NCHS K-12 Workshops
In 2010-2011, NCHS launched its K-12 outreach workshops as a way to foster community partnerships with local teachers based upon the mutual understanding of bringing history alive to students. The overriding goal of the workshops is to help find applicable ways in which teachers can show their students how to think critically about the historical process by using primary sources and methodological practices. In addition, the workshops not only act as a forum for continuing education, but also promote networking and ties between community-based leaders, educators, and scholars in the Los Angeles region.
The first workshop was led by NCHS director, Professor Gary Nash, who offered ways in which to read and interpret Early American history through the lens of race, class, and gender. This approach helps teachers illuminate primary sources for their students when other textbooks tend to focus on certain groups of people – such as Anglo-American men, and instead broadens the story to encompass a wider range of historical actors. One participant of the workshop noted that she had never fully understood that when a primary source is used, it might also shed light on who has been left out of the narrative. This realization helped her and the other teachers to see that students need to be engaged participants when analyzing primary sources as well as contemporary textbooks on any given subject and to not just accept the information at face value.
The second NCHS workshop was conducted by Professor Ross Dunn, former president of the World History Association and lead scholar on the World History for Us All project.
Although K-12 teachers recognize the importance of World history, they also shared that it was often daunting under time constraints, standardized testing, and budgetary confinements. In addition, the ancient past can often be hard for students to relate to, and therefore additional tools are needed to enliven the subject matter. To off-set these concerns, Professor Dunn showed how large themes can enable the process of incorporating a history that is world-based and interconnected, while still adhering to K-12 teaching standards. This approach offers teachers a bridge to what, on the surface, might initially appear as separate historical events happening in certain areas of the world by instead showing how both environmental and human events shape the historical past as well as the present. At the conclusion of the workshop, one geography teacher noted that he had never realized how much geography and historical events are intertwined, allowing for a crossover of knowledge that he can now convey to his students.
The K-12 teachers who had participated in the previous two workshops decided upon the third NCHS workshop theme, which is how to teach California history. For this occasion, NCHS held the workshop at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, and was co-led by Professor Jeanne Arnold (Archaeology, UCLA) and Fowler Museum educator, Gina Hall. Professor Arnold’s talk was centered on California Native Americans, most especially the Chumash. She offered insightful ways for teachers to help their students understand that Native American history is still prevalent today with the emergence of indigenous groups gaining government and communal recognition, and by showing that they are still here. In addition to Professor Arnold’s presentation, Gina Hall, gave the teachers lesson plans based upon on an object-based history that takes California’s pre-contact history and brings it alive for K-12 students.
This spring, NCHS was awarded the UC Consortium Grant to conduct its forthcoming workshop in the fall 2011. The theme is “Remembering a Divided Los Angeles: A Legacy of Segregation,” that will include two workshops and an oral history project. The workshops will be held at the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum, and will include a detailed museum tour, lectures by UCLA scholars on the legacy of segregation in Los Angeles, and training on collecting oral histories from those who experienced segregation or its legacy. Graduate students will follow up with teachers in their classrooms, by helping to guide students in collecting these oral histories. Once completed, NCHS will work with the UCLA Center for Oral History to archive the interviews. This workshop with a local museum will strengthen community ties that NCHS has developed with Los Angeles area teachers and the students in their classes.
