Consider this paradox about the history survey: While no two courses are very much alike, most history surveys are basically the same. The contradiction becomes apparent when we distinguish between what survey instructors teach and how they teach it.
The content of history surveys varies considerably from course to course. Because professors come to their subjects with different training, interests, personalities, and worldviews, they make different choices about what information to include and what to leave aside. Even on topics generally thought to be important, professors will diverge in the ways they spin the same information. For this reason, every survey is unique if only because no two teachers are alike.
But if we examine how teachers teach the survey, a very different picture of the course emerges. When Daniel J. Cohen examined nearly 800 syllabi for U.S. History surveys posted on the World Wide Web, he concluded that most instructors take a “pedestrian, by the book” approach to teaching the course. To Cohen, the evidence from course syllabi suggests a typical process for designing survey courses: “Choose a popular textbook from one of the large publishers, throw in a few quizzes, a midterm, and a final, and instructors quickly have a ready-made course.” (“By the Book: Assessing the Place of Textbooks in U.S. Survey Courses,” Journal of American History, March 2005.) It is in this sense one can say that most surveys are pretty much the same.
If in most history surveys the textbook is the syllabus, this feature combines with other elements to define a traditional pedagogy for the course:
- The goal: to cover as much essential information as possible
- The big question: “What does the textbook/instructor say?”
- The primary resources for information: lectures and textbook
- The primary mode of assessment: retelling what the textbook/instructor said
While coverage courses share a basic pedagogical DNA, history teachers often customize the standard formula of lectures + textbooks + examinations with their own variations. For example, some teachers supplement the textbook with primary sources. Others ask students to read a novel. Still others require participation in a classroom debate. More and more instructors are leavening their courses with occasional active learning activities that break the routine of lectures and lecture/discussions. Another heartening development is that many teachers now will even say on the syllabus that teaching critical and historical thinking is an important goal of their course. Nevertheless, good intentions like these are often canceled out by the powerful inertia exerted by elements of traditional survey pedagogy. Without extensive training and/or a reward structure to support sustained thinking about learning and course design, it can be very difficult to align new goals for the survey with effective teaching methods and appropriate assessments. Thus, while innovation is everywhere, much of it is a bricolage of disjointed ideas and activities. The pedagogical model which most survey courses are constructed continues to be old-fashioned coverage.
From an undergraduate’s point of view, a history survey laid out along conventional lines will look a lot like other introductory courses. From anthropology to zoology, College 101 courses tend to ask students to do the same things. They buy a textbook. They go to lectures. They attend discussions. They cram for examinations. Sometimes they write a paper on a prompt supplied by the professor. The point to note is that history surveys share with other introductory courses a common generic pedagogy, a course design so ingrained in undergraduate education that it goes generally unremarked and unquestioned. Deserving a name, we might call it the “coverage mystique.”
From a professor’s point of view, the content covered in a U.S. history survey makes this course entirely different from, say, Psychology 101. But here we confront the paradox of the survey on the largest scale. The two courses are indeed different. But they are also fundamentally similar, in the sense that both courses share a generic pedagogy geared to produce the same outcome: teachers who can cover a body of knowledge regarded as fundamental by experts in the discipline. What students actually learn from such courses is a separate question, which, in history, has gone surprisingly unstudied.
A Three Question Quiz to determine if your survey is a coverage survey:
1. As I walked to class today, the thought in my mind was
a. What will I say today?
b. What will they do today?
2. The assessments I use in my survey permit students to think that being “good” at history means
a. knowing and repeating correct information about the past.
b. performing basic cognitive “moves” that matter to historians.
3. In my survey, history is conceptualized
a. as a subject (e.g., “Colonial Latin America”).
b. as a discipline (e.g., a way of knowing).
If you answered two or more of these questions with (a), then chances are you are in the grip of pedagogical inertia.