Historians,Archivists,and Museum Educators as Teacher Educators: Mentoring Preservice History Teachers at Cultural Institutes

Abstract

A relatively new phenomenon in teacher education involves preservice history teachers conducting fieldwork in museums, archives, and other cultural institutes. However, researchers have yet to generate understandings supported by empirical observations of the inner workings of such fieldwork experiences. Using interviews, observations, and artifacts, this article analyzes the pedagogies historians, archivists, and museum educators use when adopting the role of teacher educators. Findings offer possibilities for a collaborative and site-based structure of teacher education, running contrary to traditional models. Important to the development of preservice history teachers, mentors at cultural institutes conceptualize their work through an inquiry lens, growing intuitively out of their work as disciplinary experts. In addition, educative mentoring, while typically conceived of as a classroom-based method, was observed in practice at cultural institutes. This article concludes by offering suggestions for applying principles from this model to existing preservice teacher education programs.

Keywords

mentoring social studies teacher education preservice teacher education cultural institutes

Introduction

In 2017, the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Rare Book and Manuscript Section and the Society of American Archivists (ACRLRBMS-SAA) jointly released their Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy. While the document was written primarily with librarians and archivists in mind, the authors intended the guidelines to be “sufficiently flexible for use in K-12 and in general public settings as well” (ACRLRBMS-SAA, 2017, p. 1). This shift is owed in part to the emphasis placed on inquiry-based learning and the analysis of primary source documents in the widely adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Inquiry-based learning also plays a prominent role in the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, released by the National Council for the Social Studies in 2013. The centrality of inquiry instruction in these curricular documents speaks to an increased attention to disciplinary literacy in K-12 settings, engaging students in “reading, reasoning, investigating, speaking, and writing required to learn and form complex content knowledge appropriate to a particular discipline” (McConachie, 2010, p. 16). For K-12 history teachers, this has resulted in more frequent contact with archivists both online and in-person (P. Garcia, 2017).

There has also been an increasing confluence between museums and K-12 learning (Garner et al., 2016). While museums have long sought to support the work of inservice history teachers (Boyer et al., 2010; Levstik, 2000), more recently, professional organizations and teacher educators have made calls for these experiences to take place before history teachers enter the field (see Baron, 2014; Baron et al., 2014; Clark et al., 2016; National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, 2010; Woyshner et al., 2013). Thus archives, museums, and historic sites, which were once exclusively sites of training for historians and archivists, are increasingly being utilized to prepare history teachers. Given that secondary teachers have reported experiencing very little mentorship specific to the content area they teach (Hudson, 2005), these calls for increased and deeper collaborations between teacher education programs and museums, archives, and historic sites (collectively called “cultural institutes” in this study) may appear founded on common sense approaches to teacher education in history. However, little empirical research has examined these types of collaborations. A narrow collection of studies has documented potential gains for inservice history teachers, such as more nuanced understandings of the methods by which historians create new scholarship (Baron, 2013; Baron et al., 2020; Schrum et al., 2016) and increased passion to teach history in an engaging manner (Schrum et al., 2016).

However, few researchers have generated understandings supported by empirical observations of what happens when history teachers are prepared at cultural institutes. In response, this study examines a unique and innovative fieldwork experience placing preservice history teachers in cultural institutes as part of their teacher education program. Related studies have documented the constructive influence of this experience on participants’ inquiry-based lesson planning and willingness to teach with primary sources both in the short-term (Patterson & Woyshner, 2016) and into their teaching careers (Coddington, 2020). Given the potentials of this program, this study is an effort to describe and analyze the work of historical disciplinarians—historians, archivists, preservationists, and museum educators—when they serve as mentors to preservice history teachers. I refer to these disciplinarians as mentors, as their primary role in this teacher education program is to use their disciplinary knowledge and resources within their cultural institutes to “attend to beginning teachers’ present concerns, questions, and purposes without losing sight of long-term goals for teacher development” (Feiman-Nemser, 2001, p. 18). I am primarily concerned with the pedagogies they use—their instructional techniques and strategies—and the ways their institutional contexts and professional work shape how they enact these strategies (Lave & Wenger, 1991). As a result, the findings of this study conceptualize the ways in which the mentors work as teacher educators through an examination of pedagogies they use to support the growth and development of preservice history teachers in cultural institutes.

