When the History of Education Quarterly editors invited us to contribute to this forum, they asked us to reflect on how we taught histoiy with case studies. To jump-start our exchange, they suggested four possible purposes for teaching history in this way, which I have paraphrased below:

• • To reflect on the antecedents of the so-called “new” educational policy topics (what is the long histoiy of standardized testing?).

• • To disrupt conventional beliefs with counterexamples (why did nineteenth-century science and math classrooms include so many female students?).

• • To compare and contrast educational change in particular places or regions (how did the development of schooling differ in New England, the New South, or New Mexico?).

• • To call attention to the intersection of human agency and institutional structures (how did teachers, parents, and political leaders conflict or collaborate in struggles over school reform?).

A graduate school of education contains a wide range of disciplinary models for the training of scholars and practitioners. I encounter these models as they come up in conversation with colleagues and students, or I confront them more directly as I pass a clinical psychology laboratory space each morning on the way to my office. I often see small groups of doctoral students at work, huddled around a computer monitor or deep in discussion. As my psychology colleagues are more likely to research and write in teams rather than individually, I read this scene as a sign of collaboration built into graduate training. It also contrasts with my experience of collaboration, or the lack thereof, in my own graduate training in history. In my own education, the most collaborative spaces—in which people come together around a common text and problem—existed in the earliest phases of graduate school. A few students and a professor gathered around a seminar table to analyze a book or article. But later, as students developed their own research agendas and proceeded into the archives, they researched and wrote largely in isolation. Writing groups and other venues for sharing work were sustaining, but the content of research remained an individual affair. (There were hints, though, of new spaces for collaboration—as in the History of Education Society's research mentoring sessions begun in 2009—and likely others existed, but were unknown to me as a graduate student.) Once in a faculty position, reflecting on my graduate training and juxtaposed with what I perceived at the psychology laboratory led me to ask where collaboration fits and how it might matter in graduate training in the history of education.

For the past ten years, I have taught the Roots of Urban Education, a graduate-level course for preservice art teachers and librarians, and have used the course as a pedagogical case study to help improve my teaching. Given that this is the only history course students in the teacher education program are required to take, the course emphasizes depth over breadth through a place-based study of schooling during key reform eras in twentieth-century New York City. I documented, analyzed, and revised my teaching, with special focus on my expectation that students would develop historical habits of mind and that such competencies would be relevant for future teachers.

In Mexicans in the Making of America, historian Neil Foley reconceptualizes Manifest Destiny, not as the glorious westward push of European Americans, but as their arrival on the doorstep of Mexican America. He argues that the United States came to Mexico, and we must reimagine this moment as an entry into an established New World where negotiation, conquest, and possession were already in play among various peoples and nations. The diversity of this nineteenth-century world is often absent in the ways that we have been trained to teach students in our first-year courses, and this absence, in turn, extends into our twentieth-century and contemporary discussions of race and race relations where binary comparisons dominate. Using educational and legal case studies from a variety of communities has allowed me to expand analyses in the U.S. history survey and to broaden students' conceptualizations from a singular white or binary black/white experience into a unified multilingual, multicultural, and transnational America. More importantly, this shift creates space for diverse groups of students to reconsider their own historical significance in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the relevance of local historical narratives in the scope of American history.

Texts introducing students to women's and gender history typically emphasize how gender refers to the social meanings attached to sexual difference, which vary over time and across societies and cultures. As one of these texts explains, “Definitions of what is masculine and feminine are learned as each society instructs its members from infancy through adulthood as to what behavior and personality attributes are appropriate for males and females of that generation.” Given wide agreement that gender is learned, it is surprising how seldom the places and people who institutionalize learning appear in the texts used to teach U.S. women's and gender history. Teachers are remarkably scarce in the literature, even though vast numbers of U.S. women have taught since the mid-nineteenth century. The reasons for this absence are not clear. Perhaps teachers' social location, at the murky boundaries of the working and middle classes, has contributed to their omission from sharply defined studies of class and gender consciousness. Or perhaps the conventional association of women and teaching has deterred gender historians, following the theory that studying the margins of women's experiences better reveals the mainstream. Yet, the perceived ordinariness of the woman teacher may be especially helpful to illuminate periods of significant change in the meaning of gender.

My History of Southern African American Education, 1865–Present class, a mid-level survey course, examines the history of education for African Americans in the South from Reconstruction to the twenty-first century. It draws a variety of undergraduate students, as it is cross-listed with the College of Education, Department of History, African American Studies Program, and the Institute of Southern Studies. We examine issues of power and privilege, and the ways that race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status interact with educational opportunities and achievement. A major objective is to help students understand the ways in which public education in the United States was shaped by competing economic, political, and ideological interests; this focus includes learning the ways in which schools reinforced and reshaped the larger society. Another objective is to use local, state, and regional educational issues to provide a background for understanding the history of education as well as patterns, trends, and changes in the larger historical narrative.

The city of Charleston, South Carolina, illustrates how educators can use people- and place-based case studies as pedagogical tools to reconstruct a Southern public and historic landscape. Teaching the Foundations of Education course in the city of Charleston makes the history that frames contemporary educational issues such as (re)segregation more visible. In the wake of the recent tragedy at the historic African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Charleston that claimed nine lives at the hands of Dylann Roof, place and local history help make a silent history more pronounced. A history of resistance and an ongoing struggle for freedom is inscribed into Charleston's landscape as much as the colonial and antebellum grandeur that captures the imagination, and dollars, of a thriving tourism industry. The public and historic landscape, in short, is in and of itself an educative space that allows educators and students to disrupt popular narratives by making the invisible more visible.

In the summer of 2008, we met at an alehouse in Columbia City, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood on Seattle's south side, to begin conceptualizing and designing a School & Society class we were teaching that fall in a Master of Teaching (MIT) elementary teacher education program at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. One of us (Isaac) was working on a dissertation and was the instructor of record, while the other (Michael) was transitioning from master's to doctoral student, and was the teaching assistant. This was the first preservice teacher education social foundations course either of us had taught. The experience of working together on that course has led to several years of collaborative thinking about social foundations in teacher education, including developing what we call a “place-conscious approach”—an approach that grounds the political and normative questions at the heart of social foundations in the history of places in which preservice teachers learn to teach.