Abstract
Teaching American History: A Model for University-Secondary School Cooperation

To address both local and national needs, we propose a partnership among: the Broome-Tioga Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES); two prominent historians of U.S. History, both from the History Department of the State University of New York, Binghamton (SUNY)--Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar; and the School of Education at Binghamton University (SOE).

Our partnership will develop a series of related initiatives to improve the quality of teacher training and teacher professional development in Broome and Tioga Counties. Focusing on pre-service and in-service teacher training, the project will ultimately improve the high school teaching of American History in the 15 public school districts of New York's Southern Tier, serving 40,000 students. Data collected in 1999 indicate that 12 of the 14 reporting districts failed to meet the 90% passing “State Reference Point,” which is the statewide benchmark set by the NYS Education Department for all Regents exams. Of these districts, 4 have been targeted by the NYS Education Department as “academically at risk” because of high needs/capacity indices combined with low student performance.

We will establish an integrated program that will offer a newly-founded “Certificate in the Teaching” of U.S. History." The certificate will be awarded by the Graduate Division of the University upon the successful completion of a week-long, intensive summer workshop and three graduate courses. The Certificate Program will organize a series of opportunities for teachers' professional development, including after-school programs to introduce teachers to the program, curriculum-centered in-service and summer workshops for area high school teachers and librarians, and graduate-level, semester-long courses designed for high school teachers of U.S. History. The Program will provide “foundational knowledge” of American History in three general areas: ·

• Democracy and Political Institutions
• The Peopling of North America
• Social Movements and Social Change

This collaboration provides the resources to achieve its goals. Binghamton University has agreed to support an Assistant Research Professor to coordinate its new Certificate Program for four years beyond the grant period. Broome-Tioga BOCES will assure the compatibility of the program with New York state standards and Broome-Tioga BOCES and SEHD will jointly provide extensive evaluation of the impact of the program.

In addition, we propose to use World Wide websites extensively in the project, enhancing teachers' knowledge about and access to foundational documents in U.S. History that are available on the WWW, helping teachers communicate with one another about their classroom innovations, and mounting exemplary classroom materials in U.S. History on the World Wide Web developed by participating teachers to be accessed by educators across the country. Through these wide-ranging innovations, this project promises to transform the high school teaching of U.S. History in the Binghamton area, and has the potential to contribute to the transformation of the teaching of U.S. History across the nation.