Conceptual Framework

To understand the pedagogies by which historians, museums educators, and archivists assist in the professional growth of preservice history teachers, this study is guided by a conceptual framework that enjoins educative mentoring (Bradbury, 2010; Feiman-Nemser, 1998, 2001) with situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Taken together, these two approaches help frame what it means to conduct preservice teacher education in cultural institutes. First, it is essential that I delineate my use of the term “mentor,” as defining this term in a teacher education context is notoriously difficult (Healy & Welchert, 1990). In this study I draw on the notion of educative mentoring as conceived of by Feiman-Nemser (1998, 2001) and further developed by Bradbury (2010). Feiman-Nemser (2001) describes educative mentoring as “cultivating a disposition of inquiry, focusing attention on student thinking and understanding, and fostering disciplined talk about problems of practice” (p. 28). Educative mentors challenge novice teachers’ assumptions about the nature of subject matter and attend to their immediate development as beginning teachers while also helping them work toward long-term goals (Bradbury, 2010; Feiman-Nemser, 2001). Since Feiman-Nemser’s initial work, scholars have worked to further define the qualities of educative mentors. Educative mentors offer constructive feedback (Bellm et al., 1997; C. Bishop, 2001; K. Bishop & Denley, 1997; Haney, 1997; Hudson et al., 2005; Little, 1990; Riordan, 1995) and challenge novices to articulate their thinking (Feiman-Nemser, 2001) with the goal of facilitating their reflections on their practices and rationales. They also exhibit deep content knowledge (K. Bishop & Denley, 1997; Bradbury, 2010; Harrison et al., 2006; Kesselheim, 1998; Koballa & Bradbury, 2009; Odell, 1989) while demonstrating best practices (Barab & Hay, 2001). Finally, educative mentors conceptualize their work with novices as a fluid dialogue where both parties reflect on and improve their practices (Bradbury, 2010; Feiman-Nemser, 2001).

This final quality speaks to the broader effort of educative mentors to immerse novices into communities of practice (Feiman-Nemser, 1998). Simply put, communities of practice are socially constituted spaces wherein groups of practitioners interact while working toward a particular task. Members form a collective, bonded by a shared passion or, as is the case of history classrooms and cultural institutes, a goal of educating about the past. Lave and Wenger (1991) use the term “situated learning” to describe the process by which novices move from legitimate peripheral participants as they are first immersed in tasks authentic to the community, to core participants, having mastered the skills necessary for full participation in the community. They argue that novices’ motivation to learn comes from performing authentic activities important to the community in which they are working. While scholars have argued that through situated learning experiences teachers are better prepared to apply these understandings to their teaching because their learning is contextualized within a field of practice (Barab, 1999; Barab & Duffy, 2000; Sears, 2014), preservice teachers are most likely to experience situated learning only in the concluding phase of their preservice training.

Methods of Inquiry

The literature briefly described in the outset of this study highlights the benefits of site-based teacher education. However, there have been only limited attempts by researchers to delineate the role of content area mentors in supporting said benefits, none of which are founded on observations of these mentors at work with teachers.¹ For example, Blair (2016) concludes that inservice teachers are likely to engage in experiential and place-based learning when participating in programs at historic sites. However, Blair’s inquiry relies on self-reported data in the form of information from the websites of historic sites and questionnaires with education specialists at these sites. Taken together, some of these data present a conflicting image of the pedagogies employed at these sites. As a result, observations are needed to confirm or clarify what practices these disciplinary specialists engage in when working with teachers. To fill this gap, this qualitative study aims to examine the ways in which mentors at cultural institutes approach their work with preservice history teachers and the resources specific to their sites they use in supporting the growth of preservice history teachers.

This study used data collection and analytical procedures consistent with qualitative research (Marshall & Rossman, 2011). Building on the limited previous research that has documented the short- and long-term gains preservice history teachers have made resulting from their field-based experiences (Baron, 2013; Coddington, 2020; Patterson & Woyshner, 2016), this study investigates the role museum educators, historians, and archivists play in developing those outcomes through the following research questions:

How do mentors recognized for their exemplary work in one teacher education program construct and enact their roles in the development of preservice history teachers at cultural institutes?

What pedagogies, tools, and resources specific to cultural institutes do mentors utilize to support preservice history teachers?

Context

The focus of this study is one history education program in a traditional teacher education program at a large, urban, American university. Undergraduate students in this program pursue a double major in history and secondary education and graduate students enter the program with a degree in one of the central content areas in social studies and complete a Master of Education degree. Historically, preservice teachers in this program engage in observational apprenticeship classroom-based field experiences typical of preservice history teachers (VanSledright, 2010a). Following the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education’s (2010) recommendation that teacher education programs integrate “laboratory-based experiences” into coursework, the faculty of this program collaborated with the National Archives to develop field experiences at roughly 30 local cultural institutes for 50 to 60 preservice history teachers. During the field experience, preservice history teachers complete historical research at archives and libraries, teach in galleries and exhibits at museums, historic sites, and historical societies, tutor students completing National History Day projects, and develop curriculum and lesson plans for their cultural institute. In sum, during their field experience preservice, teachers are expected to participate in a variety of enactments of history education by completing authentic, site-based tasks.

Participants

In this program, a mentor is chosen at each cultural institute to supervise between one and four preservice history teachers. Mentors are primarily historians, archivists, museum educators, and preservationists at their cultural institutes. As such, I aimed to include mentors who were representative of these various roles. To find such mentors, I consulted with the field experience coordinator who works closely with all the mentors to establish placements for preservice history teachers. In her role matching cultural institutes with preservice history teachers, she has developed a deep knowledge of the mentors, including their record of success mentoring preservice history teachers. I also solicited nominations for exemplary mentors from alumni of this program. These alumni are now inservice teachers, and some having served as mentors to new teachers in their own schools. Alumni were provided a list of practices exhibited by educative mentors and asked to nominate mentors who met at least two criteria on this list.² I only included as participants mentors who were nominated multiple times. In all, seven mentors were nominated by both the field experience coordinator and alumni.³ See Table 1 for brief biographical descriptions of each participant.⁴

Table 1.

