Until 1990, the Virginia Historical Society served a very small number of scholars and genealogists, and we made our collections available through our publications and our research library. Those collections now include some 200,000 photographs; 1,000 paintings; 160,000 books (15,000 of which are considered rare); 5,000 maps; 25,000 museum objects; and some eight million processed manuscripts—letters, diaries, deeds, accounts, plats, minute books—virtually anything and everything that has been committed to paper over the past four centuries. Today, the VHS operates a museum and a research library, and serves as an educational forum. Although I was trained as an archivist, I was hired as the Society's first education director in 1990.

We identified Virginia's school teachers as one of our most important audiences, largely because of our statewide mandate and our mission to interpret all Virginia history—all people, all regions, and all time periods. We conducted workshops around the state, providing teachers with resources (primary sources) and strategies to teach Virginia and American history. We developed teaching kits and history boxes using reproductions of artifacts, facsimiles of documents, and enlargements of photographs from our collections. In 1994, we received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to offer our first teacher institute—a three-week residential program that brought teachers into contact with some of the nation's leading historians. Participating teachers also worked with our reference staff developing primary-source-based lesson plans to be used in their classrooms. The institute is now in its 15th year, and more than 280 Virginia school teachers have attended the program.

So, when the Teaching American History initiative was launched, we were already experienced in conducting content-based workshops and institutes for history teachers. We also had established relationships with history educators throughout the state.

Since 2002, we have served as partners on 22 TAH grants involving 37 of Virginia's 132 school districts. As you know, a "partnership" can assume many forms. For us, partnerships encompass everything from a single workshop over a three-year period, to serving as project directors (which we have done twice) with Chesterfield County Public Schools.

As I read what I have written above, it sounds boastful. I don't mean it to be so. I just want to suggest that we probably have a longer history with TAH-style programming than some partners.

What lessons have I learned? What is the value of Teaching American History? In this essay, I would like to focus on what most of you don't see, which is TAH's impact on your partners—museums, universities, and historical societies.

TAH has established a framework by which local schools, university scholars, and public historians (museum educators, historic house administrators, and park service interpreters), are cooperating to address a shared concern. By forcing schools to partner with the history institutions in their own communities, TAH has brought together the various stakeholders in history education. Schools are looking to history experts in their localities for solutions, while those experts are recognizing their responsibilities to K–12 history education.

Let me cite a few examples. For the past 15 years, we have worked with university professors at our summer teacher institutes. They have always expressed their enjoyment in working with teachers, but recently I have seen a growing awareness of their responsibility to help their elementary and secondary colleagues. One incident at a recent institute serves as metaphor. The session began with the presenter asking the teachers about their students. In response, a teacher asked, "How well we are preparing them for you?" In the discussion that ensued, it was apparent that both presenter and audience were aware that theirs was a symbiotic relationship—that they were dependent on each other for the history their students were learning, or not learning. And I think that TAH has played a major part in this growing awareness.

I find myself writing more and more recommendations for assistant professors who are approaching tenure, highlighting their participation in TAH. Several years ago I asked a colleague, who was between jobs at the time, whether the university search committee might look unfavorably on his application for a tenure-track position because of the time he had committed to a TAH grant. He responded, "No, that was one of the things that they liked about me." He got the job.

All this suggests to me that university history departments have become aware that they can't sit back and expect students to come to them prepared. They need to be involved. By providing the framework for collaboration (and the funds), TAH has fostered this involvement.

I have also seen a real shift in the way museums and historical societies approach K–12 teachers and students. In the late 1980s, Lynne Cheney, as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, spoke about the many institutions in our society that serve as "parallel schools." That phrase quickly became mantra in museums. As I visited my colleagues to determine what shape our education programs should take, I heard the phrase repeated over and over. "We see ourselves as a parallel school." Every grant application included the phrase. The professional literature reflected the theme as well, as reports, books, and articles appeared with titles such as: Museums and Schools as Partners, and True Needs, True Partners: Museums and Schools Transforming Education (a 1996 report issued by the Institute of Museum Service, now the Institute of Museum and Library Services or IMLS).

I remember thinking at the time how pretentious this was. It was one thing for museums to think of themselves as parallel schools, but far more important for schools to think of museums as parallel schools.

It took TAH to get this to happen. And this is changing the culture in museums. In addition to my job at the VHS, I serve as vice president of programs for the Virginia Association of Museums, the largest state museum association in the country. In 2006, VAM received a grant from the IMLS to prepare a training tool to help museums develop standards-based educational programs to appeal to standards-minded teachers and administrators. As you might expect, the CD-ROM prepared by the VAM staff includes information on how to tailor programs to address specific content standards. However, it also contains an incredible amount of information on developmental learning, multiple intelligences, and navigating school bureaucracies—all the kinds of things that museums didn't care about in the past. More and more, I see museum education positions filled by former classroom teachers, and I am constantly counseling recent graduates interested in museum careers that a few years in the classroom is the best way to enter the field.

Schools are approaching museums and historical societies differently. During the recent revision of the Virginia Standards of Learning, I was impressed by how much the Virginia Department of Education relied on historical institutions for accuracy. These included the Library of Virginia, the American Slavery Museum, the Museum of American Frontier Culture, the Jamestown Settlement, Historic Jamestown, Colonial Williamsburg, the American Civil War Center, and surely many others.

