the Department of History at Central Michigan University believe we should be preparing teachers for the field.   K-12 teachers in our TAH professional development workshops are concerned primarily about covering the standards through activities that work with kids.  The department, conversely, is concerned with helping its majors to develop their critical and analytical abilities, and less concerned with coverage.  The paper will explore this dichotomy in the interests of the various stakeholders, identifying points of contact in our differing perspectives which have served as conversation starters among our faculty, K-12 teachers, professional development providers, and state officials.  It will suggest ways in which points of common interest can provide an avenue for historians to make our own voices heard in standards revision.