November 11, 2002

Project takes new knowledge into local schools

By Jennifer McNulty

In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight. . .

Despite the familiarity of the folk song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," made popular by Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio, and the film The Lion King, few fans realize the tune has a long history of performance dating back to the 1930s in South Africa.

UCSC anthropology professor Donald Brenneis has traced the origins of "Wimoweh" from the South African communal residences of laborers in the 1930s to elaborately choreographed performances by entertainers dressed in black tie in the 1970s.

Brenneis unearthed the rich history of a tune familiar to several generations of Americans, and thanks to a UCSC collaboration with local high schools, students at Watsonville High are among the first to be exposed to Brenneis's findings. The Monterey Bay History and Cultures Project (MBHCP) is a partnership designed to shorten the lag time between the discovery of new knowledge and its incorporation into classroom curricula.

"We're working within the state's education standards to be more reflective of new knowledge," said historian Sandria Freitag, director of the UCSC-based project. As an example, Freitag said American history textbooks being used today don't reflect new knowledge about immigration and migration, and they barely mention the Chinese in California. "They dedicate one paragraph to the Exclusion Act, which fundamentally shaped how newcomers are perceived and treated in this country," said Freitag.

Professional historians and other social scientists have been grappling with the challenge of incorporating new research into the K-12 curriculum for years, said Freitag, former director of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C. When the opportunity to direct the MBHCP arose three years ago, she jumped at it.

The Monterey Bay project began as one of 17 sites statewide that focus on history and social studies. Similar subject-matter projects offer partnerships with K-12 schools in writing, reading and literature, science, and mathematics. They have been administered by the University of California's Office of the President, but looming budget cuts may prompt organizational changes. Freitag and the other directors of UCSC's subject-matter projects are working collaboratively and exploring ways to work more effectively with local county offices of education and UCSC's Educational Partnership Center.

Volunteer faculty like Brenneis work with participating K-12 teachers to share knowledge and find ways to incorporate it into classroom lessons. Under increasing pressure to prepare their students for statewide performance tests aligned to standards that outline what topics must be covered in each grade, teachers welcome the help UCSC professors offer, said Freitag, adding that teachers are also confronted by multiple levels of language facility.

"On the Central Coast, teachers face very diverse classrooms, and part of what we offer is knowledge about how students learn," said Freitag. "We facilitate the connection between rigorous content and language skills to help all students learn."

For example, Watsonville High School teacher Elaine Legorreta was inspired by Brenneis's work to use "Wimoweh" as an example of the connections between early performance and black face in the United States and England, which led to discussions of racial stereotyping and appropriation of black music by U.S. media, all of which enriched her unit on U.S. history.

"It fits the U.S. history standard, and Elaine hooked the kids on the subject," said Freitag, adding that more than half the students are English language learners. "They all know about racism, and this really got to the institutional side of racism and showed what the entertainment and media industries have been doing. The students were able to analyze that. What comes out of these kids is very sophisticated."

Similarly, Noriko Aso, a visiting assistant professor of history at UCSC, helped fill a gap in the 11th-grade modern U.S. history curriculum by developing a unit on Japan in the early 1900s.

"The first mention of Japan in the textbook wasn't until World War II, so Noriko looked at conditions in Japan prior to the war that contributed to Japan's emergence as a major power in the 1940s," said Freitag. "She looked at the economic conditions that led to Japanese expansionism, and she showed the tensions Japan experienced as it negotiated its way into the modern era."

Aso provided cartoons and photographs, and Watsonville High School teacher Sara Roe, codirector of MBHCP, was able to use Aso's materials in her discussion of the rise of dictatorships. "Sara used Noriko's work to help her students see the patterns behind the rise of dictatorships in Europe and to do a case study of Japan that showed what was the same and what was different about Japan," said Freitag.

The MBHCP model of collaboration appears to be working: After the project's first year working with 10th- and 11th-graders at Watsonville High School, student test scores jumped 60 percent, according to Freitag. The MBHCP has worked with teachers in many low-performing middle and high schools in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties and has collaborated with the science project in a federally funded initiative for elementary teachers that integrates history, science, and language instruction.

About 35 teachers participate each school year, with double that number in the summer; each teacher receives a stipend for attending an intensive summer institute and monthly Saturday follow-up workshops that provide in-depth exposure to the latest knowledge being generated at the university. MBHCP also orients preservice teachers in UCSC's combined master's/teaching credential program to the latest theories about how to teach history and social studies, and how to incorporate language instruction into content lessons.

In addition, an ambitious new program targets middle school teachers responsible for world history from the ancient to medieval periods. This past summer, after training with Brenneis, five teachers traveled to Washington, D.C., with UCSC history professors Edmund Burke and Mark Cioc to attend the Smithsonian's 36th annual Folklife Festival, which re-created the Silk Road on the mall.

After soaking up all they could for several days, the teachers returned to Santa Cruz where they are collaborating with UCSC faculty on developing classroom units that will cover the state's sixth- and seventh-grade history standards. At an October conference sponsored in part by UCSC's Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies, the teachers shared their insights about activities such as papermaking, weaving, and sandpainting with professors who contributed analyses of large-scale patterns of the movement of technology, ideas, and values along the Silk Road. The goal is to develop units for ultimate dissemination to teachers statewide.

Fostering collaborations between K-12 teachers and university faculty members helps get new knowledge "out there" more quickly and can provide engaging "hooks" that appeal to young students, said Freitag. Teachers appreciate the infusion of cutting-edge material, and faculty, too, often come away feeling inspired.

"Faculty often get into this thinking they're doing a good deed in public service, and they come out being much better teachers because of what they learn from the K-12 participants," said Freitag.

Freitag doesn't quibble with the demands of state standards that were introduced a decade ago. "There's nothing wrong with accountability when the state is investing heavily in professional development for teachers," she said. "We're offering a helping hand to ensure that the highest quality content is offered and that it reflects new research results in a context that can lead to real change in the classroom."

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