As my university goes through program prioritization and redesigns its undergraduate core curriculum to feature all the right buzzwords, I’m once again reminded of how broken the history survey course has become. I’m not the first to say it, nor will I be the last, but the thought woke me up again at 3:30 this morning, so I’m writing about it here.
English departments figured this out a while ago. They wrestled with the canon, yet–in my experience at least, as an English major and a former lit and comp instructor–they settled on a wide variety of representative works in their lower-division survey courses rather than pretending to cover literature comprehensively. In the broadest surveys that serve more non-majors than majors, there’s some poetry, drama (often Shakespeare), short fiction, and a novel or two. Maybe some creative nonfiction. But no one is pretending to offer any kind of coverage beyond “hey, here are some samples of a few genres that have proven particularly significant over time.”
I’m noticing the opposite is the case in many history surveys. Textbooks purport to share a comprehensive narrative. Publishers’ supplementary materials (ugh) offer quizzes that are more about fact acquisition than any skills listed on the top half of Bloom’s taxonomy–as if the point of the history survey is to ensure students know what caused the Panic of 1837, or what happened during the Salem witch trials, or that Gettysburg is often seen as the turning point of the Civil War.
Recently, my university revised its general ed requirements, and in order for a course to count toward those requirements, we had to send department faculty to a course design institute to ensure the courses met university-wide learning outcomes. I was actually fine with that, as we were allowed to be pretty damn vague about what would go on in each section of a course–e.g., “assessments may include, but are not limited to, essays, exams, and group presentations.” Recently, however, the people who run that program appear to have added another wrinkle: formative and summative assessments. Quantitative formative and summative assessments, across course sections.
And so one of my colleagues took the initiative to develop a proposed assessment for one of the survey courses we moved into the new core. It was a 10- to 15-question quiz that asked students to demonstrate some basic knowledge that any eighth grader who has just finished a (very) traditional Western Civ class should be able to pass. The idea is that students would take the exact same multiple-choice quiz at the beginning and end of the course, and voilà! We can measure and document learning with the quiz scores.
The gap between the university’s assumptions about teaching and what I think works grows ever wider.
I’m teaching the first “half” (Pleistocene to 1877) of the U.S. history survey this semester. It’s my third time teaching this course, and I struggle with it every damn time, particularly in the first six weeks or so of the semester, when I’m trying to adjust students’ expectations of what a history course is and their understanding of what a history course does.
The course schedule looks fairly traditional: readings from a textbook (I know, I know–I vacillate on this; I didn’t use one last time, and next time I’ll drop it again), punctuated by fairly formal writing assignments, a midterm (an in-class essay), and final exam (also an essay). But a glance at the syllabus does not reveal at all–at all–what happens in class.
So, for example, for yesterday’s class, we read Chapter 5 of Foner’s Give Me Liberty. It’s dry, it’s boring–think Stamp Act–but when I ask students here what most interests them about history, the Revolutionary War ranks right up there with the Civil War, so I feel compelled to give a nominal nod toward coverage of the subject.
Once we were in class, I asked students to summarize what the colonists who were protesting the various British acts wanted. After the students discussed this briefly in small groups, we made a list on the board.
I passed out a press release on the current-day Tea Party’s platform, and I thumbnailed for students Tea Party demographics.
I then asked students if today’s Tea Party adherents, who claim the Revolutionary era as their intellectual and political legacy, are actually in line, ideologically speaking, with the original Tea Party. My students agreed that, at first glance and even with some reflection, they did, if we’re looking at their political planks. We also discussed what today’s Tea Partiers find attractive, politically and culturally, in that historical moment, at least as it’s traditionally chronicled.
But, as I said to my students, “If there’s one thing you take away from this course, I hope it’s that when someone is drawing conclusions from history for political ends, you say, ‘It’s actually more complicated than that.'”
So, my next question for students was, “How does today’s Tea Party perceive and use Revolutionary-era history? And why does it matter how Tea Partiers represent history?”
We watched two videos that feature history as told by Tea Party darlings Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck:
The first is an easy one for students to analyze, Colbert’s enjoyable theatrics aside: Sarah Palin is a big Second Amendment rights advocate, and she tells a popular story in a way that emphasizes her concerns and inflates their importance.
The second is more complicated. Glenn Beck talking about black history in early America? And taking a vaguely art historical approach? What the hell rabbit hole have we fallen into here? On the surface, he’s asking for the same thing Clarence Walker does in Mongrel Nation, which we read last week: that Africans and African Americans be fully integrated into our stories of the founding of the American republic because it will change how we understand American history and race relations.
I encourage you to watch the video; it’s a very rich text that, on close reading, yields all kinds of insights into the hopes and fears–but mostly fears–of the Tea Party.
The first thing I highlight for students is that Beck is arguing for less emphasis on slavery as central to the black experience in the United States. As he explicates various paintings, Beck (along with everyone’s favorite early American historian, David Barton) names the African-American men depicted in them, then asks why we focus so much on slavery in telling the stories of black lives.
(Hint: Every single African American Beck names in that clip was a slave.)
My students and I talked about why Beck wants to downplay slavery, why Beck might believe the Tea Party should take an interest in black history at this time, and why this black history instead of the history Beck dismisses rather casually (Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights movement). It was a lively discussion among students from a broad political spectrum.
If this course were in the university’s new core–which many are arguing it should be, if only to keep enrollment up–how would we assess these students, formatively and summatively, in a quantitative way? Hell, I struggle to assess such learning qualitatively.
I feel just as some of us were beginning to push back successfully against the content coverage model that keeps student learning low–very low–on Bloom’s taxonomy, university administrators and the state board of ed (which, alas, controls all public education in Idaho, not just K-12) once again demonstrate they have no idea whatsoever what the humanities are or what they do for students.