Study Participants.

Name	Position	Biographical information	Institutional mandate
Anna	Education specialist at a national archival and preservation organization	Undergraduate and graduate degrees in history; has worked as a preservationist and interpreter at a Midwest historic society; has worked as an archivist for 10+ years	Preserve, manage, and provide access to significant documents in U.S. history
Michael	Archivist at a historic collection affiliated with a medical college	Undergraduate degree in science, a master’s in statistics and a master’s in library studies with an archival focus; archivist for more than 10 years; worked in a local museum before coming to his current position	Repository for the records of a medical college; particular focus on the history of women in medicine
Carolyn	Historian at a local history museum	PhD in Latin American history; has worked as a community organizer then transitioned to work at a local historic society and then eventually museum work for the last two decades	The local history museum for a large Northeastern city; seeks to link local and national histories while telling the unique story of the city it represents
Vanessa	Education outreach manager at a large museum	English and social studies teacher, later an administrator for the local school district; transitioned to work as a museum educator for the last 10 years (develops community partnerships for the museum, trains the docents in the content of the exhibits)	Preservation, conservation, and display of material culture pertaining to a specific ethnic and religious identity throughout U.S. history
Barbara	Senior director of programs and services at a state-wide historic society	Museum specialist for more than 30 years; undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in history with a specialization in museum studies administration; also an associate professor of museum studies	Provides professional and amateur historians with access to documents from U.S. history while making history relevant to broader audiences
Scott	Education coordinator of an international art museum	Language arts teacher and administrator for 30+ years, National Board certified and hired new teachers as a department chair; 10 years as a museum educator working primarily with teachers who visit the education resource center of the museum	Seeks to educate the general public about the fine arts through a large collection of European and American paintings, sculpture, armor, and other material culture
Madeline	Director of the special collections at a large research-focused university	Undergraduate degree in history; a master’s in history, and a master’s in library science with an archival emphasis; more than 35 years working as an archivist across the country	Preserves and interprets the social, economic, political, and physical development of a large Northeastern city form the 19th century to the present

Data Collection and Analysis

Data collection occurred over the span of one academic year. I first conducted semi-structured in-depth narrative interviews (Seidman, 2006, p. 9) with all participants. These interviews represent the core of my data collection, as the research questions are aimed at understanding the ways in which these individuals take on the role of teacher educators within their disciplinary contexts. My protocols were designed as life-history interviews (Bertaux, 1981), focusing on mentors’ professional and personal experiences, rich descriptions of their cultural institutes and the work they do in them, and the tools in their cultural institutes they use when mentoring preservice history teachers. My protocol questions were largely open-ended; I treated the protocol as a list of topics I aimed to cover in-depth rather than as a scripted list of prompts.

I deemed it essential to conduct direct observations (Bernard, 2006) of the mentors at work with preservice history teachers. I observed four mentors at work with preservice teachers three times, three of whom had participated in interviews.⁵ While I aimed to observe all mentors who participated in the interviews, the logistical challenges of scheduling three observations each with seven participants in one semester necessitated that I limit my observations to four mentors at a mix of cultural institutes. Because preservice teachers work in a variety of sites, I conducted observations at four distinct cultural institutes: a museum, an archive, a historical society, and a library. My observations reached a saturation point during the third observations, and thus, I suspended data collection (Angrosino, 2012). My observations lasted between two and three hours, wherein I recorded descriptive field notes (Bogdan & Biklen, 2006). As part of my observations, I also collected artifacts the mentors created to structure the experiences of the preservice teachers.

I began my analysis by transcribing and inductively reading the transcripts immediately after conducting the interviews. I then open coded the interviews, putting conceptual labels on passages that denoted emerging categories within the data (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). At the conclusion of my open coding, I had a list of six potential categories of use in this study. At this point, I began direct observations of the mentors at work with the preservice history teachers. The observations were conducted in part to corroborate the data collected in the in-depth interviews. However, this was an iterative process, as the observations provided further insights into the practices described in the interviews and the interviews informed my analysis of the observations (LeCompte & Preissle, 1993). I wrote memos for the conceptual labels that emerged from my field notes and further developed the list of potential categories. I employed the same strategy when open coding the artifacts. At the conclusion of data collection, I then deductively coded the interviews, observations, and artifacts according to the themes from Feiman-Nemser’s (2001) elaboration of educative mentoring.⁶ As I coded the data, I once again wrote analytic memos helping establish how the themes from educative mentoring were (or were not) embedded within the mentor’s thinking and practices.

