Preparing Future Faculty alongside High School Teachers: A Workshop Model

This poster describes, analyzes, and evaluates an innovative professional development program for history graduate students and secondary teachers of world history.  Funded by a grant from the British Council and the Social Studies Research Council, Hussein Fancy, Bob Bain and a team of six graduate students from the History Department and the School of Education created and enacted a model for preparing world history faculty at the collegiate and secondary levels. Three features of this project made it a unique form of professional development and offer it as a replicable model for other universities. First, the project had an essential goal of preparing future history and history education faculty to design and enact curriculum in world history at the collegiate level while simultaneously providing rich professional development for teachers of world history at the secondary level. Second, this project aimed to develop and strengthen avenues of interdisciplinary collaboration among historians, education specialists, and their respective graduate students. Third, the project sought to provide graduate students with experience in designing programs for and working with area high school teachers, helping bridge the divide between the academy and the secondary classroom.

This poster explores this unusual attempt to deepen future faculty’s understanding of world history and of the challenges teachers of world history face. Essentially creating a ‘Third Space,’ the project brought together historians, education specialists, and world history teachers to work collaboratively around a common problem: the use of shifting temporal and spatial scales in history. The project made explicit the ways scale informs the work of historians – including works by Fernand Braudel and David Christian – to take up the pedagogical challenges teachers and students face in teaching world history. The poster analyzes and evaluates the processes involved in the design and enactment of the workshop, including elements designed for the graduate students and the elements designed for secondary teachers. Using documents generated before and after the workshop – such a lectures, curricular materials and interviews – the poster reports on the value of this model in helping prepare doctoral students in history and history education, as well as building tighter connections among world history teachers, K-16. The poster concludes with implications for replication at other universities.