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Table of Contents: Community College Historians in the United States |
The Survey Course: The Specialty of the Community College Historian
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The American public knows the history profession primarily through enrollment in introductory courses. Their college level studies usually began and ended in western civ, world civ, or the U.S. survey. For many students these courses took them on a rapid run through countless events, spanning centuries of time and vast, often unknown, regions of the globe. Their memories of the experience are often limited to the instructor's enthusiasm or idiosyncrasies. Faculty experiences often are not much better. Student frustration in the face of a seeming blizzard of facts is matched by faculty concern about student inability to master the minute portion of the historical record presented in class. This worry extends to the inability to induce students to move beyond the "facts" to understand how to think historically by putting material together in meaningful ways. Outside the classroom there are more obstacles to effective survey instruction. The survey course is not well regarded professionally or philosophically among academic historians. The solution for these problems is the inauguration of a concerted effort across the profession to rethink the role of the introductory course and to regard the instruction of the survey as a valued specialization within the historians' community. Historians working through the American Historical Association (AHA), the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and the Community College Humanities Association (CCHA) have begun this process. Because faculty at two-year colleges have spent more time addressing issues related to survey instruction than their colleagues in other academic settings, the OAH and the AHA have joined with the CCHA to increase the presence and voice of community college historians. It is time for the profession to draw on this experience and for historians at two-year colleges to collaborate with one another and with their colleagues in four-year colleges and universities to address the issues of the survey as a separate specialization within the profession. The Paradoxical Position of the Survey Course The introductory history course currently occupies a paradoxical place in history departments in the United States. At four-year colleges and universities it is both the most central and the most peripheral activity of department members. The centrality of introductory courses is assured because these courses consume much of the classroom time spent by historians, generate the bulk of full-time equivalent student enrollments, which underwrite the overall package of departmental activities, and represent the totality of postsecondary exposure to historical study for most students. Although it is functionally the more central course offering, survey teaching is often the most peripheral activity of faculty members because the profession is dedicated to and rewards specialization, not generalization. Generalization arouses concern among historians, a group almost congenitally suspicious of the primary activity of survey teachers--the presentation of generalizations about long-term historical development. At community colleges, introductory courses are the primary work of the faculty. Unfortunately, these courses are often embedded in an institutional environment that is not conducive to effective history instruction. For example, administrators frequently regard courses in all fields as the transfer of bits of information, rather than the introduction and development of a particular way of thinking about the world. Many community colleges place a premium on the adoption of a single, institution-wide pedagogical model by all faculty regardless of discipline and then channel professional development money toward mastering that model. There is often little financial support for study or conferences directly in one's academic field. Furthermore, at many colleges career development for faculty is limited to accepting administrative responsibilities for extra pay. The result is that introductory course issues often reside at the periphery of concern at two-year colleges, albeit for different reasons than at four-year schools. The impact of these professional and institutional values is to skew professional activity away from interest in the survey course. Proof of this was offered by Lynn Hunt, who bluntly assessed the position of western civ courses and teachers:
The situation is not any better for historians of events on this side of the Atlantic. According to John Higham, "Professors and students [read 'majors'] alike know that early specialization within American history will bring the best jobs, the easiest teaching, and the quickest advancement."(2) The problematic place of the introductory history course is also illustrated by its position in the crossfire of the "culture wars," as discussed in several recent works that analyze some of the philosophical differences among historians. Survey instruction can offend both the adherents of the profession's longtime attraction to specialized "scientific" study and the more recent writers who adhere to the tenets of postmodern thought. Both groups have philosophical objections to the course by the very nature of what it does. Specialized study involves the examination of a narrowly defined body of evidence and the drawing directly from that evidence of clearly defined conclusions that seem to be true for that time and place. The goal of this activity, when it operated under the aegis of "science," was the accurate re-creation of a particular part of the past that became a "brick" in the construction of an edifice called "what we know about the past." From this perspective, survey courses--which often cover centuries--cannot be accurate because