Teaching to Teach History: A Study of a University-Based System of Teacher Preparation

Abstract

Both history and education courses comprise a significant portion of certification requirements for prospective history teachers. Teaching ambitiously requires mastery of many practices and bodies of knowledge, including disciplinary, pedagogical, and pedagogical content knowledge, learned in that history and education coursework. However, researchers have often treated history and education coursework separately. Missing from our understanding is how history and education courses impact each other’s depictions of teaching history, and what prospective teachers learn about history and teaching history in each setting. This study examines the intersection of history and education coursework by investigating what prospective teachers learn about how to teach history in different contexts. It follows instructors and prospective teachers in three courses offered in one semester at Indiana University: an American history survey, a social studies methods course, and a writing-intensive history seminar.

Indiana University has a long history of historians interested in teaching, a School of Education with strong commitments to disciplinary literacy, and active cooperation across these two departments. As such, it presents a telling case for effective practices of preparing prospective history teachers across history and education courses. While at Indiana University, I observed and filmed courses, collected instructional materials, and regularly interviewed instructors and focal prospective teachers. I asked prospective teachers what they noticed from the courses and what they could imagine using from courses in their teaching. I coded transcripts of interviews and class sessions for the types of knowledge and practices presented by instructors and recognized by prospective teachers. I employed three frameworks of apprenticeship to analyze how instructors presented knowledge and practices: apprenticeship of observation, cognitive apprenticeship, and the framework of representation, decomposition, and approximation for teaching practice.

In analyzing patterns of what prospective teachers noticed, I found that they often fell into a pitfall of experience: over-contextualizing based on the type of course. Even though historians used and discussed many laudable pedagogical practices, prospective teachers tended to focus on disciplinary knowledge in history courses, not viewing historians’ pedagogical practices as something they could or should adopt for their own classroom. Conversely, education instructors frequently presented disciplinary knowledge. However, in the context of an education course, prospective teachers tended to focus on pedagogical moves, while not focusing on the disciplinary knowledge.

Additionally, I found actions that supported broadening prospective teachers’ professional vision to notice more in each type of course. Instructors employed metacognition in their teaching, explaining reasons for presenting instructional activities and how they aligned with instructional goals. Instructors reminded students frequently of their future careers as teachers. Education instructors thoughtfully selected historical knowledge to demonstrate pedagogical techniques and reinforced its importance. Finally, regularly asking prospective teachers what they noticed from courses led them to notice more. These findings suggest practices other institutions could use to strengthen teacher training and collaboration between schools of education and history departments, as well as practices that could improve history instruction at elementary, secondary, and collegiate levels.