History outreach

Two of the University of Maine’s missions are fairly easy to quantify. Teaching can be measured in the number of successful students; research, in the grants awarded or amount of work esteemed by peers. Measuring the third mission, public service, is more difficult.

UMaine’s Department of History will repeat itself today with a successful effort at helping the Maine community by doing what it does well: bring scholars together to share information on the latest work in their field. The third annual conference is expected to attract 100 or so Maine teachers, as it has in the previous two years. Conferences like this are a little-known but valuable part of the contributions the university makes to the state. Approximately 1,000 Maine teachers last year took advantage of the College of Education and Human Development’s various programs and conferences designed to make teaching more effective. With help from the college, the History Department today is presenting “Up to Date: Teaching History in Maine.” The conference, fortunately, is not a series of arcane academic papers but a focused attempt to bring useful material to Maine teachers.

History Professor William Baker, who began the conference, observed that it is valuable to teachers because it “puts you onto information and gives you glimmers of where you should go.” Some possible directions teachers could take can be found in a keynote address by Jerome Nadelhaft, history professor emeritus, on the use of history, and a discussion on a new Maine history textbook for high-school students. Other topics are using computers in the classroom, foreign relations and environmental history.

Cooperative Extension offices traditionally have contributed most to the university’s mission of community outreach, with their emphasis on such areas as sustainable and natural resources and 4-H. But as valuable as that is, the state also benefits from other areas of the university making a contribution. The direct relevance of the history conference to teachers and their students is among the best sort of community outreach the university can practice.