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Toward a Coherent Curriculum: Teaching and Learning History at Alverno College
John C. Savagian
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To consult additional interactive material related to this essay go to
http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/textbooks/2009/savagian/index.html
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| Over the years, discussions on teaching American history have generally focused on content and teaching methods. Some teachers advocate including more voices in the story; others complain of having to squeeze more content into an already-tight calendar. Using a global framework to teach the American past gets growing emphasis today. Some professors value such a reorientation as an innovative response to globalization; others see it as a distracting add-on that truncates important lessons about key American institutions. Wrapped within these debates are questions of teaching style. To lecture or not? To rely more on primary sources or secondary sources to fashion the story? To give students more hands-on experiential learning or more practice in developing abstract thinking?1 |
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Those fundamental questions about teaching American history can be answered only when we first settle on how (and not what) we want our students to learn. To consider this question requires the historian as teacher to shift away from teaching the topic and toward teaching the student. Such a change does not come easy because many of us teach the way we were taught. In a tradition-bound discipline, graduate courses focus on content with little or no pedagogical discourse, and doctoral work remains centered on research and writing. The classroom serves as a testing ground for our research, students as a captive audience for our findings. What training we have as teachers usually comes haphazardly. We might be fortunate enough to have a teaching mentor, but more often than not we suffer on our own as teaching assistants and adjuncts. Even when as classroom historians we want to be more student centered, the internal demand to publish or perish tamps down the pedagogically adventurous. But accrediting agencies and state departments of public instruction continually press for new methods of history teaching that stress inquiry-based learning and for assessment models that go beyond time-honored testing of knowledge. The demand for engaged students and a faculty more attentive to the needs of the individual learner has never been higher, but the gulf between our practice and these theories continues to grow. What is a historian to do? |
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The history faculty at Alverno College grapples with those issues. Rather than approach them from within the silos of our specializations, we confront them by holding discussions across disciplines and departments in order to direct an innovative curriculum we call ability-based learning. At the heart of this learning program stands a series of institutional outcomes, or abilities, which serve as our blueprint in teaching history. Without them, both student learning and the direction of our own teaching would more likely reflect the old saying "if you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there." |
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While some schools are just beginning to define outcomes and to design and implement ways to reach them, Alverno College's thirty-five-year experience with an outcomesbased curriculum has earned it a national and international reputation.2 Located on the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Alverno is a liberal arts college for women established by the School Sisters of St. Francis in 1887.3 Today we have an enrollment closing in on 3,000, with a growing emphasis on graduate programs in business, nursing, and education. |
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