Historiography and Teacher Education: Reflections on an Experimental Course.

Nation at Risk report, which declared that the ignorance of American youth was at a crisis level. E. D. Hirsch reiterated this concern in his best-selling Cultural Literacy, in which he also decried the lack of content knowledge of American students. Further studies, such as Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn's What Do Our 1 7 -Year-Olds Know? and the Bradley Commission's Historical Literacy, argued that students were particularly deficient in historical knowledge. As a result, in the 1990s, many historians and policy makers endorsed a strengthening of history teacher requirements and the addition of expanded required historical content in the curriculum.1 In the 1980s and 1990s, new advances in cognitive and learning theory also supported increased disciplinary knowledge for teachers. In 1987, Lee Shulman's influential article, "Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of a New Reform," introduced the concept of pedagogical content knowledge "a special amalgam of content and pedagogy that is uniquely the province of teachers, their own special form of professional understanding."2 Shulman argued that effective history teachers draw