Findings

The findings of this study are reflective of three broad pedagogical moves enacted in the mentors’ institutional contexts. My analysis suggests disciplinary mentors, when working in conjunction with a teacher education program, have their mentees engage in work relevant to the mission of their cultural institutes and provide direct support in these new tasks, while also relating their fieldwork to their future work as history teachers. This approach is in contrast to inservice teacher experiences at cultural institutes and offers a model for teacher educators supporting history teachers at any phase of their careers. As will be noted, at times, the institutional mandates of each cultural institute appeared to condition the types of pedagogies mentors enacted. See Table 1 for a description of each institute’s mandate.

Pedagogies of Place

The first constellation of pedagogical moves revolved around the mentors’ use of resources in their sites to teach their mentees about the work historians do in these spaces. Of course, engaging with historical disciplinary practices is possible in both the K-12 and university classroom, though novices unlikely encounter them in traditional classroom fieldwork. These moves were enacted with the goal of fusing mentees with the educational and historical work of the host cultural institute, as this program is founded on the premise that experiencing history in authentic communities of practice will transfer into teaching practices (Baron, 2013).

Inductive coding of the interviews and observations suggest several ways in which mentors utilize tools specific to their sites with the goal of nurturing mentees’ growth as history teachers. This program involves immersion in a content-focused setting; as such, the mentors carefully craft projects that are aligned with their institute’s resources. As a national archive, Anna’s institute has a monumental collection of primary source documents, many of which are already digitized. Because students could spend their entire fieldwork experience just searching for documents, she matches their projects with programs being offered at her institute. Other mentors linked their mentees’ projects to particular exhibits or the noted strengths of their institute’s collections. Carolyn and Madeline described how mentees designed teaching units around popular exhibits that related to local history. These decisions are owed in large part to the institutional mandates of the sites in which they work, as both of their sites specialize in local history. Both mentors reported pushing their mentees to connect the content of the exhibits to essential understandings relevant to teaching history (Barton & Levstik, 2004).

Mentors expressed a belief that inservice history teachers are generally intimidated by cultural institutes. With these concerns in mind, the mentors aimed to immerse their mentees in their cultural institutes, giving them as complete access as possible to their collections and guiding them as they learned the disciplinary norms and expectations for core participants using these spaces. Barbara said these experiences help the mentees

overcome any intimidation factor. Being in this kind of facility, often for the first time, helps them understand why we have the rules we have, helps them navigate online, as well as physical finding aides to find the kinds of sources they want.

Similarly, Carolyn aims to give her mentees an understanding of the “behind the scenes” operations of a museum. She remarked that museum exhibits have a lot of

narrative, subtle messages, not so subtle, that they’re there. I have talked to [mentees] about this because they say “Well, how did you make these choices?” and I say “Oh, these choices are by committee to some extent,” and I say “You often will know going into a show that you have to use X,Y, or Z assuming that you can afford to use it.”

Madeline expressed a connection between understanding the inner workings of an archive and the mentees’ future teaching. She said that learning how archives and libraries function will inform their own research, “but also means that they understand what we do, why we collect what we collect, and how to find it and use it, and understand that raw material can be so interesting to their students, and to them.”

An early observation of Peter, a mentee at Scott’s site, exemplifies one way in which preservice teachers develop a deeper understanding of how museums and archives function. I observed Peter as he toured a recently installed exhibit with a museum educator. Peter learned about the history of the exhibit, the curator’s philosophy, and how the objects in the exhibit were created. Following this experience, Peter reflected on how museum spaces might be collaborative environments for discussions of citizenship and history, a new concept for him. For Peter, this was a demystifying experience, whereas museum exhibits have previously appeared as neutral presentations of historical artifacts, learning about the process by which curators create a narrative out of the content of an exhibit shifted his thinking about museums as sites of learning. This transformation occurs by design. The mentors develop experiences for preservice teachers wherein they come to understand cultural institutes are not just a collection of artifacts, but rather a narrative-driven setting that uses institutional mechanisms to tell specific stories.

Simply working in the galleries was a powerful experience for the mentees placed in museums. Scott reported having his mentees tour the museum without direction in the early visits, then asking them to tour the museum once they began developing resources for objects in the museum’s collection. Scott argues this immersion changes “the way you walk through the museum,” giving his mentees a “teacher’s perspective” on the content of the museum. The mentors aim for these perspective-taking activities to be powerful later on, as the mentees will need to consider their future students’ strengths, interests, and preconceptions when planning pedagogy in museums and archives (Donovan et al., 1999; National Research Council, 2000). Anna argued the preservice phase is the most fruitful time of a teacher’s career to instill these dispositions: “I feel like graduate students or undergrads are very busy, but once you’re in the classroom it’s a different kind of thing.” She continued,

Once you get into your job and you’re like “I wish I had the time to read stuff, I wish I had the time to explore, but I don’t have time to do this,” so that’s why I think this is important to kind of lay that basis now so that when they’re out there and they’re strapped [for time], they can be like “oh, at the historical society there was this thing.” I mean, learning the content is always great, but they’re also learning the process and I think that’s the most important thing.