TAH has fostered a spirit of collaboration that brings together all the stakeholders in teaching American history. That is an important contribution—and perhaps TAH's most long-lasting legacy.

On more than one occasion, teachers participating in our Teaching American History (TAH) project have speculated that one reason their middle school students often have trouble understanding historical texts may be because they have not yet developed the ability to imagine the past. Because they are young their experience is limited and many have yet to discover museums, historic houses, or other places of historical interest. In addition, the historical past is not immediately evident on the surface in New York City, where it is often difficult to see through the many layers of changes in the landscape and the built environment.

As a museum educator, I have been encouraging teachers to bring the tools of art history and material culture studies to their classrooms by presenting works of art and architecture, photographs, and historical artifacts to students. In this way, the definition of the primary source is expanded beyond the written word to include the visual and the tactile; the historical source material available for consideration and evaluation is greatly increased; and students are offered the possibility of a sensory as well as intellectual encounter with the past.

In periodic visits to art museums, historical collections, and historic houses in New York City, as well as in a series of after-school workshops, our group of middle school teachers has explored a range of art and artifacts with an eye toward conducting similar explorations with their students. Teachers are learning a process of investigation that involves observation, deduction, speculation, and interpretive analysis to uncover the meaning of art and objects.

The technique, standard in museum education, is simple and direct: It asks students (or anyone seriously approaching a work of art) to begin by describing the object, to analyze its structure, to consider the circumstance of its creation, and only then to propose an interpretation of the meaning of the piece.

Here are the basic guidelines for exploring a work of art or artifact of culture:

1. Sensory experience is at the heart of our interaction with works of art or artifacts of culture. Observe the piece for at least one full minute—this is surprisingly long for many students.

2. Take note of your first response. Aesthetic response is personal and often emotional. It deserves our attention. Here students can register their reaction and then set emotion and opinion aside.

3. Describe the work. Make note of the obvious in neutral language, e.g. "seated female figure in green dress, landscape background . . ." This constructs a visual/verbal inventory that serves to focus our viewing. It is especially important in conversational settings with students because we cannot assume that we all see the same things. Articulating the description brings everyone to a kind of consensus about what is being looked at.

Articulating the description brings everyone to a kind of consensus about what is being looked at.

4. The formal elements of a work of art or artifact of culture constitute the language by which it communicates. Analyze the piece by examining the use of line, shape, color, form, composition, format, medium, etc.

5. Consider the context where the work would originally have been seen; the purpose it might have served; the physical condition in which the work has survived; when, where, and by whom the piece was made; and the title. All of these conditions contribute to the meaning of an object.

6. Make historical connections. How does the piece connect with the broader historical context? Young students exercise their chronological thinking here to contextualize the piece at hand. Recalling contemporaneous events and issues, students consider how the object relates to the larger historical picture. Steps five and six often require additional research outside the object itself.

7. Reevaluate your response. Has it changed? Has it become more nuanced? Is it possible to appreciate the work on multiple levels (intellectual, emotional, historical)? Close reading of objects deepens our understanding of the historical past and teaches us to consider the evidence before forming opinions.

This process has been developed primarily for group conversations, the principal mode of teaching in the museum context. In the classroom or on a self-guided museum visit, teachers may have their students work individually or in small groups to create a written record of their investigations. This allows the students to choose the object of their investigations, either from the museum collection, a museum's online resource, or a collection of photographs or reproductions.

Whether in the classroom or the museum, requiring students, even reluctant artists, to draw their chosen object serves to slow down their observation process and forces them to notice all the aspects of the piece from overall structure to fine details. In this way, they are firmly grounded in the actuality of the object before advancing speculation about its function, meaning, or historical significance.

When conducted in a disciplined yet free-flowing and open-ended fashion in the hands of an experienced teacher, this type of engagement with art and artifacts empowers students to enjoy the materiality of the past, develop their powers of reasoning, make critical historical connections, and furnish their historical imaginations. It encourages students to propose possible alternative meanings and to develop the ability to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory interpretations simultaneously. This method provides authentic contact with art and artifacts and teaches close reading of objects, thereby engaging students in the type of work historians do on a daily basis.

At the very least, aesthetic experience can spark excitement and curiosity in students. Many times, teachers have remarked to me that a particular student who is not normally engaged in the classroom was very responsive to a work of art or more generally to the excitement of a museum visit.

A few years ago, I had an experience that forever convinced me of the value of this work. I was working with a group of 4th-grade students in a series of classroom visits in which we had looked at, considered, and discussed a variety of works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With the goals of sparking their curiosity, introducing the idea of connections between art, history, and culture and developing their critical-thinking skills, we looked at projected images of art and artifacts from Ancient Egypt, colonial America, and the modern period.

On a class visit to the museum, students were eager to encounter the real thing in person. As we made our way to our destination, Romare Bearden's six-panel collage entitled The Block, I could feel the excitement mounting. As the children seated themselves in front of the work on the floor there were murmurings of recognition among the students who remembered seeing photographs of the piece in their classroom. As I was about to invite the students to look quietly at the work, 10-year-old Leticia, who was normally very quiet in class, raised her hand impatiently, bursting to say what was on her mind. "I think art is about ideas," she said. "It's about the ideas the artist has—and those can change. And it's about the ideas we have when we look at it." This is precisely the lesson I wish to share with my TAH teachers and their students.