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Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey
Lendol Calder
| History professors say the darnedest things. Like the one who summed up his teaching philosophy declaring, "If I said it, that means they learned it!" Or the colleague who scoffed at "trendy" educational reforms because, as she put it, "You can't teach students how to think until you've taught them what to think." Then there was the time an eminent historian rose to speak after my presentation on how not to teach the history survey. "I may be doing it wrong," conceded this gifted, award-winning teacher, "but I am doing it in the proper and customary way."1 |
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The professor's droll remark points to where we stand today in the teaching of history surveys, perhaps especially the U.S. history survey. Generations of undergraduates can testify that introductory surveys are taught in a "proper and customary way." "First you listen to a lecture, then you read a textbook, then you take a test," is how a student described her survey to me, adding, significantly, "It wasn't different, really, from my other introductory courses." Here historians flirt with calamity. When the only history course most people ever take from a professionally trained historian tempts students to believe there is little difference between history and sociology or history and biology except for the facts to be learned, it is not surprising that teachers occasionally sense they might be "doing it wrong."2 |
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The feeling is as old as it is accurate. For as long as there have been survey courses, some teachers have suspected that the vacant expressions on students' faces (so famously portrayed in the "Anyone? ... Anyone?" history-class scene in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off) are not so much indications of the students' shortcomings as predictable products of the survey itself, whose basic design requires professors and textbooks to pass on essential information about a historical period. This emphasis on "coverage" accounts for the course's trademark routines—earnest lectures, stolid textbooks, decontextualized assessments, flagrant and routine violations of Auerbach's law (as in Arnold "Red" Auerbach, the distinguished learning theorist and coach of National Basketball Association [NBA] legends, who summarized his teaching philosophy by declaring, "It's not what you say; it's what they hear").3 Some teachers have always suspected that to make the survey "a serious house ... proper to grow wise in," to borrow imagery from Philip Larkin, it would not be enough to juice up the lectures and write better textbooks. Nor would it be enough to tinker with content by assigning a few novels, or rearranging the chronology, or reorganizing lectures around a set of new themes. For at least a century, some have asserted that nothing less will do than a complete redesign of the survey, from its basic assumptions up.4 |
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So when I claim that the typical, coverage-oriented survey is a wrongheaded way to introduce students to the goodness and power of history, I am not saying anything outrageous or new. But pedagogical inertia happens. While everything else touching the survey has changed—think back to the days of the presidential synthesis, when classroom technology meant pull-down maps and chalkboards, when tweedy professors lectured to what back then were called "freshmen"—the old routines of coverage remain firmly in place. Thus the problem that bedeviled our teachers and their teachers before them continues to vex us today: What is to be done with the history survey? |
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I hope it is not useless to argue yet again for significant changes in the way we teach these most important of history courses. True, obstacles that defeated earlier calls for reform have not gone away. Professional reward structures continue to discourage careful inquiry into the problems of teaching. Institutional constraints still make large classes obligatory, while old folk beliefs about learning continue to be impervious to cognitive science. Neither do current political trends favor reform, unless one believes that narrow testing regimes and a return to "traditional" American history should define the horizon of what is possible. |
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