A major focus of the projects Michael has developed involve explicitly teaching mentees how to best utilize a finding aid to find useful sources in an archive. Similarly, Barbara has mentees conduct a mini-research project on their second site-visit to learn about the challenges of doing research in a large library. I observed Charlie, a preservice history teacher, search for sources in the library that have yet to be digitized that might be of interest to inservice history teachers. Given that Charlie had never set foot in an archive before this experience, Barbara’s expectation is that finding, requesting, handling, and reading original documents is designed to give him the experience historians have when they work in the archives. The pedagogies of place are mediated by the varying institutional strengths and mandates, and I did not observe uniform experiences across sites. Mentees placed in museums and historic sites had experiences related more to public history, while those in archives, libraries, and historical societies had experiences related more to historical research. However, all mentors aimed to contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of how history is enacted by disciplinarians in a diversity of venues.

Pedagogies of Historical Inquiry

The first finding suggests mentors utilize their sites to bring preservice history teachers into the professional communities of their particular cultural institutes. The next group of pedagogical moves represent the mentors’ aim to integrate preservice history teachers into the broader disciplinary community of historians by having them engage in various aspects of historical research in an authentic disciplinary space. I most frequently observed mentees in archives, libraries, and historical societies engaged in source work, the method by which historians interrogate primary source documents to reconstruct the past (Sexias & Morton, 2012; VanSledright, 2010b; Wineburg, 1991). While the mentees have learned historical knowledge from their content courses, the mentors used resources in their institutes with the aim of developing deep disciplinary knowledge and skills through experiential learning. For example, Anna, Carolyn, and Michael described projects where their mentees found and used primary source documents within their collections. Madeline said of the mentees,

A lot of them haven’t necessarily been exposed to primary sources, so I think they just become much more comfortable in doing the research, in thinking outside the box, becoming more creative in thinking about where materials might be, how to use them, in becoming more confident of their own judgment and evaluative powers, and in becoming better writers because we’re asking them to write succinctly and objectively, or as objectively as possible.

In response, Madeline’s mentees engage in a process where they develop an understanding of the work of historians by experiencing it firsthand in an archival setting. Madeline has developed this process over iterations of this program, beginning from an assumption that K-12 teachers and students alike ought to better understand the purposes and functions of an archive. As such, she sought to create a project that mimics the process through which historians conduct their research in this space. For the first half of their experience being mentored by Madeline, the mentees conduct research in archives. Their work shifts to writing a historical research report and concluding the experience by proposing a lesson plan using primary sources from the collection. I observed one of Madeline’s mentees, Tamara, throughout her experience. Tamara began by reading a work of history researched and written using sources from her cultural institute. Madeline asked her to choose a particular story from this secondary source that she was interested in learning more about and reviewed the historian’s footnotes to identify the primary sources the historian used to support this story. Tamara then searched the archives to locate those primary sources and developed her own historic essay using those sources, expanding on the historian’s argument.

Tamara’s work followed the inquiry process by which historians develop their arguments, thus further nurturing the disciplinary literacy and historic thinking skills she began to develop as an undergraduate history student. Madeline expects that the project Tamara and her other mentees complete will better prepare them

to do research and to evaluate information and evidence. And that’s a lot of what we do to, is evaluating, being able to determine what information is closer to the source, what’s more trust worthy, what’s more reliable, what’s missing.

Barbara described a hands-on approach to scaffolding her mentees’ source work:

Once they find sources, to help them understand what those sources are saying—everything from helping them read handwriting, through talking about “what’s the main point here?” or “how do you take notes?” or “how do you take down a citation?” It really is so personalized, depending upon the need of the [mentee].

Similarly, Carolyn reported emulating the mentorship process she received while completing her PhD, working one-on-one with the mentees and offering critical feedback on their historical analysis and writing skills. I observed these types of activities more frequently in archives, libraries, and historical societies, though they were not absent from museums.

An often-unacknowledged element of source work is possessing a level of comfort interacting with the sources historians use in their research. Anna and Michael both used the term “object-based learning” to describe the types of pedagogy they use in their mentorships to begin this sort of work. During my observations, object-based learning was enacted not through material culture as such (though mentors described their mentees’ interactions with artifacts from their sites’ collections) but the physical handling and reading of primary source documents, rather than interacting with digitized versions or facsimiles. Michael, Madeline, and Vanessa argued that projects where mentees engage with raw material from their collections make history more “tangible” by allowing mentees to touch and hold original data used by historians.

Pedagogies of Support

The final series of pedagogical moves relate to the mentors’ efforts to support their mentee’s growth and reflection as they navigated spaces often times unfamiliar to them. These were pedagogical efforts less connected to the disciplinary nature of cultural institutes, but rather best practices documented in the research on classroom-based mentorships. The most frequently coded best practice of these mentors was their ability to draw on deep content knowledge when working with the preservice history teachers. Of the seven mentors who participated in this study, all had at least one undergraduate degree in history, five had one or more advanced degrees in history, museum studies, or library sciences, and one had a doctorate in history. As such, the preservice history teachers in this program are mentored by individuals who, due to the nature of their professional expectations, have had considerable preparation in historical content and training working with primary sources.

