Well, as with Jackie, I'd like to welcome everyone here. It is really excellent to see so many people in this room. When we first began to plan for this project--actually back in the summer of 2001 -- a year and a half ago -- we were in many ways planning for this evening, the first night of Teaching American History Project. And here we are and it's very gratifying for all of us involved in this project to see so many people here.

My name is Rick Sawyer and I coordinate the Secondary Certification Program at Washington State University Vancouver. Along with Armando Laguardia -- who you will meet shortly as he introduces Art Pearl, a speaker tonight -- I represent the Education Department at WSUV.

The Secondary Certification program that I work in prepares new high school teachers, including new history teachers. As Jackie mentioned, one of the goals of this Project is for us to learn new understandings about American history. And, of course as history teachers, that goal is what we want for our students.

I'm going to talk very briefly about the second and third goals of this project: the second goal is for us to engage our own students in gaining deep understandings of American history and in making personal and social meaning with and through historical content. The third goal is for us to support and promote what we have in this room: teacher knowledge, expertise, and leadership. We see this project as a collaboration in which we are going to share existing knowledge and generate new knowledge and expertise about teaching and most importantly -- learning history.

As we all know, teaching is an incredibly complicated process. To be an effective teacher, you have to engage an exceptionally diverse range of students in learning. Each evening in this five-evening colloquium series, we are going to examine not only historical content but also how to engage students in learning that content. As I mentioned, our goal is to examine and to develop approaches to facilitate our students' gaining understandings of historical content in authentic ways, that is, at least in part, by using the very methodologies that historians use to examine, to interpret, and to understand history. Our goal is to see how we can have our students -- with our help -- become their own historians. So, each evening in this series, we are going to present -- in addition to the historian -- someone from the field of history education. This history education specialist will continue the discussion about how to extract that methodology that the historian is using and for us to begin to use it to engage our students in learning -- in both a hands-on and minds-on way -- inside and outside the classroom. In a way, the history education specialist will begin to translate the content and the approaches discussed by the historian into learning approaches that we can use in our classrooms. We have very intentionally paired the historian with the history-education specialist in order to at times complement each other, and at other times, to present somewhat different views of the same general topic, in order to show that history is a living text and certainly open to debate.

The methodologies that we are going to focus on over the span of the five-evening colloquia include but are not limited to the following:

• the examination and interpretation of contexts framing historical events;
• within those contexts, the examination and interpretation of primary source documents and artifacts;
• the use of oral histories;
• the use of digital museum archives which are on line;
• and the critical analysis of historical film, video, and images.

A challenge for us as teachers will be to facilitate our students' learning of history, using these same tools as we construct authentic ways of teaching and learning history. So the challenge for us will be to take these tools and integrate them into powerful learning experiences for our students who are in exceptionally complex and unique classrooms.

To help us with this process of using some of these methodologies as tools for active learning, we are going to pair, as I mentioned, history education specialists with historians. I'd like to mention a few of the education specialists that we have lined up as presenters and discussion facilitators. Tonight you will meet Art Pearl, who is professor emeritus at the University of California Santa Cruz. He now works at WSU Vancouver. His field is democratic education. We also have scheduled for next month, Karen Hoppes, who teaches the history methods course at WSUV and is a high school teacher in Lake Oswego. She will discuss the use of primary source documents and artifacts in the classroom. A third history education specialist is Dave Barber, who is the media specialist in the Vancouver School District and is well versed in the use of technology to promote how students learn history.

As I mentioned, the presenters will only begin the discussion. For the third part of each evening in these colloquia we've scheduled break-out discussion groups. Consistent with how we've scheduled these sessions, our break out discussions will generally focus on 1) historical understandings and 2) methodologies and their classroom applications. In the break-out sessions we will discuss these historical understandings and questions and their applications for student learning within our own classrooms.

And then coming up this summer, we are also currently planning a week-long Summer Institute, scheduled for the third week of July. At the summer institute, for those who choose to continue with this project, we are going to revisit the historical content and methodologies we begin to discuss here. The summer institute, however, will be more field-based and experiential. We plan to take fieldtrips to different locations, such as Old Town Portland, and examine some of the historical work that Jackie and others are doing.

In the summer institute we are gong to save considerable time for discussion and curriculum development. For the curriculum, we are going to develop unit plans, again focusing on deep understandings of historical content and methodologies--as guiding questions for units. After articulating the historical understandings we wish our student to have and ways of assessing those understandings, we will design learning experiences for our students. At the end of the summer, we will begin to create a library of these unit plans to share with each other.

Again, I'd like to thank everyone for coming tonight. The real goals of this project are for us to together learn history and generate new authentic ways of teaching history that are learning centered.

Washington State University, Vancouver | Center for Columbia River History
Evergreen School District | Klickitat School District | Vancouver School District