CHAPTER 5: Collaboration within a Teacher Education Program: Preparing History Teachers to Teach English Learners

Learning the language and content of history—to analyze texts, debate ideas, and develop an informed opinion—can prepare adolescent English learners for school success, professional employment, and active citizenship as they come of age in U.S. society. Indeed, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which have been adopted in 45 states, recommend that all students interpret complex informational texts and use evidence from texts to justify their views (Santos, Darling-Hammond, & Cheuk, 2012), literacy skills that can be taught and learned in history classes. Often, however, content coverage and classroom management predominate in secondary history classes partly due to the socialization of teachers, who are pressed to cover vast geographies and time periods (Barton & Levstik, 2004). To complicate matters further, history is especially difficult for English learners—who must master academic content through English as they develop proficiency in English (Lucas, Villegas, & Freedson-Gonzalez, 2008)—because it is construed in abstract, complex terms quite different from everyday language (Schleppegrell, Greer, & Taylor, 2008). As such, transmission-oriented instructional practices like lectures do little to foster English learners’ comprehension or production of historical knowledge. Gearing history instruction instead toward developing content-specific literacy skills as suggested by CCSS seems a worthwhile target but also a notable challenge for English learners and their teachers, a challenge that can and should be addressed through teacher education (Santos et al., 2012). Specifically, efforts are needed to equip history teachers with pedagogical content knowledge and some understanding of the specialized academic language of history to prepare them to teach literacy skills of history to English learners (DelliCarpini et al., 2012; Schall-Leckrone & McQuillan, 2012). Through the collaboration of an experienced history methods instructor (Pat) and a language specialist (Laura), we sought to address this need by infusing modules with language-based strategies into an existing history methods class and analyzing what preservice history teachers and we learned in the process.