Although the mentors hold substantial historical disciplinary expertise, they all assumed the role of “cothinker rather than expert” in enacting their roles in this program (Feiman-Nemser, 2001, p. 20). The program is based on the assumption that preservice history teachers can serve as valuable resources to cultural institutes through the creation of useable curricular resources, development of existing resources, and other contributions to pedagogical programming. All mentors commented on the value of these material contributions to their cultural institutes. However, mentors expressed a specific desire to learn from the novices who work in their cultural institutes. Anna, Michael, Vanessa, and Scott in particular commented on what the novices taught them about engaging with K-12 students and teachers. Anna remarked on the “fresh perspective and the fresh learning” that interns bring to her work in the archive, while the novices Vanessa has worked with offer her a “better understanding of the current state of K-12 education and classroom trends.” Michael’s work with preservice history teachers has made him aware of the distance between his approach to archives, grounded in the model of researcher expertise, and the professional knowledge that structures K-12 teachers’ approaches to archives (P. Garcia, 2017). As a result, the collaborative nature of this partnership has allowed him to reform not only his work with K-12 audiences but also the orientation his cultural institute takes toward its K-12 programs.

The mentors described and were observed providing constructive oral and written feedback that allowed novices to reflect and improve their practice. The program does not require mentors to use a uniform approach to providing feedback to the mentees, but there were some commonalities emerging from the interviews and observations. The mentors tended to draw from prior experiences while training for their current careers or working in their cultural institutes to refine their approaches to feedback. For example, as a byproduct of their graduate training or a direct result of their career trajectories, all the mentors have accumulated some experiences as educators. Barbara spent 3 years as a professor of museum studies, Madeline teaches public history and library science courses, and Anna, Carolyn, and Michael taught undergraduate courses while completing their graduate degrees. Vanessa and Scott were both secondary teachers in their first careers. Time developing lessons and assessing student learning appears to have shaped the approach to feedback they described. In addition, participation in this program has inspired Michael to seek out educational research related to lesson planning and adolescent development to plan pedagogical experiences that will be useful for his mentees’ ongoing development as novice teachers.

Anna, Barbara, Michael, Scott, and Vanessa all described providing frequent feedback to their mentees, adjusting expectations throughout the experience. Michael described his feedback meetings as “check-ins” which were “constant.” The reciprocal nature of this feedback guides his mentees’ work and, as mentioned earlier, develops Michael’s working knowledge of current pedagogical practices in K-12 classrooms. In all three of my observations of Michael and his mentees, I noted Michael’s easy rapport when providing support. Realizing neither of his mentees had spent any time in an archive nor were familiar with the specific content of the archives in which he works, Michael thoughtfully probed the process by which each mentee navigated the archival finding aid to discover primary sources they felt were useful for their projects. For example, I observed Michael as he modeled close reading and primary source analyses of the documents, activities requiring scaffolds that imitate the process historians use to analyze data (VanSledright, 2010b; Wineburg, 1991). Michael’s knowledge of primary source analysis is drawn from his graduate education in library studies and his work with professional historians who use his cultural institute to conduct their research. During this session, Michael offered focused and useful feedback to train his mentees in the metacognitive process required to do this type of planning. In formulating this feedback, Michael drew on a mix of his knowledge of the archives, deep content knowledge about the subject matter, and his previous experiences working with inservice teachers.

Like mentors in K-12 settings, the mentors were observed or described modeling best practices and probing their mentee’s thinking in one-on-one meetings. Often times, their work with inservice history teachers guided their understanding of best practices in history education. For example, Anna reflected,

I had to say to [my mentee] some of the things I would say to a middle school student or a high school student, you know, like “always check the source of your document,” you know, or “I noticed that when I did a Google search this came up too, but see how the word ‘blog’ is in there, that means that this is someone’s [opinion].”

Madeline described a similar approach using brief but frequent meetings: “They meet with me weekly, we check-in, they tell me what they’ve found, or what they haven’t found, we talk about where to look, how to look, and then they start looking at what they’ve got and synthesizing that.” Scott’s “conversational” approach and careful readings of the mentees’ work provide opportunities for more in-depth one-on-one feedback than are likely in classroom-based placements. These one-on-one meetings with the mentors aim to build historical thinking skills (Wineburg, 1991) beneficial to nurturing an inquiry approach to teaching as well as deepening their content knowledge.

Finally, all seven of the mentors reported making links between the mentees’ work at their sites and their future classroom teaching. Many of the preservice teachers in this program perform work that could be best described as public history. However, the mentors in this study either designed projects that were explicitly linked to the mentee’s future work as K-12 educators or asked their mentees to reflect on how their cultural institute could support their future teaching. Barbara explained the relevance of a preservice teacher conducting research in a historic society thusly: “they go through the process of trying to find something, and what are the obstacles they face, so that they can better walk in the shoes of the secondary student.” As noted earlier, Anna spoke of the importance of building conceptual knowledge when the preservice teachers are novices, as she believes it is foundational to the rest of their careers. Similarly, Michael said teachers “don’t really go to the archive very much [. . .] One of the focuses of our work is try and come up with curricular connections now because we think it can be a really good way of teaching American history.”