they are too far removed from the evidence of the past and make broader generalizations than those warranted by the bounded study of specialists. Matters relating to cause and effect, world view, or context cannot be presented in a highly nuanced fashion. Although the winnowing process occurs (or ought to) within the context of a set of organizing principles, the resulting course is open to the charge that it is a watered-down, if not actually misleading, version of "true" historical findings. Survey courses have also come under fire because of the recognition that many of the generalizations used to organize course material reflect the perspectives and experiences of only a portion of the population under study, not the society as a whole. These "master narratives" leave out the achievements and perspectives of women and minorities as well as nonelite whites. Critics hold that these narrative generalizations legitimate the power positions of upper classes and act as part of their control mechanism over the rest of society.(3) This position, coupled with the belief of some that any attempt to represent the past is by its nature a misrepresentation, leaves the survey course in an untenable position. It is a course that, when examined closely, is built on an activity that has little support within the preferred paradigms of the history profession. The lack of support for generalization does not eliminate its need. Many scholars have recently called for historians to reconsider the role of generalization as well as particular generalizations by the profession. The above statement by John Higham was drawn from an essay calling for historians to reach beyond "local and national experience to transnational patterns." The need to develop global perspectives on western and world history also involves generalization. Edmund Burke III agrees when he argues that "a scholarly tradition that was rooted in the paradigm of civilizational studies has been challenged from both within and without. As a result of the collapse of moral exceptionalism which had privileged the West above the rest of humanity as well as a new sense of global interdependence, historians have expanded their focus."(4) Faculty, who have the primary obligation of conveying the meaning and results of historical study, are placed in a perplexing situation by these institutional, professional, and philosophical conditions. While historians, along with society at large, wrestle over the broader implications of the past and how to present it, the survey course cannot be put on the shelf. It continues to enroll students and pay the bills. Resolving the Issues The first step in resolving the issue of the survey course is to end its status as a derivative activity in a profession whose members frequently have other fish to fry. The survey course should be regarded as a separate specialty because of three interrelated factors: (a) it addresses a different audience—the general public instead of fellow historians or their apprentice-majors; (b) it makes different kinds of generalizations from those appropriate for narrow fields of study; and (c) it requires a careful reading of current trends in society in addition to adherence to professional standards of inquiry. In other words, it contains different kinds of tensions from those that characterize other activities within the profession and requires perspectives and experiences which are both outside of and in addition to archival study. Audience The teacher of the introductory history course looks outward from the profession to the public, which possesses intellectual frameworks and priorities different from those of professional historians. When historians write for historians, they can start from a shared base of common understandings including what the past is, what the basic analytical categories are, how to validate their conclusions through the use of evidence, and what earlier historians have already said on the subject. The student audience brings to the classroom a body of knowledge developed outside the groves of academe and, for that reason, cannot be assumed to be ready to learn history in the same way that historians approach history. The issue extends beyond debates about the quantity of historical information that students carry into the classroom; they often do not possess the same starting point, in terms of perspectives or experience, to make sense of the data of history in the same way as historians. Furthermore, because most students in introductory courses will not take advanced studies, the introductory course has to be "complete." Instruction cannot be predicated on the assumption that the course need present only part of the picture, with the expectation that students will acquire the rest of their historical perspective in later study. The intellectual frameworks of historical study must be an explicit feature of the course--not part of the undiscussed background of assumptions about shared knowledge and perspective. Generalizations Faculty in introductory courses have to organize their presentations around generalizations that are different in at least two ways from those used by historians writing for historians. First, although historians develop their generalizations (conclusions) at the end of a period of research and thought, the generalization arrives in the survey class as the topic sentence, or first utterance, on a topic with which the student is largely unfamiliar. The conclusions of historians, if presented to students in the same way that they are offered to colleagues, simply look like more of the unsupported pronouncements that permeate public discourse. From the outset, students need to learn how historians reach their conclusions, as well as how to use evidence to reach conclusions of their own. Therefore, our generalizations always have to contain the apparatus of historians' thought processes as part of the teaching effort to show the scope