Purpose

The goal of the Teaching American History Grant (TAHG) program is to raise student achievement by improving teachers' knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of American History.

According to the National Council for History Education (NCHE), one of the biggest problems facing history teachers is the “so what?” principle. American history students consistently ask, “What does this have to do with me anyway? Why should we spend time learning about a bunch of dead people?” The challenge of historical pedagogy is, therefore, to make learning history meaningful to the lives of young people.

• One way to make history come alive for students is to combine the factual with the conceptual. After students learn when and where an event occurred, they can discover (1) how and why it happened, (2) how various parties have interpreted it, (3) why that event is significant while some others are inconsequential.
• A second way is to make the learning of history active rather than passive by supplementing lectures, discussions, and videos with “readers’ theaters,” historical re-enactments, and other hands-on activities. Students will research photographs, letters and other primary sources, create extensive time lines representing key events in state and national history, and conduct on-line searches.
• A third way to enliven history is to link the present to the past, drawing on students’ interest in a current event to engage them in constructing an historical account of how that event came to be.

For teachers to pursue these strategies effectively, the teachers themselves need to be immersed in historical thinking. DOE American history teachers have voiced their needs for programs to improve their own critical understanding of the subject content and to upgrade their teaching methodologies.

Program

The TAHG program will develop the ability of Hawai`i’s history teachers and future teachers to think like historians, by:

• strengthening their familiarity with key events to develop a coherent narrative encompassing the requisite scope and breadth of American history;practicing the interpretation of evidence and skills of analysis and by investigating primary sources, giving teachers exposure to the most up-to-date techniques of investigation and instruction;providing access to an innovative structure of mentoring networks to teach history more effectively to students;engaging individual teachers in a community of educators; and
• expanding teachers' field of colleagues and their access to museums and other resources in the community.

These activities will support teachers in constructing a coherent framework for teaching an event-based American history curriculum, while enabling them to meet DOE content and performance standards.

Office ofCurriculum, Instruction and Student Services Instructional Services Branch Department of Education - State of Hawaii 2005