Discussion

Although rarely enacted in practice, preservice teacher education programs and cultural institutes are well-suited collaborators. After all, historians, archivists, preservationists, and museum educators in cultural institutes and classroom-based history teachers are united by a common goal of educating the public about the past. However, these stakeholders face distinct challenges to planning and enacting pedagogy. The movement of cultural institutes into the realm of K-12 education has necessitated dialogue over how best to conceptualize educational practices in these spaces (Gosselin, 2011; Hooper-Greenhill, 1999; Rasmussen & Winterrowd, 2012). New graduate degrees and certificate specializations have been created, conferences have been held, and special issues in museum education journals and books have been written, but the struggle to define an educational vision for cultural institutes, particularly in relation to formal K-12 education, remains ongoing (B. Garcia, 2012). Museum educators are often constrained by market forces that demand an appeal to broader audiences while hoping to create intellectually challenging experiences for visitors (Luckeroff & Falk, 2016). Meanwhile, K-12 teachers are constrained by their own (though at times overlapping) professional expectations (Cooper et al., 2018; Marcus, 2008). K-12 teachers must satisfy the mandates of administrators, parents, and boards of education while aligning their work to state content standards and, depending on the content they teach, preparing students for high-stakes examinations.

However, the mentors in this program do not appear tethered to the institutional strictures that have narrowed the possibilities of history teacher education as typically enacted in K-12 classrooms or in cultural institutes. While traditional mentorships in preservice teacher education are limited by inservice teachers’ unwillingness to see themselves as teacher educators (Feiman-Nemser, 1998), the mentors in this program readily assume this role. And though teacher education is regularly conducted in cultural institutes, the pedagogies I observed in this program did not resemble the learning experiences documented by researchers of inservice history teacher education (Baron, 2014; Blair, 2016). The content-heavy pedagogical approach inservice history teachers are likely to receive in cultural institutes, which emphasize historical knowledge acquisition through didactic methods (Baron, 2014, p. 14) is intuitive, given institutional mandates of cultural institutes around educating the general public about the subjects of their collections. However, museums are environments designed to convey particular messages and dispositions (Ellsworth, 2005; Trofanenko, 2016; Trofanenko & Segall, 2014) as well as spaces where such messages are mediated by interactive technologies and displays (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998). Few inservice teachers have had training about museums and archives (Marcus et al., 2009) and “may not be aware of how best to use these informal learning settings to support learning in their classroom” (Kisiel, 2007, p. 30). By situating their work in a preservice teacher education program, the institutional mandates of individual cultural institutes are operationalized in service of the broader goal of preparing teachers to work in future K-12 history classrooms.

Their willingness to circumscribe the institutional expectations of two communities of practice suggests the mentors serve as brokers for their mentees (Wenger et al., 2002). Brokerage involves what Wenger et al. (2002) call “multimembership” across communities of practice (p. 38). The mentors are chiefly members of their cultural institutes, giving them access and knowledge of the raw data of history found in these communities of practice and consequently considerable subject matter knowledge. What was less obvious before I began this inquiry is the extent to which the mentors are also members of the educational community. Their experiences with K-12 teachers and students, either teaching K-12 students and teachers in their cultural institutes, preparing K-12 curricular materials from the collections of their cultural institutes, or as former inservice teachers themselves, give them insights into their mentees’ prospective work as history teachers. Thus, their work as brokers in this program can be characterized by two broad pedagogical approaches.

As brokers, mentors expect that the mentees would make meaningful contributions to the work of their site and treated them as fellow historical disciplinarians. As such, mentors aimed for their mentees to become members of their community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), moving from legitimate peripheral participants to core participants in cultural institutes. They used a variety of pedagogies unique to their cultural institutes (Sears, 2014) and a collaborative approach to setting goals and outlining the mentees’ tasks. Mentoring is most effective when it is “joint work” rather than the technocratic, situation-to-situation support that characterizes traditional mentorships in teacher education (Feiman-Nemser, 1998; Little, 1990). These mentors place less focus on learning to attain grades and aimed for greater focus on addressing the genuine needs of their cultural institutes by carrying out “tried and true” tasks related to their communities of practice (Barab & Hay, 2001, p. 73).

But mentors also used these multimemberships to make connections between the historical community of practice in the mentee’s fieldwork and their future work as classroom teachers. They stressed both the inquiry process by which historians create new knowledge and the social and political construction of their sites, knowing both are relevant to the work of history teachers. The mentors’ feedback, especially in one-on-one meetings, encouraged mentees to engage in reflective thought, which is essential to the inquiry process (Dewey, 1933). Although the mentees had a diversity of experiences depending on the type of institution in which they were placed, the social studies methods course associated with this placement was a venue for learning about the various ways in which history is practiced and enacted at cultural institutes. While history education advocates have long called for the use of inquiry in the classroom, available evidence suggests many history teachers hold tenuous understandings of inquiry (Bohan & Davis, 1998; Voet & De Wever, 2017; Yeager & Davis, 1996) and rarely enact it in practice (Barton & Levstik, 2003; McDiarmid, 1994; Thornton, 2001). Mentorships in classroom-based fieldwork have been shown to encourage an inquiry approach to varying degrees (Levy et al., 2013; Saye et al., 2009; Yilmaz, 2010), though mentorships of this quality are relatively uncommon. The sort of mentorships I observed in this program may be a path to remedying this challenge, though more research is needed on whether these lessons on historical inquiry translate into long-term classrooms practice.

