Forging New Partnerships: Collaboration between Academic Historians and Schoolteachers to Improve History Teaching 1983–2013

Over the past 30 years, K-12 history education has taken many turns, mostly for the better. Supported by millions of dollars made available through Teaching American History grants, and with the development of state history standards, academic historians and schoolteachers throughout the country were able to spend thousands of hours together in efforts to improve history teaching. In 2010, Linda Symcox conducted a series of ten interviews with university historians about their experiences collaborating with secondary teachers. The results were presented in themes such as “world history’s coming of age,” “learning is a two-way street,” and “a cultural divide persists between the educational establishment and university historians.” This follow-up study presents the view from the other side through interviews with ten schoolteachers who have responded to the same questions that were posed to the academic historians. This study showcases commonalities and differences in perceptions between the academic historians and the schoolteachers. Additionally, it looks into the future as teachers begin to grapple with a dramatically new era of reform defined by economic austerity and the Common Core Standards.