Ok, so I haven't kept up my New Year's Resolution to post at least once a week. My colleague Michael Lee is mostly to blame. I am currently team-teaching a class with him. It is an American Literature/History "learning community, and we meet for two hours daily and, truth be told, I am barely keeping up with the reading assignments for the literature section. We just finished reading Edith Wharton's classic, "House of Mirth," on Thursday. Remarkable book--poor Lily Bart! The upper classes of fin de siècle America were a vicious bunch! What a jungle.
But this "learning community" has raised some serious questions for me: what do student really need to know? Are there particular facts that students MUST learn in a US history survey course? What if I skip the Populist Movement (one of my favorite topics, by the way) or the War of 1812? What if I do not spend much time on politics in the late nineteenth century and instead spend more time on Women's Suffrage or the Harlem Renaissance?
In my usual survey courses, I try my best to cover the broad outlines of US history--we read a textbook chapter or two every week.
In this learning community, however, so far we have spent three weeks on Reconstruction and race relations in the post-Reconstruction South, one week on the American West, and one week on industrialization (which we will be exploring in various forms for another couple weeks). We are already at least two weeks behind where I would normally be and we are focusing primarily on themes as they relate to the literature of the period. In short, I am making no attempt at broad coverage.
I'm having a great time and I think are students are as well. I think they're learning a lot. We're going into more depth and I would argue doing more critical analysis. Aren't those the skills and habits of mind we're trying to instill?
But it raises many questions in my own mind about how I teach, what I should be teaching, and what students really need to know.
One question central to history and the humanities: Are there specific facts that students need to know in order to pass a college survey course? Is there a specific body of knowledge that must be mastered in my history classes?
Or, is history--like the liberal arts generally--more about cultivating habits of mind like critical inquiry and critical thinking? Is developing a "historical consciousness" (a term we history teachers use to mean, I think, an ability to recognize the ways that history has shaped and continues to shape the world around us) about learning specific facts or about recognizing and exploring connections, being sensitive to context, and asking why things are happening as well as venturing forth conclusions that pay attention to historical origins?
A recent article I read ventures forth a compelling definition of the liberal arts:
The liberal arts, argues the author, "aren't bodies of knowledge that can be ladled out. They can't be set down on a study sheet (though developing them requires the mastery of specific bodies of knowledge). They are abilities, like the ability to see beauty or do critical inquiry, and are cultivated or brought out of (e-duced from) students' latent powers." *
By this definition, it would seem that WHAT you cover is not as important as HOW you cover it. Do you subject historical facts to a process of in-depth inquiry and analysis? Operating on this principle, it should not matter if you explore ten topics or one topic during the quarter, as long as students are cultivating their higher faculties.
But are most of our students ready for that kind of seminar-like focus?
Ok, so I'll keep chewing on these conflicts:
Coverage vs. Depth
Facts/"Knowledge" vs. Habits of Mind; Critical Thinking
*Jeff Lustig, "The University Besieged," Thought and Action (Fall 3007), 10.
