The History You Don't Know, and the History You Do: The Promise of Signature Pedagogies in History Education

Abstract

The persistent separation of subject-matter content and pedagogical training in traditional teacher education programs has made it difficult for many beginning teachers to establish a base of knowledge they can use to develop pedagogical content knowledge as their careers unfold. While existing efforts to bridge this gap have focused on intensive collaborations between education faculty and their colleagues in disciplinary fields, or on the integration of disciplinary knowledge into teacher education coursework, work still can be done to address the problem of providing beginning teachers with the balance of deep and flexible content knowledge complemented by practical teaching maneuvers that so many of them crave. This chapter explores the possibility of addressing this gap via the development of signature pedagogies, following the lead established in many other professional fields, paying special attention to Lee Shulman’s conceptualization of the idea and its potential impact on teacher education in history.