Advice for Graduate Students Teaching the Survey Course

James W. Oberly

Teaching the U.S. survey at a community college or regional comprehensive university may very well be the first professional employment that a graduate student will receive today. A summary of a report by the Coalition on the Academic Work Force noted that "tenure-track faculty were teaching fewer than 50 percent of all introductory history courses"(1). Indeed, graduate students and part-time faculty are teaching the majority of survey classes taught in this country, including the U.S. history survey. This trend is most pronounced at Ph.D.-granting institutions, but is also characteristic of non-doctoral public institutions--where most college students are. According to the Department of Education's figures, the two biggest groups of college students in 1999-2000 were enrolled in community colleges (5.6 million) and in baccalaureate and master's-level regional comprehensive public universities (3.6 million).

These patterns in turn coincide with increased professional and student expectations about how the survey courses should be taught. To help new instructors face the challenge of teaching the U.S. history survey, the OAH Program Committee has scheduled a special session for graduate students called "Beyond the Lecture: An Interactive Workshop" at the upcoming OAH Annual Meeting. What follows is an introduction to some of the issues I have become familiar with over the years as a teacher, and an invitation to discuss teaching strategies further with me and other historians in Los Angeles.

"Know your audience," is good advice for any speaker, including beginning college history teachers. The typical U.S. survey course at a regional comprehensive public university has from forty to one hundred students. Generally, class size is usually small enough for the instructor to learn the names of each student in the class. Therefore, "know your audience by name" is a good starting point for a history teacher because the students expect to be treated as individuals and not as student ID numbers.

Knowing why your audience is in attendance is also sound advice. Students usually take history classes at regional comprehensives universities for one of two reasons: for general education credit, or for credit toward a history major. But these are not two groups of equal size. At my regional comprehensive university (which has an enrollment of 10,400), about 300 students major or minor in history. The other 10,100 students will take one, and only one history course in their college career for general education credit. Many of these students are pursuing majors in professional programs like business administration, management information systems, engineering, nursing, and teacher training. The vast majority of students sitting in class on the first day of "U.S. History to 1877," to be blunt, are forced to be there because of university degree requirements.

I believe the U.S. history instructor's task on that first day of class is to discuss the importance of general education with the students. This is the time to explain to students why university faculty believe that every one receiving a university diploma should be a well-educated man or woman, and that part of being educated is the development of a historical consciousness. This is also the time to explain that the skills developed in the study of history are useful in almost any pursuit in life. A U.S. history class, even if only a semester's worth, can help accomplish this goal.

Given a class that meets for three hours a week for a fifteen-week semester, the instructor will spend up to forty-five hours with a class over a term. That is quite a bit of time to spend together as a group. How to use that time to the best advantage is one of the biggest challenges facing a new instructor. The tried-and-true way to fill that time is to deliver forty-five separate lectures surveying American history. I--probably like most of my generation--began my teaching career developing such a set of lectures, but over the years, I learned that my students develop a fuller historical consciousness about change over time if they are put to work generating some history of their own. Early in my career I decided to borrow an idea from my mentor, Professor Mary Young of the University of Rochester, and have students restage a Lincoln-Douglas debate rather than deliver my lecture on the topic. I divided the class of fifty into two teams: Lincoln and Douglas, and subdivided these into presentation and rebuttal squads. I gave each squad copies of the speeches Lincoln and Douglas delivered in 1858 before the first of their debates. That experience taught me how well students could work together in teams and how competitive (in a positive sense!) students could be in class. Prior to this, their competitive side emerged only when they came to my office to fight for extra points on an essay. Most importantly, I learned that students in a general education survey could--and would--analyze and make use of primary sources to generate their own history during class time.

These days I put more emphasis on teamwork and less on competition between students in the classroom My survey classes are bigger now--usually eighty students per section--too big for the Lincoln-Douglas debate to include all of them. Still, I have had good success working with teams of students analyzing large databases in American history. In recent years, we have worked with colonial probate inventories; the Atlantic Slave Trade database; Civil War muster rolls; the population, manufacturing, and agriculture censuses; and the American National Election Series. Fortunately, many of these databases are available on the Web or on local area networks (LANs) in easy-to-use spreadsheets. I devote part of class time to hearing student teams report on their preliminary findings and then give a final report to accompany their papers. Afterwards, the class and I work to summarize and synthesize our collective findings. We conclude by creating a summary project--such as a map, table, or chart--that reflects what we learned from the sources and from one another.

The U.S. history survey is a venerable, yet flexible course. There are many successful approaches to structuring the course and the class time. Fellow panelists Peter Frederick (Wabash College), Priscilla Dowden (University of Missouri-St. Louis), and I invite you to join our interactive workshop at the OAH Annual Meeting to discuss different ways of teaching the U.S. survey.

Endnote

1. Robert B. Townsend, "Part-Time Faculty Surveys Highlight Disturbing Trends," AHA Perspectives, October, 2000.

James W. Oberly is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and serves as Chair of the OAH Membership Committee for Wisconsin. He is the author of Sixty Million Acres: American Veterans and the Public Lands Before the Civil War (Kent State University Press, 1990), and most recently, "Decision on Duck Creek: Two Green Bay Reservations and their Boundaries, 1816-1996," American Indian Culture and Research Journal (Fall, 2000).