Committee on Teaching and Public Education: K–20 Scholars and Scholarship at the Western History Association

Abstract

The Committee on Teaching and Public Education drives educational initiatives for the Western History Association (WHA). The committee connects K–12 teachers, university faculty, public historians, librarians, WHA members, and others engaged in any form of teaching to promote the West as a vehicle for learning. (See figure 1.) Figure 1. K–12 and university faculty work together to bring recent western history scholarship to their classrooms, 5 April 2013, at the University of Notre Dame. Foreground, left to right, Emily Maas, Eric Morser, Mark Johnson, Melody M. Miyamoto Walters; background, left to right, Flannery Burke, Annie Gilbert Coleman, Leisl Carr Childers, Logan Brumm, Tim Tomlinson. Photo by Brian S Collier. Annette Atkins, of St. John’s University, launched the committee shortly after the 2003 Western History Association conference in Fort Worth, Texas, where the council accepted her proposal to create an ad hoc committee on teaching. Atkins’s good idea led to meetings during WHA annual conferences focusing on the practice of teaching. Atkins’s founding role was so essential that when she stepped down in 2009, she was named chair emerita of the committee, which became a standing committee by 2010.1 In 2007 the committee looked for ways to engage not just WHA conference participants but teachers in nearby communities. Our first connection came through the Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University after its director, Brian Q. Cannon, graciously funded awards for K–12 teachers at the 2008 WHA …