Partnership expands history program to aid elementary teachers

COLUMBUS – The U.S. Department of Education today (7/2) announced an approximately $1 million federal grant that will allow an existing partnership of The Ohio State University, Columbus Public Schools and the Ohio Historical Society to now focus on improving the quality of American history instruction in Columbus elementary schools.

The History WORKS II: Building Foundation program is an expansion of the History WORKS program, which focuses on training middle and high school American history teachers in Columbus.

President Karen A. Holbrook said the grant expansion allows Ohio State and its partners to continue helping teachers interest students in American history at an earlier age.

“This is a great opportunity for us to build on a partnership that has worked well over the past two years and has succeeded in supporting the work of our public school teachers in a very important area – American history,” Holbrook said.

Kenneth Andrien, chair of the Ohio State Department of History, said the History WORKS II program, which is funded by a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History program, will establish an ongoing professional development program for more than 100 of Columbus Public Schools’ teachers. The program was designed to increase teachers’ knowledge, understanding and appreciation of traditional American history, he said.

Andrien said the program is an example of Ohio State’s and the Department of History’s commitment for improving “education outside the walls of the university.”

“If you can get students excited about history from the very beginning – teaching children that history is alive, fun, worth knowing and important – then you will have better students in history in middle school and high school,” Andrien said. “The new program is essentially the same as History WORKS but it will be closely geared for the younger age groups.

“We have developed a successful model of how to work together to achieve our goal, and now have the resources to continue to do it,” he said.

Gene Harris, superintendent of Columbus Public Schools, said the district’s students and staff will benefit greatly from the grant.

“This initiative will help us to sustain our academic gains and maintain the momentum we’ve built in recent years by providing our quality teaching staff additional training and resources they can use to bring history alive for students,” Harris said.

The History Teaching Institute, a part of the Department of History’s Goldberg Program for Excellence in Teaching, will oversee the program. The History Teaching Institute is a five-year-old initiative designed to improve the quality of history teaching in Ohio.

According to Jennifer Walton, the institute’s director, the program offers three major components to help teachers: graduate-level training, a lecture series and a web-based resource center, which offers a variety of teaching materials.

Walton said the partners are dedicated to the program.

“The level of commitment from all of the partners has been really high,” Walton said. “Everyone has their own unique resources to bring to bear with this project. For us as historians, we want to extend whatever expertise we might have to the educators throughout the state of Ohio.”

Cynthia Ghering, head of the Department of Manuscripts and Audiovisuals for the Ohio Historical Society, said because the History WORKS II program will give teachers the tools to teach them the curriculum.

“The teachers of this age group are even less specialized than others in teaching American history and citizenship,” she said. “By capturing the students’ imaginations when they are young, they will always have an appreciation for history.”

Grant for History in the Heartland program also announced this week
The U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History program awarded a nearly $1 million grant for the History in the Heartland project on Monday (6/28). The federal grant will fund a partnership of Ohio State, the Ohio Historical Society and the Mid-Ohio Educational Service Center to improve the quality of training and instruction of history teachers from 60 school districts in 12 Ohio counties. It will bring together more than 100 sixth- through 12th-grade American history teachers with faculty from Ohio State’s regional campuses at Marion, Lima, Mansfield and Newark and the Columbus campus, as well as the Ohio Historical Society and local historical societies.

Andrien said the History in the Heartland project will adapt the techniques from the History WORKS program to include components of regional history.