Aaron Woodrow Andersen and Dr. Andrew Johns, History

My project addresses some pressing needs in public school education. There currently seems to be somewhat of a “gloom and doom” attitude about public schools in the United States. The public school system has come under fire in recent years for its perceived failure to adequately educate our children. Alternative proposals such as charter schools and vouchers have been advanced amid a growing perception that public schools are dropping the ball. I have heard many horror stories about unqualified teachers or teachers who, after gaining de facto tenure, proceeded to count down the days to retirement while teaching straight from the textbook.

One problem is the lack of student engagement in learning. Simply put, boredom. The extent of student boredom in schools was the subject of the 2006 High School Survey of Student Engagement (HSSSE) conducted by Indiana University and involving a survey of 81,499 high school students. When asked “Have you ever been bored in high school?”, 17% of the respondents reported being bored in every class and an additional 50% reported being bored every day. That is two out of three students who are bored in high school at least every day! When the students were asked why they were bored in class, 75% said it was because the “material wasn’t interesting.” Thirty-nine percent agreed that the material was not relevant to their lives, 32% agreed the school work wasn’t challenging enough, and 31% cited “no interaction with the teacher.”

The issue of student boredom becomes magnified when observed in history classrooms. Traditionally, history has been perhaps one of the most maligned of the core subjects in school, and for good reason. In an article entitled “Why Kids Don’t like Social Studies”, researcher Mark Schug discusses the results from an interview-survey of elementary and secondary students about their experience in social studies classes. Forty-four percent of the students cite boring classes as the reason why social studies is uninteresting to them. One student commented, “[I didn’t like] working with the government and ancient things. First of all, [the teacher] talks a lot about it. There isn’t much work. Every day you know you’re going to have social studies and you just sit there.” Another student reflected “It was just read the chapter, do a worksheet, take the test.” When Schug asked the students what they thought should be done to improve their social studies classes, their responses reflected an overwhelming desire on the part of students for active learning and more variety in instructional methods.

The results of these two surveys have convinced me that history classes contain too much one-way lecture and not enough interaction between teacher, students and content. Lessons would be more compelling if they featured technology, hands-on activities, and interaction between students and teacher.

It is with the findings of these studies in mind that I decided to design a history curriculum that actively uses primary historical documents and project-based learning instead of relying solely on the textbook and teacher lecture. The historical era I chose to design a curriculum around is the Cold War, a rich topic for history teachers. Video footage, audio recordings, music, novels, magazines, government documents, and even living people, are many of the resources teachers can use to teach about the Cold War. At the same time that the recent nature of the Cold War makes it rich in artifacts, it also means that it is taught at the end of the school year, when student and teacher energy may be ebbing and previous units have siphoned away the time allotted to learn about this era. The resulting gap between the potential of the Cold War to be taught memorably and the reality that it is often given short shrift made it a particularly appropriate era around which to design a curriculum.

The 3-week Cold War unit that I designed revolves a “time capsule” of Cold War artifacts that I purchased off of eBay. I suspect I made happy many eBay sellers looking to clean out their attics! This time capsule includes fall-out shelter manuals, anti-communist propaganda pamphlets, old LIFE magazines, Vietnam war protest pins, and other Cold War-era artifacts. The purpose of these artifacts is to bring the Cold War to life for high school students who, in this day and age, were born in the 1990s after the Cold War ended. In my unit, students will pair up and choose an item to research and prepare a presentation about. Students will present their findings in class and in a special history fair after school where peers, parents, and faculty can come and learn about the Cold War. I have written up the complete unit plan, daily lesson plans, and a student workbook.

The process of brainstorming lesson ideas, collecting my Cold War artifacts, and writing up the unit plan and accompanying student booklet has been a particularly fruitful one for me. This project also served as my Honors Thesis, and defending my project in front of an honors committee also helped me think critically about each step of my unit design. However, this project has still not met its toughest audience: a high school classroom. I am happy to report that I will be able to use it even sooner than I anticipated. I am now teaching United States History at Lehi High School, and am both nervous and excited to see how this unit goes when my classes get to the Cold War in a few months. The past few months of teaching history in high school has been quite a baptism of fire—I can only imagine how difficult it would have been had I not made my college experience more applicable to my current career by tackling this project of designing a unit curriculum.

References

• Yazzie-Mintz, Ethan. Voices of Students on Engagement: A Report on the 2006 High School Survey of Student Engagement. (Bloomington, IN: Center for Evaluation & Education Policy, 2007), 2.
• Ibid, 5.
• Ibid. Students were allowed to select more than one answer.
• Mark C. Schug, Robert J. Todd, and R. Beery, “Why Kids Don’t Like Social Studies,” Social Education, vol. 48 (May 1984): 386.