Rethinking the Survey Course

David Trask

Because the history survey course provides many students with the last formal opportunity for historical study and significantly aids in the construction of much of what the public knows about the past, it plays a fundamental role in the history profession. Despite this importance, however, survey courses can be a frustrating experience for both students and teachers. Students, for instance, remember the survey as an unsatisfactory narration of countless events, spanning centuries of time, and vast, unfamiliar, regions of the globe. As a result, their memory of the experience is often linked to the instructor's enthusiasm for the subject or, as is many times the case, the teacher's idiosyncrasies. Faculty experiences are not that different. The frustrations of students, seemingly faced with a blizzard of facts, is matched by faculty concern about the inability or unwillingness of students to grapple with the foundational knowledge that makes up the historical record. On a higher level, instructors worry about the failure of students to move beyond the "facts" and to think historically by putting material together in meaningful ways and connecting events with broader, more abstract questions. The situation outside the classroom is not much better. The survey course seems to be in the paradoxical position of being central to departmental activity, yet on the periphery of institutional and professional concern. This article seeks to explore this position further by first delving into the reasons for the paradox through an exploration of the theoretical issues surrounding specialization and generalization, and then suggesting areas where improvement is needed, especially concerning the professional status of community college historians who spend the bulk of their time teaching survey courses.

Trask

The Paradoxical Position of the Survey Course

The introductory history course occupies a paradoxical place in history departments in the United States. At four-year colleges and universities it is both the most central and the most peripheral activity of department members. Centrality is assured because these courses consume much of the classroom time spent by historians, generate the bulk of full-time equivalent student enrollments--which underwrite the overall package of departmental activities--and represent the totality of postsecondary exposure to historical study for most students. Functionally, it would seem to be the more central course offering, but since survey teaching faculty are in a profession dedicated to specialization, not generalization, it appears to remain on the fringe. Specialized study involves the examination of a narrowly defined body of evidence and the extraction from that evidence of clearly defined conclusions that seem to be true for that time and place. The goal of this activity, when operated under the aegis of "science," is the accurate recreation of a particular part of history, a brick in the overall structure of "what we know about the past." From this perspective, survey courses--which often cover centuries--cannot be accurate because they are too far removed from the evidence of the past and make broader generalizations than those warranted by the bounded study of specialists. Matters relating to cause and effect, worldview, or context, cannot be presented in a highly discriminatory fashion. Although the winnowing process occurs (or ought to) within the context of a set of organizing principles, the resulting course is vulnerable to the accusation that it is a watered-down, if not misleading, version of "true" historical findings. Survey courses have also come under fire for being built on generalizations that only reflect the perspectives and experiences of a mere portion of the population under study, often neglecting the achievements and perspectives of women and ethnic groups as well as non-elite whites. Critics hold that these "master narratives" legitimate the power positions of upper classes and act as part of their control mechanism over the rest of society (1). This position--coupled with the belief of some scholars that any attempt to represent the past is by its nature a misrepresentation--leaves the survey course in the untenable position of being built on methodology that has little support within the preferred paradigms of the history profession. This does not have to be the case, however, and with the resolution of certain issues, the survey course can once again move to the forefront of both the class and the profession.

Resolving the Issues

The first step in resolving the issues surrounding the survey course is to end its status as a derivative activity in a profession whose members frequently have other fish to fry. The survey course should be regarded as a separate specialty because of three interrelated factors: (a) it addresses a different audience--the general public instead of fellow historians or history majors; (b) it makes different kinds of generalizations from those appropriate for narrow fields of study; and (c) it requires a careful reading of current trends in society in addition to adherence to professional standards of inquiry. In other words, it contains different kinds of tensions from those that characterize other activities within the profession and requires perspectives and experiences which are both outside of and in addition to archival study.

Audience.

The teacher of the introductory history course looks outward from the profession to a public which possesses different intellectual frameworks and priorities. When historians write for each other, they start from a shared interpretative and methodological base. Students, on the other hand, bring to the class a body of knowledge developed outside the groves of academe and, for that reason, cannot be expected to readily learn history in the same way as historians. This issue extends beyond debates about the quantity of historical information that students bring--they often do not possess the same starting point, in terms of perspectives or experience, to make sense of the historical data in a scholarly way. Furthermore, because most students in introductory courses will not take upper-level history courses, instruction cannot be predicated on the assumption that the course only needs to present a part of the picture, with the expectation that students will acquire the rest of their historical perspective at a later time. In other words, the intellectual structures of historical study must be a deliberate feature of the course--not part of the assumed background.

Generalizations.