Idaho in particular needs students who can engage in informed, reflective civic discourse, not students who can parrot information from a textbook or lecture. (Our statehouse is filled with party-line parrots.) My students would do miserably on formative and summative assessments like those proposed by my colleague. But which kind of person would you rather have participating in our democracy–a student who shows one-semester improvement on a quiz, or one who can thoughtfully evaluate politicians’ and pundits’ motivations for deploying history in political discourse?
I am fond of asking “what would have to be true for this to make sense”. It seems to me that you (like many university educators) are making an assumption that state policy makers care about the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. It is possible that they think that kind of learning would be dangerous is provided to the masses and should be reserved for elites (who will either opt out of the public system and use their money to go private, or pay for enrichment) and that the BASIC education that the state provides should focus on the lower levels of the taxonomy.
As for university administrators, they are mostly trying to keep the doors open, the public money flowing, and the students and parents happy. I suspect there are many among them that are trying to come up with a system that gives the state enough of what it wants while allowing you and your colleagues to do the thing you do best. That’s a dangerous dance as you indicate.
I love the questions you are asking. And in case you didn’t know, the embedded comedy network thing is not visible outside of the US. Due to the wonders of geo-location and programmers with a sense of humour, Canadians get the following message “Sorry, but this video is unavailable from your location, probably due to your overly polite attitudes.” I chuckle every time I see that.
Jo, that message is hilarious! If you can watch the videos on the Comedy Central site in Canada (not embedded), search for Colbert and Paul Revere. It’s a good one!
Absolutely the State Board doesn’t care about higher level thinking skills, and that’s a problem. I don’t think universities should be providing a basic education. And I know what administrators are trying to do, but here they keep also intervening in teaching in ways that are. not. helpful.
It sounds like the assessment tool isn’t assessing what a college course should be teaching, to me. I guess I’m thinking of Jack Meiland’s essay, on the difference between high school and college, where he argues that the difference should be that while high schools teach information as facts, colleges focus on evaluating how we know what we claim to know. So, an assessment for a college course shouldn’t be about what year Elizabeth I came to the throne, but more about how we might interpret the historical evidence in meaningful ways. (Of course, I’m guessing that would be a whole lot more difficult to assess because it’s a whole lot more complex.)
I’m in English, and my department has very much focused on skills in reading literatures within cultural theoretical contexts. And yes, assessing those skills is darned difficult.
But if we’re really aimed at creating a critical citizenry, then you’re doing it right in your teaching, but the assessment isn’t assessing students ability to think as historians.
Leslie,
I want to go in a slightly different direction here and suggest that I find mandatory administration-imposed course design institutes absolutely terrifying. You’re the expert on how to design a successful history course, not some “learning scientist” or, even worse, a Deanlet. Professors are trained professionals. We should be allowed to do our jobs however we see fit. Allowing vagueness is just the first salvo in a campaign that will end with complete deprofessionalization if all of us aren’t careful.
Leslie, great post that hits on many of the challenges that those of you who teach the survey must face these days. We designed our Milestone Documents service (Jonathan Rees is our Editor in Chief for US History II) with much of this in mind. So instead of a single textbook-driven narrative, we offer a curated collection of primary documents and optional textbook articles (written by multiple scholars) that can be assigned piecemeal and changed at any time. Thus, you can emphasize different themes/issues from semester to semester, and you can also begin to get away from the “coverage” dilemma. I think there is definitely a role for those simpler, content-oriented assessments in any history course, and I don’t necessarily see a problem with a department finding common ground about the form/structure of such assessments. Still, I agree that the main goal of a history course should be to foster higher-level thinking, so it would troubling indeed if those common assessments were not paired with more demanding ones developed by each instructor as appropriate for his/her course.
I hate more than anything the notion that only quantitative data carries value (and so much quantitative data is actually bad data), but if you are stuck with it (can history/lit/etc raise a revolt that this is not appropriate?), I have been happier with forms such as quote-matching (match author to key statement) or maybe chronology (put these events in order), which I feel can demand some complex thinking in the background to accomplish, without reducing history to several oversimplified facts.
Jonathan, I agree that course design institutes are terrifying–but I also think professors have somewhat brought this upon themselves. When I was teaching, there were six of us theoretically teaching the exact same course number, that fulfilled a requirement. It was nearly impossible even to get us to sit down and talk about shared goals, and one-year lecturers got very little mentoring to bring them onto the same page. We demanded that students give over their autonomy to our core curriculum, but refused to entertain even the slightest chance that we might need to sacrifice some autonomy to making it a true “core.” These types of outside or top-down mandates are responding to problems (real and perceived) that universities have ignored for a long time.
I mainly deal with high school students, but what often gets me is that they don’t seem to have much sense of chronology. I don’t care about exact dates, but it would be much easier to talk history with them if they had some idea of “the Romans were way long ago, but the Egyptian kingdoms had been around forever by then” or “the European Renaissance came after the Middle Ages. It’s amazing what they don’t know and the schools don’t seem to teach.
(Teaching the Tea Party is a good idea, History gets written and re-written all the time. In the 18th century, the issue that led to the tea party wasn’t that taxes were imposed or that they were too high, but where they were spent and who got to say so. As I learned when I bought my house in Concord, MA, the first law passed by the independent Massachusetts legislature was the Stamp Act, so I had to pay a few hundred bucks for a stamp to register my deed. Living in Massachusetts was a sort of history lesson in its own right. I learned that a well regulated militia meant getting your pants on and your musket ready in 60 seconds, even if you were cuddling with your fiance as half the younger guys were doing on the night of Paul Revere’s ride.)