Teaching American History

The Department of History participated in the first awards given by the U.S. Department of Education in 2000, when its partner Phoenix Union High School was the only Arizona district to receive an award. In 2003, the Department received funding to work with the Creighton School District : a year when Creighton and Maricopa County Schools Consortium were the only schools in Arizona that received funding. In 2004, the Department began work on its third TAH with the Maricopa Consortium, again the only district to receive funding in Arizona . The Department actively seeks to partner with school districts in order to bring quality American history education to the classroom, especially in poor or minority concentrated schools. In August 2005, Linda Sargent Wood joined the ASU history faculty. Prior to her appointment, Wood served as the Northern Arizona University history teacher/mentor for the Page, Arizona Teaching American History Grant. The Page Grant ended in the fall of 2005 with the graduation of 13 Page teachers with a Masters in Education with a History Emphasis. Upon joining ASU, Wood started working with Maricopa County to deliver workshops to TAH teachers.

The most recent TAH grant, "Learning History by Doing History," partners the ASU Department of History with the Deer Valley Unified School District. This project, one of only two awarded in Arizona in 2006, benefits from the combined experience on four previous grants between director Linda Wood and co-director Brian Gratton. Deer Valley is a rapidly growing urban/rural district of 35,000 students located in Northwest Maricopa County, which gives this project the opportunity to impact the teaching of a large number of students.

The Teaching American History Grant program is a discretionary grant program funded under Title II-C, Subpart 4 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The program supports competitive grants to local educational agencies. The purpose of these grants is to promote the teaching of traditional American history in elementary and secondary schools as a separate academic subject. Grants are used to improve the quality of history instruction by supporting professional development for teachers of American history. In order to receive a grant, a local educational agency must agree to carry out the proposed activities in partnership with one or more of the following: institutions of higher education, nonprofit history or humanities organizations, libraries, or museums. The goal of this program is to demonstrate how school districts and institutions with expertise in American history can collaborate over a three-year period to ensure that teachers develop the knowledge and skills necessary to teach traditional American history in an exciting and engaging way.

The Department of History's participation in these grants reflects its desire to actively seek out opportunities to partner with local school districts, especially those with significant populations of poor and minority students, to improve the quality of education for young students of history.

Lattie F. Coor Building
PO Box 874302
Tempe, AZ 85287-4302
480.965.5778
480.965.0310 Fax
Contact Department of History

Accessibility | Privacy
Copyright and Trademark Statement
Undergraduate Students | Graduate Students
Course Catalogs
Contact Webmaster