While I was at the OAH in Milwaukee over the weekend, I went to see a session entitled, “The End of the History Survey Course.” The commentator, who actually did very little commenting on the papers at hand, was Lendol Calder of Augustana College. I went because I had read about him at John Fea’s blog, and because two of the main papers were by Joel Sipress and David Voelker, the co-authors of a JAH article that really changed the way I think about teaching surveys.
Towards the end of his remarks, Calder told an old Lyndon Johnson joke. Supposedly, Johnson had just heard a lecture on economics by John Kenneth Galbraith. After he was done, LBJ asked Galbraith if he knew what giving an economics lecture was like.
“No,” said Galbraith, “what is giving an economics lecture like?”
“Giving an economics lecture is like pissing down your pant leg. You think it’s hot, but nobody else does.”
Calder’s point was that most historians think they give great lectures whether they actually do or not. I actually would not include myself under that generalization though. I’ve never been happy with my survey lectures, which is why I’ve been messing with them from almost the moment I started teaching. Most notably, I’ve continually substituted lecture time for teaching other skills-related historical activity. This is why I was so taken with the Sipriss and Voelker article that I’ve linked to above. I remember thinking when I read it first read it, “You can do that?” Yes, you can. Their model for this was Lendol Calder, who’s given a name to the result of this intellectual process: uncoverage.
Ditching my textbook was the first step on the road to uncoverage. What I learned at this session was that I actually still have a long way to go. I have far too many remnants of the coverage model in my survey courses to consider myself at all innovative.
This session offered up an alternative. In his remarks, Joel Sipress outlined the framework for an argument-based model for a US history survey course. This struck me as a good thing is at allows historians to embrace a positive model for what introductory courses should be like, rather than just defining them by what they’re not. Here’s my transcription of his four points about what an argument-based model for a survey course would consist of:
* Organized around significant historical questions.
* Students systematically exposed to rival positions.
* Students asked to judge relative merits of rival positions on the basis of historical evidence.
* Students develop their own positions and argue for them on the basis of historical evidence.
Why would you want to organize your course this way? Lecturing is boring. I know I’ve defended it before and I still will (under limited circumstances), but I’ve favored teaching skills over facts for some time now in my upper-level classes. I’ve been inspired to practice what I preach all the time now.
Besides, your students aren’t learning anything in your coverage-based course (no matter how hot you think you are). It’s in one ear and out the other. How do we know this? As Calder pointed out, the scholarship of teaching and learning has come so far in the last decade or so that there is enough evidence for history teaching articles to have footnotes. None of those materials support sticking with the coverage model.
And after all, shouldn’t we base our arguments about a subject this important to our profession upon all the available evidence? “My professors did it, and their professors did it and their professors did it too.” – That just doesn’t cut it anymore.