Faculty in introductory courses have to organize their presentations around generalizations that are different in at least two ways from those often used by professional historians. First, although historians arrive at generalizations at the end of a period of research and thought, these conclusions are presented to survey students as the starting point to a topic with which the student is largely unfamiliar. Because of this discrepancy, the information presented to students simply looks like more of the same unsupported pronouncements that permeate public discourse. From the outset, students need to learn how historians reach their conclusions, as well as how to use evidence so that they may reach conclusions of their own. Second, historians need to rethink these generalizations in relation to the purpose of the course. Should the course be a basic survey of past events, or should it help students to acquire the analytical tools needed to make sense of the past? Adoption of the second approach transforms introductory course instruction into a separate professional specialization. As long as history departments evaluate survey instruction solely within a traditional framework, it is not markedly different from upper level courses--except in that serious survey course instruction is virtually impossible because of the breadth of knowledge needed to teach it. Survey courses require material drawn from many more specializations than are required to defend a dissertation or for the successful completion of a doctoral program. As such, a presentation of the "best" recent findings of the historical community will not convey the necessary historical perspective to first-year students. In contrast, instructors must learn how to develop generalizations or approaches that have heuristic rather than purely "truth" value. Suitable generalizations open inquiry into a topic, rather than close off a conversation after a period of study. They can consist of questions for further study or thesis statements examined for their validity. Such generalizations represent a starting point for the study of a historical issue and help lead to a conclusion that is historically sound. In between, students should be exposed to thought processes that let them know how they reached their conclusions and what they concluded. Experienced introductory course instructors already know this--new instructors usually have to find this out on their own. If the distinction between generalization for the history profession and generalization for students is not recognized as valid, instructors may feel that the process of developing heuristic generalizations represents their drifting away from the central tenets of historical study. Instead, they are opening up the possibility of greater historical understanding for their students.

Knowledge of Current Cultural Trends

In addition to all of the training expected of historians, specialists in introductory teaching need an awareness of the world outside the profession and expertise in connecting the two worlds in ways that enlighten the public, while fairly and accurately representing the perspectives and activities of historical study. This awareness includes knowing not only what students think about, but also how they process information. For example, in survey courses historians introduce their students to ideas, events, and people that are oftentimes completely new. What previous experiences do students bring to their understanding of these issues? Analysts concerned with literacy and the impact of popular culture note that with the decline of reading, students bring less "book knowledge" to the classroom. Consequently, as they try to find examples in their own world to relate to historical material presented, they are more likely to use images and rhetoric from television and advertisements than material from novels or newspapers. The goal of the instructor should be to find ways to offer a course that understands the world of students, connects to it in meaningful ways, and concludes by moving the student into the realm of historical study, its contents, and processes.

Conclusion.

Although specialists argue with one another over such broad cultural issues as the end of history or the content of the canon, survey faculty--especially at the community college level--continue to serve as the bridge between the profession and the public at large. Survey faculty do this by organizing the historical knowledge of broad periods of time into presentations that make the findings about different periods and people intelligible and accessible to the general public. These instructors are also best able to inform the profession about conditions "out there." The recognition of introductory teaching as a specialization in its own right will address some of the trends within the profession that have helped place the introductory course on the margin of professional activity, and historians--if not history--on the margins of society. The introductory course can become the meeting ground of the profession as well as the bridge between professional historians and society. Lastly, because of the growing importance of community college faculty in survey course instruction, the status of the community college historians within the profession needs to improve. Although continuing to include community college historians in the formal structures of the profession, the Organization of American Historians, and other professional historical associations must now move in the direction of regularly making community college historians a part of the informal, but strategically important, activities and discussions of the organization.The formal groundwork needed for the full participation by historians at two-year colleges has begun. In the last few years the OAH created an ad hoc committee on community college issues and subsequently converted it into a formal entity--the Committee on Community Colleges--to provide a permanent forum for community college voices. Historians in the OAH, the American Historical Association (AHA), and the Community College Humanities Association (CCHA) have also advanced the process of formal inclusion. This effort led to the development of a joint publication that presents the views of community college historians along with a directory that facilitates outreach to faculty employed in the two-year venue. The Society for History Education published a special issue of The History Teacher on "History Teaching at the Community College" in November 1999. The National Endowment for the Humanities also has a long record of expecting and promoting the participation of community college faculty in all phases of their education programs. Formal inclusion has not led, however, to the full participation of "junior college" faculty in the activities of the OAH, especially in areas where they could make significant contributions. Examples of this omission have occurred in recent and otherwise very useful issues of the Journal of American History. Both the annual "Textbooks and Teaching" feature and the recent analysis of future directions in the survey course, did not include community college historians in the discussion. The time for the profession to create the conditions needed to move the participation of two-year college historians from the formal to the normal is well past due. One way to achieve this inclusion would be to establish survey teaching as a separate, valued specialization within the profession and to include historians at community colleges in all phases of this work. In turn, it is also time for these faculty to make themselves available for such projects.

1. See, for example, Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988); Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994); Pauline Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).

2. See, for example, David S. Trask, "Teaching History in Historical Times: A Side Stage Approach," Teaching History 21 (Fall 1996): 59-67.

David S. Trask teaches history at Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown, North Carolina.