Professional History Teachers: Whose Professionalism Is It?

The history standards debate of the 1990s centered on content and teacher preparation.  Outcomes include a focus on greater efficacy in teaching, but less clarity on how historical grounding serves our students and society.  The debates over content standards, increased accountability, greater transparency, and stronger teacher training are forcing us to reexamine how and what we teach, and who is responsible for the direction we take. 

In New York, quick acceptance of the new standards led to reform of our professional masters programs for teachers.  The intent was to strengthen the professional status of the social studies teacher cohort.  To this effect, university teacher preparation programs created and adjusted masters programs to serve this population.  In recent years, cracks in the architecture have become visible along lines between accessibility and professional standards, history content and proficiencies, and classroom skills and content knowledge.  Within all these tensions is the issue of which national entity decides the proper outcomes.

This paper examines our department’s struggle to find a curricular balance between the need to develop critical analytical and thinking skills in our majors, while insuring acquisition of the factual content they need for licensure; the situation is complicated by limited resources, and a push for assessment data that leans towards licensure success over history proficiencies.  Recently, the college of education, responsible for NCATE accreditation, is requiring use of their assessment data regardless of discipline.  Our department needs to find solutions that do not force us to create two curricula, ghettoizing social studies once again.