Professional Development

Teaching American History in Iowa

In 2003, Area Education Agency (AEA) 267 received a three-year Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Innovation and Improvement. The AEA will join with
  • The Connie Belin & Jacqueline N. Blank International Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development (Belin-Blank Center)
  • The University of Iowa College of Education
  • The University of Iowas Department of History,
  • Iowa Area Education Agency 267,
  • the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum,
  • and the Grout Museum of History and Science
    to promote and support the effective teaching of American History at the elementary and secondary levels. The $718,423 Teaching American History in Iowa grant hopes to significantly increase student appreciation of, and achievement in, courses related to the history of the United States.

    Within Congress the person most clearly associated with the Teaching American History Grants Program is Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). In discussions of the program, he said, "An unfortunate trend of blending history with a variety of other subjects to form a hybrid called 'social studies' has taken hold in our schools. I am not against social studies, but I want history. If we are going to have social studies, that is OK, but let's have history." On the floor of the Senate, Byrd reminisced about his education in a two-room schoolhouse 79 years ago. He recalled learning about Nathan Hale and how Hale's heroic story influenced his life. Byrd recalled how he memorized his history lessons by the light of an oil lamp and he remembered the importance of good books and teachers and how they had a formative influence on him. "So I say today we need good history books and good teachers so that the boys and girls of today will find their heroes among the early Americans who built this country."

    In 2001, President Bill Clinton signed into law an omnibus appropriations bill, providing an initial $50 million for programs designed to address the problem described in Congress as "the troubling historical illiteracy of our next generation of leaders." In Fiscal Year 2002, Congress funded the grant program in the Department of Education and appropriated $100 million for the program.

    Our goal through the Teaching American History in Iowa grant is to give teachers time and tools to focus on mapping their existing American history curriculum and to participate in workshops and summer institutes to facilitate their understanding of the ways historians think, learn, and do research. Participating teachers will learn from outstanding university faculty, and they will become better able to coach each other and their students in the use of primary source materials to enrich the sense of being a part of local, state, and national history. Teachers will spend a day at the Grout Museum in the Fall of 2004, and in July, 2005, they will have the gift of TIME to spend hours at the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, experiencing the thrill of any historian exploring primary sources, and learning how to pass on that excitement to their students.

    The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present. We know that what historian Michael Stanford (1986) has said is true:

      "Someone who writes a scissors-and-paste history is not a historian. The diligent student who faithfully copies down every word of the lecture is not a scholar. In each of these cases the essential element is missing: there has been no thinking. The material has passed from earlier to later stages without ever going through a mind."

    The Teaching American History in Iowa grant gives us the opportunity to engage students minds.

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    Belin-Blank Center / 600 Blank Honors Center / The University of Iowa / Iowa City, IA 52242-0454
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