Dr Peter J Edwards
Lectures and transcripts on Germany and World War II
Hitler's Victories 1939-41
Stalingrad and Beyond, 1942-43
Fall of the Third Reich, 1944-45
"http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/42.2/fallace.html
From The History Teacher Vol. 42, Issue 2.
Viewed February 1, 2010 2:50 EST
Presented online in association with the History Cooperative. http://www.historycooperative.org
Historiography and Teacher Education: Reflections on an Experimental Course
Thomas D. Fallace
University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia
IN RECENT YEARS, professional historians have encouraged policy makers to increase content requirements in history in hopes of improving the overall teaching of history in American schools. Support for such proposals has come from many sources. The origins of this movement can be traced to the 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education's Nation at Risk report, which declared that the ignorance of American youth was at a crisis level. E. D. Hirsch reiterated this concern in his best-selling Cultural Literacy, in which he also decried the lack of content knowledge of American students. Further studies, such as Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn's What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? and the Bradley Commission's Historical Literacy, argued that students were particularly deficient in historical knowledge. As a result, in the 1990s, many historians and policy makers endorsed a strengthening of history teacher requirements and the addition of expanded required historical content in the curriculum.1 1
In the 1980s and 1990s, new advances in cognitive and learning theory also supported increased disciplinary knowledge for teachers. In 1987, Lee Shulman's influential article, "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of a New Reform," introduced the concept of pedagogical content knowledge-"a special amalgam of content and pedagogy that is uniquely the province of teachers, their own special form of professional understanding."2 Shulman argued that effective history teachers draw upon techniques and understandings unique to the discipline, not upon a generic set of instructional tools t