Limitations and Future Research

I must delineate several limitations of this study. Common to qualitative inquiries (Patton, 2002), I offer findings from a specific situational context. With seven interviews and observations at four sites, my sample size is small. These limiting factors are owed to the relative rarity of museum and archive-based programs for preservice history teachers. Consequently, I have made no attempts to generalize these findings, though I believe teacher educators will be able to apply lessons from this study in their own contexts. In addition, while all participants in this study took up the role of broker, their work with preservice teachers was conditioned in limited ways by the institutional mandates of their cultural institutes. Although I describe some of those nuances in the findings of this study, research is needed to address these discrepancies in a more direct manner. Relatedly, my analysis only briefly treats the gender, ethnic, class, and other intersectionalities to which these mentors identify. I acknowledge that these layered and interacting social categories shape the mentors, and their beliefs about and interactions with the historical narratives of their institutions. This study seeks to specifically document the pedagogical practices of mentors in this program, and there was not space here to examine this important aspect of the mentors’ work. I acknowledge the challenges these intersectionalities bring to historical work and am currently collecting data on the life histories of both mentors and mentees in this program to more fully explore how these factors influence various aspects of this program.⁷

Conclusion

At the outset of this study, I described the move toward disciplinary literacy in the CCSS and its subsequent influence of cultural institutes and history teachers alike. Although documents such as the C3 Framework and Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy would suggest that both teacher educators and educators in cultural institutes are moving in lockstep with the CCSS, the emphasis on disciplinary literacy has reignited debates relating to the purpose and execution of history in K-12 classrooms. Disputes over what historical narratives ought to be taught in schools will likely be renewed every generation (Taylor & Guyver, 2012). However, the emphasis on disciplinary literacy has led to concerns that history risks being reduced to a set of skills learned through repeated practice and potentially removed from the curriculum altogether (Ashby, 2011; Lee, 2011). Preservice history teachers need to be primed to navigate the delicate balance between increased demands for disciplinary literacy and the preservation of epistemologies that uniquely belong to the field of history. The challenge for teacher educators is that, though many preservice history teachers will have majored in the subject, most view themselves as passive recipients of history rather than creators of it because their work has generally brought them only to the margins of the profession (Sears, 2014). As such, their conceptual understanding of teaching history is framed as the passing on of names, dates, and interesting stories. Further complicating the work of teacher educators is the reality that deep understanding of the historical discipline is counterintuitive to the habits of mind of those who work on its margins (Wineburg, 1991).

To help preservice history teachers integrate conceptual understandings of history into their prospective classrooms, teacher educators must create powerful learning experiences relating to history’s disciplinary processes, procedural concepts, and the ways history structures knowledge (Gosselin, 2011; Husbands, 2011; Sears, 2014). The findings of this study offer a model for accomplishing this elusive goal by bringing preservice history teachers on an inbound trajectory from the margins of the historical discipline toward core participation in historical communities of practice. It is also a model for educators in cultural institutes seeking to make their programming more responsive to teachers’ professional practices. This model is not an abdication of teacher education to historical disciplinarians, but rather a true collaboration where all groups contribute to the development of novice history teachers. Given the size of some teacher education programs and limited access to local historical resources, organizing such a program may seem daunting. However, models exist for running a program with similar goals and approach in a single site (rather than multiple sites, as is the case in this program; see Baron, 2014; Baron et al., 2014). Based on my observations and interviews, the rewards appear worth the efforts. The mentors in this program exhibited many of the same approaches and dispositions as those documented in educative mentorships in K-12 settings. They have also coordinated their approaches to coincide with the coursework of the partnering teacher education program and reported mutual benefits from working with preservice history teachers. Although museums, archives, and historic sites serve purposes beyond the preparation of history teachers, these findings indicate they are sites well suited for this task and may provide a vehicle for reshaping history teacher education.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-jte-10.1177_0022487120920251 – Supplemental material for Historians, Archivists, and Museum Educators as Teacher Educators: Mentoring Preservice History Teachers at Cultural Institutes

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-jte-10.1177_0022487120920251 for Historians, Archivists, and Museum Educators as Teacher Educators: Mentoring Preservice History Teachers at Cultural Institutes by Timothy Patterson in Journal of Teacher Education

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Tresier Mihalik and Audrey Rankin for their helpful work that shaped the analysis in this article and Christine Woyshner for her informative input throughout the process of drafting and revising this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Teacher Education for their thoughtful critiques of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Timothy Patterson

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biography

Timothy Patterson, PhD, is an assistant professor of social studies education in the College of Education at Temple University, where he primarily teaches courses in social studies methods and the history of education. Patterson’s research on social studies, global citizenship, and teacher education has been published in journals such as Teachers College Record, Theory and Research in Social Education, the British Journal of Educational Studies, and The Social Studies.

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