Rethinking the US History Survey for 21st-Century Teachers and Students

The last decade has seen significant changes in the way U.S. History is taught in high schools, much of it generated in collaboration with professional historians at colleges and universities. A lot of this work advocates discipline-based training and the practice of historical thinking skills, which focus on primary-source analysis and encourages students to actively seek understanding of the past rather than to passively receive knowledge of it. In addition, teachers are being asked to instruct students in 21^st century competencies such as solving real world problems, finding and evaluating resources, communication skills, research and writing skills, and the ability to work cooperatively.

At the same time, little has changed in terms of the basic structure, content, and curriculum for teaching U.S. history as delivered in U.S. history textbooks.  At Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a private preparatory school in Cambridge Massachusetts, we in the history department used a college-level U.S. history textbook for years, a practice that is typical in independent schools, and required in AP courses at public schools. Increasingly, however, we found that the textbooks we used (and we tried several) interfered with our efforts to teach historical thinking skills. Most books are very long, making it difficult to assign more than a smattering of primary sources or secondary scholarship (an acute problem for high school history classes, but one that is likely familiar to teachers of first- or second-year U.S. history courses at the college level.) There is no doubt that contemporary U.S. History textbooks have tried to address these conflicting demands by including highly excerpted and contextualized primary sources. However, these sources are often used to illustrate a point made in the main narrative of the textbook and to expand the scope of the analysis by including actors and voices often ignored in that narrative. This is why we decided four years ago to abandon the traditional textbook and create our own course materials that would allow us to teach more substantially from primary and secondary sources.

In our poster presentation for the 2017 AHA meeting, we intend to demonstrate the main features of the U.S. history course we created, as well as highlight some results we have noted after four years of teaching it. We reconstructed the survey around twelve chronologically organized units, each shaped by a set of central questions or problems, and supported by contextualizing narratives, and curated primary and secondary sources. We adjusted the periodization of American history to produce an appropriate number of case studies to fit our academic schedule and to give enough time for exploration and reflection.  This approach has allowed us to have our students read history through primary and secondary sources. Similarly, this approach allows us to create organic assessments that ask the students inscribe their arguments within a historiographical context. Class time can be spent discussing sources rather than reviewing textbook readings. In addition, we have created an interactive website that will allow us to hold this course online as well as within a traditional classroom.