Department of History
On 9 January 2002, the tenured faculty of the Department of History voted 10 to 4 not to recommend the transferal of the program in social studies education to the School of Education. Although members of the tenured faculty rejected the proposal for a number of reasons, their primary concern was the damage to the quality of the program that such a move would entail. The principal consideration, the tenured faculty believe, must be the quality of teacher training received by ECU students – a factor given remarkably short shrift in the proposal submitted by the Deans of Arts and Sciences and Education. Such concerns as the “purification” of the College of Arts and Sciences, fine-tuning the policies and procedures for personnel actions, and refashioning bureaucratic structures may have intrinsic value to university administrators, but history faculty are focused most intently on the quality of teacher training. Secondary-level social studies teachers are best trained in the Department of History.
Fundamental to the vote against the deans’ proposal is the belief that the administration of the social studies education program, which includes the shaping of curriculum, should rest in the History Department. The national trend in teacher preparation has been for some time to provide instruction based in the student’s discipline – the course of action recommended by both the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the National History Standards. The NCSS calls specifically for the teaching of skills (like the analysis of primary documents) that are central to the discipline of history. A thorough grounding in the subject matter is especially important for North Carolina secondary school educators who must pass two demanding Praxis exams based upon the knowledge of history for licensure. High school students who must pass mandatory End of Course tests likewise rely upon teachers who know the subject matter thoroughly. Simply put, in order to teach history effectively in secondary schools, the instructor must know history. Questioned by members of the History Department about possible alterations after transferal of the program, the Dean of Education could offer no guarantees concerning curriculum changes and personnel decisions. To the contrary, School of Education faculty have repeatedly indicated their desire to reduce the number of “content” courses in the social studies education curriculum.
The program in social studies education should be situated in the History Department for a number of closely related reasons as well. Because of the critical importance of subject matter courses, a member of the History Department is best suited to advise students about course selection. The directors of social studies education have been fully integrated into the History Department, as evidenced by their having been afforded ex officio membership on the unit’s Curriculum and Undergraduate Committees. The faculty who currently supervise student interns in the public high schools have the appropriate combination of credentials; they have earned graduate degrees in history and are certified to teach in the public schools. These history educators have cultivated close relationships with the public schools of eastern North Carolina, and all history faculty have contributed to the forging of such links through their participation in the annual symposium for high school history teachers. Faculty preparing secondary school history teachers should be located near the History Lab, a facility carefully designed for teacher preparation, in the Brewster Building. If, as the deans suggest, relocating art education facilities would be problematical, the same can be said for the History Lab as well. In all, the history faculty is best suited to provide rigorous instruction for and close supervision of the students who will become high school history teachers.
University officials should also be concerned about the deleterious impact of the proposed transferal on the History Department. The loss of roughly half of the unit’s undergraduate majors (along with the M.A.Ed. program) would surely result in a concomitant reduction in F.T.E.s. With fewer faculty, the History Department would be unable to offer the full panoply of courses necessary for the kind of instruction students will need to pass the Praxis Exams – nor will it be able to offer the array of course offerings that other units on campus can expect at a research university.
The deans’ proposal involves the relocation of three highly successful teacher education programs from the College of Arts and Sciences to the School of Education, yet inconsistently would allow comparable programs in Foreign Languages, Psychology, and Theatre and Dance to remain within A&S and other programs to remain in such schools as Art and Music. Twenty-three of East Carolina University’s thirty-eight teacher education programs are currently situated outside the School of Education, an arrangement that has proved to be quite effective. In fact, ECU has achieved distinction statewide for its teacher training efforts in large measure because of the efficacy of the current structure. There would seem to be no reason to tamper with a successful system. In the case of social studies education, as noted above, there are compelling reasons to avoid the kinds of changes outlined in the deans’ proposal.
