National Resource Guide to American Studies in the Secondary Schools
Preface
Joseph F. Trimmer
Ball State University
In the 1950s, when I was fumbling through the 11th grade, I had no idea that the strange combination of American literature and American history, team-taught in a two-hour block by Ms. O'Connor and Mr. LaRocca and listed on our school schedule as "Integrated," was a course in American Studies. Although Ms. O'Connor and Mr. LaRocca were gifted teachers, I have often wondered whether they had any idea that the innovative course they cooked up for fifth and sixth periods was connected to a national movement in interdisciplinary education known as American Studies.
The interdisciplinary impulse has always been active in American education. In seasonal cycles, it has prompted college faculty to revise the general studies curriculum and school teachers to redefine the boundaries of their subject matter. In the 1950s, however, educators embattled by the cold war were eager to "integrate" the disciplines to teach a coherent vision of American culture. Their efforts were encouraged by a series of remarkable books that employed interdisciplinary studies to identify the unifying themes of the American experience--e.g. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950); R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955); and Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958).
At mid-century, the interdisciplinary study of America became institutionalized as a new discipline. College students could major in American Studies. College teachers could join the newly formed American Studies Association and scholars could publish their interdisciplinary research in the ASA's official journal, American Quarterly. School teachers, such as Ms. O'Connor and Mr. LaRocca, though probably on the edge of this action, sensed something was afoot and began fiddling with schedules and syllabi.
In the 1960s, the federal government, with high hopes and much hoopla, funded Project English, a series of curriculum centers organized to publish new materials for the secondary schools. These two dozen centers operated independently and focused on different approaches. Unfortunately, they produced few materials of lasting value. However, they did make a substantial contribution to the general process of curriculum development by introducing interdisciplinary studies--and the major theories and texts of American Studies-- to school teachers throughout the country.
After two decades of experimentation, American educators were prepared to make the most of the Bicentennial. As 1976 approached, many of us seemed to have the same idea--summer workshops on American Studies. John Hague (Stetson University) had been funded to organize the National American Studies Faculty and was planning summer workshops at sites such as Skidmore College and Roger Williams College. As I designed Ball State University's version of an American Studies workshop, I drew on our university's tradition as a teachers college and targeted our audience as secondary school teachers. I also began corresponding with other workshop directors, exchanging methods, materials, and mailing lists. As a result, we organized the first session on "American Studies in the Secondary Schools" for ASA's 1977 convention in Boston.
Encouraged by the success of our summer workshops and the response to our presentation in Boston, I applied to the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a Center for American Studies in the Secondary Schools at Ball State University. The Center was funded in 1979 assisted by enthusiastic endorsements from the American Studies Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Council for Social Studies, and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
The plan was to select a three-member team from each state in the nation (the eastern 25 in 1979; and the western 25 in 1980). The primary member of the team was an English or Social Studies teacher. The other two members were a university professor (to enrich the intellectual quality of the work) and a public school administrator (to ensure the political practicality of the work). The teacher spent four weeks at Ball State University developing a model curriculum unit. The other team members came to Ball State for a fifth week, during which teams discussed ways to organize faculty development workshops to introduce the units to other teachers throughout each state. In addition, several teams were selected to give presentations on their work at the annual meetings of the American Studies Association (Minneapolis), the National Council of Teachers of English (San Francisco) and the National Council for Social Studies (Portland).
During the planning for the 1980 workshop, I contacted several members of the European American Studies Association, all of whom had been working on ways to introduce American Studies into the English language curriculum in their countries--e.g. France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Together we applied to NEH and the International Communications Agency to form the American Studies Curriculum Project to be located in Washington, D.C. We paired fifteen of the most talented teachers from the two Ball State workshops with school teachers from different European countries. These cross-cultural author teams spent the summer of 1981 in Washington working with the personnel of the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution to write curriculum units for a three volume guide to American Studies. Several teams presented their work at ASA's 1981 convention (Memphis) and EASA's 1982 convention (Paris).
Like Project English, the American Studies Curriculum Project was unable to meet its rather grandiose publishing objective. Some of the author teams discovered that while they were gifted teaching their own curriculum, they were uncomfortable researching and writing curricula for other teachers. Many had difficulty identifying this group of "other" teachers: were they American teachers looking for new ways to teach their own culture, or European teachers trying to introduce American Studies into culturally distinct traditions of English language instruction? Others encountered fundamental cultural differences that caused them to question and dispute the unifying theme they had agreed to develop into a curriculum unit. Eventually, most challenged the "myth-symbol" model that shaped the Project's design for curriculum development. Although they learned a great deal about each other's cultures and the possibilities of conducting cross-cultural/collaborative research, the author teams failed to convert their education into materials that would educate others.
In many ways, this failure was fortunate. By the mid-1980s, the publication of a curriculum guide based on the assumption of cultural coherence would have been seen as obsolete. American educators, embattled by the "culture wars," were eager to interpret the differences in American culture. In retrospect, the difficulties encountered by the cross-cultural author teams now seem like a premonition of the cultural revolution that occurred when teachers and scholars working out of other, non-European contexts began studying America.
In the late 1980s, these different voices reshaped the direction of the American Studies workshops that were offered to secondary school teachers at sites such as Boston College and Tufts University. This new direction required more than a little fiddling with schedules and syllabi. It required a dramatic change in the way teachers thought about culture and culture studies. And it required an inclusive procedure for tracking and assessing these changes.
In 1993, Lois Rudnick (UMass, Boston) convened the ASA Task Force on Secondary School Programs. In the next few years, this group conducted national surveys, sponsored full day workshops at ASA's annual convention and, in 1995, became part of ASA's permanent committee structure. That same year, the ASA membership voted to have a secondary school seat added to the National Council and in 1996, the first secondary representative to the ASA's National Council was elected. These recent changes mark the association's recognition of the significance of American Studies in the secondary school curriculum.
The result, near the end of the century, is the publication of The National Resource Guide to American Studies in the Secondary Schools, a text that reveals the breadth and depth of the American Studies movement in our schools. It provides descriptions of programs in twenty states in the nation and it offers in-depth portraits of seven programs, each with its distinct philosophy, pedagogy and curriculum.
This Guide will serve as an invaluable resource for those teachers who continue to work at the edge of the action, isolated in their buildings from their professional peers. Now they will know where to go for advice, where to find other teachers who are cooking up innovative ways to study the many cultures within American culture. On behalf of Ms. O'Connor, Mr. LaRocca, and all the other teachers who have and will teach some version of American Studies, I want to thank Lois Rudnick and her contributors for helping us find each other and connect.