and meaning of a historical perspective. Second, historians need to rethink the content of generalizations in introductory courses in relation to the purpose of the course. Should the course be a survey of reliable, basic knowledge about the past, or should it help students to acquire the analytical perspectives needed to make sense of the past? Adoption of the second approach transforms introductory course instruction into a separate professional specialization. As long as history departments evaluate survey instruction solely on the historical quality of the classroom presentation, survey instruction is not markedly different from presentations to majors—except that serious survey course instruction is virtually impossible because of the breadth of knowledge needed to teach it. Survey courses require material drawn from many more specializations than are required for the successful completion of a doctoral program. Furthermore, generalizations suitable for classroom use are different from those needed to defend a dissertation. A presentation of the "best" recent findings of the historical community will not convey historical perspective to first-year students. In contrast, instructors must learn how to develop generalizations or approaches that have heuristic rather than purely "truth" value. Suitable generalizations open inquiry into a topic, rather than close off a conversation after a period of study. They can consist of questions for further study or thesis statements that are then examined for their validity. They represent a starting point for the study of a historical issue and help to lead to a conclusion that is historically sound. In between, students should be exposed to thought processes that let them know how they reached their conclusions and what they concluded. Experienced introductory course instructors already know this; new instructors usually have to find this out on their own. If the distinction between generalization for the history profession and generalization for students is not recognized as valid, instructors may feel that the process of developing heuristic generalizations represents their drifting away from the central tenets of historical study. Instead, they are opening up the possibility of greater historical understanding for their students. Knowledge of Current Cultural Trends In addition to all of the training expected of historians, specialists in introductory teaching need an awareness of the world outside the professional community, and expertise in connecting the two worlds in ways that illuminate the public while fairly and accurately representing the perspectives and activities of historical study. This awareness includes the trends that affect student thought (content) and how they approach issues (process) at any particular time. Historians present their students with ideas, events, and people that are new to the students. What previous experiences do students bring to their understanding of these issues? Analysts concerned with literacy and the impact of television note that with the decline of the willingness (if not the ability) to read, students are able to bring less "book knowledge" to the classroom. Consequently, as they try to find examples in their own world to relate to historical material, they are more likely to use television plots and advertisement slogans than material from novels or newspapers. Other analysts discuss the effect on thought processes of nonlinear media (such as television or the Internet) and viewer control over what material and in what order they approach material.(5) The goal of the teaching historian should be to find ways to offer a course that comprehends the world of students, connects to it in meaningful ways, and concludes by moving the student into the world of historical study, its contents and processes. Although many faculty have made the contemporary world part of their research programs, the idea of tailoring historical presentation, from the start of a course, in ways that account for the intellectual starting points of students, seems to violate the values of objectivity and distance that characterize traditional historical study. Conclusion Although specialists argue with one another over such broad cultural issues as the end of history or the content of the canon, survey faculty continue to serve as the bridge between the profession and the public at large. Survey faculty form this bridge because they organize the historical knowledge of broad periods of time into presentations that make the findings about different periods and people intelligible and accessible to the general public. These instructors are also best able to inform the profession about conditions "out there." The recognition of introductory teaching as a specialization in its own right will address some of the issues within the profession that have helped place the introductory course on the margin of professional activity and historians, if not history, on the margins of society. The introductory course can become the meeting ground of the profession as well as the bridge between professional historians and society. Notes 1. Lynn Hunt, "Reports of Its Death Were Premature: Why Western Civ Endures," in Lloyd Kramer, Donald Reid, and William Barney, eds., Learning History in America: Schools, Cultures, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 39. 2. John Higham, "The Future of American History," Journal of American History 80 (March 1994), 1,289 3. See, for example, Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994); Pauline Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 4. Edmund Burke III, "Introduction: Marshall G. S. Hodgson and World History," in Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ix. 5. See, for example, David S. Trask, "Teaching History in Historical Times: A Side Stage Approach," Teaching History 21 (fall 1996), 59-67. |
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