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Comment: Meeting the Challenges of the United States History Survey
Michael Grossberg
Indiana University
Editor, American Historical Review
| READING THESE PAPERS made me realize just how much teaching the United States Survey is a common rite of passage for us all. I taught it for the first time in 1979, my last year as a graduate student. I became a part-time instructor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where I taught the first half of the survey. Beyond the constant rush to finish lectures, what I recall most vividly from that experience was the challenge an older student put to me as I struggled to make generalizations about an era or event: "How do you know that? You weren't there!" He raised that objection over and over again. Answering him was difficult in part because of my tenuous hold on the subject matter. But as I have thought about that experience, I also have come to realize that crafting an effective response to such challenges was difficult for me because I was struggling with the fundamental challenges of the course itself: What is its purpose? Its goals? What should be included? What should be excluded? These issues troubled me then; they have troubled me ever time I have taught the survey since then. |
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These four very thoughtful papers help us understand why the survey course is such a challenge. I want to use this commentary first to try and identify that challenge a bit more fully, and then to assess the nature and implications of the kind of solutions being advanced by the authors. |
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The Challenge | |
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I want to begin by focusing on the basic problem that these authors have identified for us: How can we design, teach, and test an intellectually coherent survey of the American past? Thinking about this challenge and the authors' response to it forces us to confront an irony. In many ways the very successes of our discipline has made the problem more and more difficult. We now have the richest understanding we have ever had of the American past. As Thomas Bender wrote recently in the American Historical Review: "This rewriting of American history has often been associated with the 'triumph' of social history within the discipline, but in fact the transformation is much broader than that: the domain of the historical has been vastly extended, inherited narratives displaced, new subjects and narratives introduced."1 Yet bringing that broad understanding into the classroom, especially in a survey course, has proven to be a very difficult task. As each author helps us understand, the expansion of subjects and methods has eroded the coherence of the survey itself. We simply cannot tell the kind of single narrative of the American past that was possible with the Presidential Synthesis. And yet, no viable alternative has emerged. |
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The result, the papers suggest, is a foundational moment in our discipline. It compels us individually and collectively to reconsider the very nature and purpose of survey courses. We are likely to agree, in Jonathan's words, that a survey course should provide students with a core body of knowledge and set of analytical skills. But persistent difficulties and disagreements undermine our ability to do that in any broadly agreed upon manner. |
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Three of those difficulties warrant particular emphasis. First, we have never followed the approach of the social sciences in which introductory courses in fields like sociology or psychology are explicitly designed to present a discipline and its basic questions, fields, and methods. Instead, our introductory courses have traditionally buried those goals out of a conviction that a narrative must take precedence over overt presentations of history as a discipline with distinctive domains and forms of analysis. Second, structural problems have exacerbated the problems of survey teaching. The survey course, at least in most colleges and universities, has become overloaded with multiple, often conflicting purposes: it is the last chance to reach some students, a recruitment device for upper division courses, a gatekeeper into those courses, a means of training graduate students, a testing ground for new teachers, a cash cow for FTEs, and on and on. These multiple goals often combine to stifle innovation. Finally, perhaps more clearly than in any other course, the survey reveals how the fragmentation of our discipline into a myriad of specialized fields and sub-fields has produced clashing definitions of what should be part of our general understanding of the American past. Since everything cannot be included, we clash over what should be privileged and what should be passed over. |
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As these papers tell us, foundational issues like these emerge whenever we talk about the survey course. Gender, race, ethnicity, and, I would add, class, are at the center of these debates. Finding effective ways to integrate them into our surveys of the American past has become one of the most critical means by which the problems posed by the survey class have been expressed and contested. |
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The Solutions | |
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The authors help us understand the problems that we all face in teaching and testing surveys. However, their papers also reveal that common understanding does not necessarily lead to uniform remedies. Each of them offers a particular way of tackling the problems of survey teaching; together they offer us a range of issues to think about as we debate ways to teach this primal course. |
