Changes in Education : History: Teachers are preparing to teach history in a controversial, culturally diverse way that is new to the classroom.

There’s no such thing any more as traditional summer vacation for many teachers. The demands of year-round schools, of learning new curricula, of becoming comfortable with new ways of teaching, all mean summer “classroom time” for thousands across California and the nation.

Teachers in San Diego County this summer have worked to improve themselves in various academic subjects. Among the special institutes for them are ones in writing and in multicultural history.

When Kay Karzen’s fifth-graders study the history of Jamestown beginning next month, they won’t just learn about traditional colonial government in the Virginia Tidewater settlement.

They’ll also find out about the status of labor in 1619 in the nation’s first permanent English settlement, as well as the role of women, of blacks, of immigrants and of tobacco, the colony’s first cash crop.

Karzen will have her Fremont Elementary School students use poster charts and journals to contrast their findings with the present-day status of immigration, tobacco, labor, blacks, women, and government in America.

In addition, they will think about how each group and issue intersects with their own family histories and experiences, such as whether they have friends who are black, or the reasons why one of their teachers struck the school district during a labor dispute and another crossed the picket line.

As they sweep across American history during the year--the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the Civil War in 1865, the Great Depression of the 1930s, are examples--students at the Old Town area school will make continued references to the same ethnic, political and economic issues.

Karzen’s plans reflect the first efforts of San Diego-area instructors to put flesh onto the skeleton of California’s newly mandated history framework, which calls for teachers to include so-called “forgotten” histories of America and the world--the nonwhite, non-male, non-European contributions omitted from or downplayed in standard U.S. texts for years.

Her new classroom lesson plans, together with those of 60 elementary- and secondary-school colleagues across the county, grow out of their just-completed three-week institute at UC San Diego on teaching cultural diversity, where they studied with professors from UCSD and San Diego State University.

Many teachers find the new framework intimidating. Not only do they need to brush up on history, social studies and religion, but they also want help approaching issues of ethnicity and religion. For example: How to teach about ethnicity without inadvertently insulting a student from a particular group? How to teach the history of Islam and refer to the modern Middle East, touching on contemporary issues of the Persian Gulf War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in an even-handed way?

The institute tried to make teachers more comfortable with the new demands for a multicultural teaching of history and social studies, and in trying teaching techniques now in vogue such as having students work together on projects.

It’s hard enough for teachers to make history come alive for today’s Nintendo generation, said Robert Ritchie, UCSD history professor who headed the three-week program. Add the new state framework--controversial among some educators--and many teachers throw up their hands in confusion or frustration, he added.

“This is a very good opportunity for us,” said William O’Connor, a civics, world history and American history teacher at Rancho Bernardo High School. “We’ll get a much better handle on integrating the whole concept of ethnicity, of teaching history from a lot of different perspectives--and not just from non-European ones but from those of people who aren’t the traditional wheeler-dealers, whom we thought don’t count because they’re just ordinary folk.”

Ritchie oversaw the program under the auspices of the California History-Social Studies Project of the state Department of Education.

The teachers heard university experts on ethnic studies, water politics, religion, ancient Greece, Mexican art, and ethnic stereotypes in American film. They brainstormed among themselves on how to apply the material in their instruction. As a final exercise, they researched a topic to make into lesson plans that they will refine this fall in their classes before the plans are published in a resource book for use by teachers statewide.

“We know that at times this can be uncomfortable; we know that a lot of whites feel funny talking about multiculturalism in front of kids who are not white,” Ritchie said, citing as one example the confusion among many institute teachers when UCSD ethnic studies professor Ramon Gutierrez asked them to write down what they thought their race and ethnicity was.

Among the answers that teachers gave for race were: black, white, Pacific, Latino, Celtic--mixing race and ethnic classifications together.

Some teachers later talked about whether they could introduce the distinctions to their own students through a quiz similar to the one Gutierrez gave the teachers.

“It might make a good introductory lesson,” said one.

“But toward what goal?” asked a second teacher, expressing worry that students might pick up on negative differences between students rather than learn an appreciation for racial and ethnic pluralism.

Ritchie pointed out that, traditionally, many elementary teachers have been comfortable only with teaching about American Indians. That’s because they wrongly perceive that Indian history has little relevance to contemporary issues, he said, and because they have few American Indian children in classrooms to jar them into awareness.

But, said Ritchie, “We’re saying that there are ways of thinking about all these kinds of issues. Teachers need to be comfortable talking about multiculturalism, but not patronizing.”

For example, Ritchie had the teachers learn about contemporary Chicano art not just as a form of ethnic political expression but as a style with strong historical roots to Mexican painting over the centuries.

Some American educators have criticized the California framework, which many other states have emulated or are planning to follow, as going against the tradition of the “melting pot,” which they feel forges a common national heritage rather than emphasizing cultural diversity.

On the other hand, black and Latino activists believe the multicultural effort is window dressing and that history will still be taught from a “white-male, European” perspective.

For most teachers, issues of whether or not to teach that Indians were mistreated by some missionaries, or that blacks were not passive players in slave times--among other historical points--are moot, Ritchie said.

“Their classrooms are already multiracial and their students expect to learn history” from a variety of perspectives, he said.

Escondido middle school teacher Alan Brown says he will be able to use many of the lesson plans that will result from the institute.

“For example, I can look at Kay Karzen’s (process) and expand upon them” for his 7th-grade world-history classes, said Brown, who has also approached the new curriculum as a policy-maker in his role as a 10-year member of the school board in the San Marcos Unified School District.

Similarly, Brown hopes his lesson plan on the diversity of Eastern religions--Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism--can help ease the reticence that many teachers have in teaching the history of religions, also a requirement of the new framework.

Brown found the institute particularly helpful at balancing new historical knowledge--especially useful to elementary-level teachers who have few specializations in history--with specific ideas on how to use it in classrooms.

A big hit with most teachers was the two-hour session of movie clips on ethnic images in American film presented by Linda Mehr, a former UCSD professor who now heads the archives at the Motion Picture Academy in Hollywood.

“As you show films in class, you can ask yourself now, ‘Is this the best film to show on a given subject? Does it show Hispanics only as common laborers, as people who can’t think?’ ” Brown said.

“It really made me aware of stereotypes in the film industry.”

Ritchie hopes that the teachers, all of whom he said fall into the “highly motivated” category, will become acolytes and spread the word at their schools that the new curriculum is not as daunting as their colleagues might believe.

“I think one of the reasons I was chosen was that I have experience in staff development and curriculum,” said Pamela McGregor, a first-grade teacher at Westwood Elementary School in Poway and one of several Poway district teachers in the institute.

McGregor already met with fellow teachers at her school last week to talk about ideas gleaned from the three-week session. “And six of us (in Poway) will be putting on workshops, where we’ll present some lesson plans.

“That’s the key,” she said. “You don’t want teachers to feel overwhelmed with even more pressure to do more” by just giving them general information and forcing them to find time to write their own curriculum from scratch.