Education Committee - July 2007

ASEH Education Committee

Today’s schools have a need for environmentally-based curricula that can help future citizens understand issues of ecological health and social justice confronting our nation and the world. Students and teachers benefit from content-rich instruction integrating social studies, humanities, and science at the K-12 level. To address these needs and capitalize on the accumulated knowledge and resources of membership, ASEH established a new Education Committee at the 2007 annual meeting. Committee members include Aaron Shapiro, historian for the US Forest Service in Washington DC, Thomas Andrews of the University of Colorado at Denver, and Vicki Garcia of St. Agnes Academy in Houston. The Committee will help fulfill the obligation a learned society should uphold to the educational systems which make our work possible and necessary; it will also help expand ASEH membership, enhance its public profile, and magnify its social significance.

Many ASEH members teach future teachers. The American Historical Association recently issued a challenge (http://www.historians.org/pubs/free/historyteaching/) to history departments to consider innovative and effective ways for educating future history teachers among students. In an unscientific poll on the ASEH website, 82% of respondents favored ASEH including pre-collegiate education in its outreach efforts. Many members are already active with schools in their local communities and participate in teacher workshops, but the opportunity exists to improve networks. The committee will focus on issues relating to the practice of teaching and learning environmental history from the primary grades through the graduate level.

Committee goals include:

• Fostering networks among environmental history scholars with professional or personal concerns in K-12 education

• Encouraging K-12 educators to join and participate in ASEH

• Gathering existing curricular materials developed by membership for publication on a new ASEH educator page on the website as well as linking to relevant external materials

• Overseeing new collaborative initiatives to produce high-quality, content-rich materials for use in schools that take advantage of new media

• Establishing a speakers’ bureau for Teaching American History and other professional-development workshops

• Securing grant funding for curricular initiatives and teacher workshops at the ASEH conference that would facilitate projects throughout the year

• Organizing education and teaching-related panels and roundtables for future ASEH meetings

• Developing partnerships with history education organizations and relevant repositories to foster primary-source and place-based instruction

• Exploring partnerships with environmental education and science education initiatives

• Coordinating with museum professionals and local, state, and national government agencies to provide the public additional opportunities to explore environmental history

The committee will also coordinate with future subcommittees to maximize ASEH education outreach efforts and minimize overlap. A future internship subcommittee, for instance, would apprise the Education Committee of its efforts. Graduate students selected to participate in an internship program could be asked to develop lesson plans or locate primary source materials for use in K-12 and undergraduate teaching.

We welcome suggestions as to how this committee can best serve the organization and encourage your participation in this effort. Please feel free to contribute to our blog at http://aseheducate.blogspot.com or email us at ASEHEducate@gmail.com