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Mary tells us, for instance, that we are captives of an outmoded metaphor. She implores us to derail the train of history and the chronological journey it makes us take. Instead, she contends, we should adopt the web as our organizing framework. I think that the Web and its notion of interconnected people, events, ideas, and places at a time and over time is quite appealing as an organizing assumption. However, it is not clear to me just how that new approach will resolve our problems any more effectively than did the old. Why will the new metaphor enhance the integration of history's many disparate subjects? How would it promote the kind of inclusiveness she champions in a comprehensive but non-chronological manner? How will it allow us to approach critical methodological issues like periodization, which Peter Stearns once argued is our most important and critical method?2 |
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Jonathan challenges us to streamline our surveys and explore particular subjects such as Chinese exclusion policies and the story of Wong Kim Ark in greater substantive and analytical depth. Again, I think we are given a very compelling argument. It is not clear to me, though, whether the suggestion is that any extended exploration of a particular subject will provide teachers with a way to introduce students to critical knowledge and skills. Or, is it that certain subjects such as race provide the most effective and legitimate way of meeting those goals? The paper also made me wonder how in-depth explorations could or should be arranged temporally and spatially. And also I also wondered about the impact of survey courses that produced variable bodies of knowledge and skill on something like AP testing. |
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Diane tells us that the history of ethnicity in America is a field transformed. And she contends that it is more vital than ever because the history of ethnicity now reveals a past that can promote desperately needed toleration in the present—certainly a widely shared goal. Doing this, she intimates, would require teachers to master the subject and teach it in a more inclusive manner, one that avoids pigeonholing groups, regions, and eras. Her lengthy list of pedagogical goals for teaching the history of ethnicity reveals just how that might be done. I wondered, though, if the basic message of the paper is that we must all acquire a similar mastery of other subjects as well and a similar list of teaching goals and strategies for each of them. If so, how do we secure this knowledge of each field? Where is the time to do this for each field in the survey course? If not, why privilege ethnicity? |
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Finally, Uma asks us to think about the survey from the vantage point of testing, not course construction, and the vantage point of the AP test in particular. She reminds us that testing in many ways drives content, particularly for AP courses. And that reality makes me wonder whether testing encourages the kind of integration that the other speakers champion. One answer, I think, comes with her discussion of incorporating women's history into the test. She cites one of the questions: "From the 1840s through the 1890s, women's activities in the intellectual, social, economic, and political spheres effectively challenged traditional attitudes about women's place in society. Assess the validity of this statement." It seems to me that the import of an argument like Mary's is that questions like these should focus not internally on women's distinctive place, but rather externally on women's impact on the larger society. A question like this may well be a structural feature of testing that marginalizes women's history. Uma also compels us to think about the pedagogical context of survey teaching. Just how effective are we in teaching our ideas and methods to students? The demographic information she provides suggests a base of knowledge about learning styles that most college and university teachers, in particular, never think about. Indeed a whole new field on the scholarship of teaching and learning has emerged even though few of us are aware of it. Yet Uma makes it clear that the testing formats that we adopt in ignorance have an impact on student performance and thus on our success in meeting course goals. Since the survey is likely to include the most diverse membership of any of our courses, this kind of information may well be critical in determining course success. Whatever our course goals may be they cannot be achieved if we fail to reach our students. |
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The range of remedies advanced by the authors underscores the depth of the challenge posed by this foundational moment for the survey course. Together, the papers leave us with basic questions: Should there be uniform or varied approaches to both substance and method in survey courses? Are there core subjects, themes, and methods? What are the consequences of the choices we make for learning and testing? As the papers make clear, each of us must answer these questions in some fashion as we teach this most basic yet most critical course. |
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Conclusion | |
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I want to conclude with one final point. I think that the most important message of these papers is that rather than wallow in complaints about how hard it is to teach and test the American survey, we should seize the possibilities of this foundational moment and devise courses and tests worthy of our discipline and our students. I hope that message is heard. |
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Notes
1.Ê "Strategies of Narrative Synthesis in American History," American Historical Review, 107(2002), 129.
2.Ê "History and Policy Analysis: Toward Maturity," The Public Historian, 5(1982).
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