Uncovered, a new approach to the survey?


Yesterday my department had a lunchtime brownbag discussion about Lendol Calder’s new way of teaching the survey (although, as you’ll see, him calling it “the survey” is a misnomer).

The idea, articulated in an influential 2006 JAH piece, is that attempting to cover everything that happens from 1865 to 2011 turns into a plodding along of facts that is pedagogically unsound. Students get bored, he says, and they don’t retain the information. It isn’t working. His “uncoverage” approach is instead a topical approach to history, working through big subjects (in his examples: “the Cold War” or “the civil rights movement”) and forgetting about trying to cover everything. He then has his students uncover history for themselves, using documentaries, primary source documents, and dueling textbooks (Howard Zinn versus Paul Johnson is his example). He hopes that students will then leave the semester knowing: (1) a lot about the Cold War (and the other topics he’s selected); and (2) a lot about thinking historically and understanding that history is contested ground but premised on evidence and interpretation. This is a thin summary, but you get the gist.

There is much merit this approach, and to his credit Calder (and my department’s advocates for him) has got me re-thinking the way I set up my discussion sections and even some of the readings I assign in my 100-level survey. Indeed, after the brownbag I am even more impressed with the Major Problem series, which consciously sees history as a series of arguments with results based on documents.

On the other hand, there are several problems with Calder’s approach, at least as it appears in the article. First, he’s teaching a ten-week semester, for 30 students, on 1945 to the present. With such limitations, his approach is probably wonderful. But in my experience, a class of that description is not “the survey” but an upper-division class. In my 100-level classes, I get 120 students in a lecture hall with bolted down seats and two TAs who lead Friday discussion sections. We’re talking apples and oranges here. When I teach upper-division classes, I’m most certainly taking another look at the article.

In addition to this complaint, the syllabus he proposes spends a full third of the classtime watching documentaries. One third! To me, this is just lazy lecturing. Plus, if he thinks sitting through a lecture is boring (is it, really?), has he tried to stay awake through “God in America” or almost any Ken Burns’ documentary? I usually last about 15 minutes before the saccharine music and the long, panning skyward shots have got me reaching for my afghan and increasing my horizontal ratio. Plus, is using as a model of the “typical” lecture the famous scene from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (“Anyone? Anyone?”) really fair? It’s certainly not my approach to the classroom, and I doubt it’s anyone’s.

On the other hand, Calder makes a good case for how we learn (and therefore how our students’ learn).

One of his best arguments is that we learn when it matters, and a test isn’t quite good enough to create “mattering.” This got me thinking: what if I restructured my 16-week survey around 16 topics that slide chronologically forward. For instance, assuming that the industrial revolution is a meritorious starting point, what if we spend the first day going through technological breakthroughs in American life, then pull back to the late 19th century to see how we got to where we are today. The next week could be an investigation of, say, why Chicago (my city) is so racially segregated today. Clearly Reconstruction and the New South and the Great Migration would come up. Then third, the role of women in politics, which will highlight the Progressive Era movement toward female suffrage. Then the relationship between government and industry, a la the New Deal. Etc.

Of course, we’d need a concise textbook to keep the thread alive (go HIST!). But I wonder, has anyone with my kind of constraints tried this approach? Can uncoverage work in a real survey?

11 thoughts on “Uncovered, a new approach to the survey?

  1. Yes, it certainly can, but you have to do something that I can tell from reading this blog that would be difficult for you all: You have to concede that you won’t be able to cover everything. That means that lots of the topics covered on earlier posts here are going to get a lot less time, hopefully not so that students can watch documentaries (although a little video can be a good thing) but so that you can teach more skills and less facts.

    When you do that, you get the added advantage of being able to kill your textbook without looking back (which I can tell you from experience is absolutely liberating).

  2. Jonathan, thanks for your post. Let’s pretend that I’m willing to give up coverage (which of course I’ve long given up–it’s impossible to cover everything–but I’m not yet willing to give up a single complex, confused chronological narrative of the past). How do you do unconverage in a large classroom where it doesn’t turn into, as Toynbee put it, “one damned thing after another”? I’m very curious to hear your ideas as to how you’ve made this work.

  3. Thanks for this post. As an early-career scholar, I’d love to see links to examples of “uncoverage” syllabi, along with instructors’ comments about what worked well about them (or didn’t) and what you plan to adjust in the future.

  4. Nice look at a topic that deserves more attention and examination as to applicability in the differing levels of History teaching. I agree on the point that tests don’t create the right level of ‘mattering’- from my own experience, leading discussion sections with undergrads, the moment you mention the word test the only thing they care about, with regards to material, is ‘will this be on the test?” One thing that struck me on your ’16 sliding topics idea’ is that the presentation might be too fragmented, and you might have too little time, to adequately cover the topics you select.

    Maybe you should look at clustering around four or three topics over the sixteen weeks, so you give students time to absorb the material you cover. As a GTA, I’ve often been on the front lines when a professor has to ‘rush’ through material and students spend most of their discussion period grilling me as to what they should have in their notes.

    Maybe you can ‘guide’ them to self-selection of topics or novel sources? If you want to tackle technological breakthroughs, give a general overall lecture and perhaps give students the opportunity to select from a list of names or pieces of technology and let them explore the topic themselves. The key would be to guide them to sources that are ready and easy to access- in this way you can cover skills in each cluster (document analysis, material culture analysis, etc..) but keep it fresh as your students are finding topics that interest them. They should keep blogs that demonstrate the process of discovery they go through- or perhaps encourage your students to use Twitter and appropriate hashtags so that disparate students working on similar topics can interact and help each other out, both in and outside of class. It would be *a lot* of work on your part, but once you figured out the initial format and did the legwork you could modify the course over time to keep it fresh.

    Very interesting topic though- I look forward to seeing what ‘solution’ you come up with!

  5. I am very interested in this approach as a high school teacher. I struggle trying to cover the material without having to give lectures or worksheet/reading assignments. We try to cover all of US History in one year, but it will never be done to the depths I wish it could.

    I, too, would be interested in seeing more resources and syllabi. I think the students would get much more out of this approach that it would be fun to work into my classroom.

    How would you formally asses the students at the completion of each ‘unit’ or theme? Would you still give tests, assign papers, or is the process itself their formal assessment?

  6. Why would you need a textbook at all? How about a set of readings compiled in a packet, or perhaps on a wiki or in a google documents shared folder?

  7. Jeremy, thanks for the good wishes! I’m not sure I would feel comfortable defining 150 years of American history by three or four themes–that sounds a bit too thin for me, and it would become a topics course anyway. But maybe 8 would be better, giving me the complex, broad narrative that I’d like them to leave with, but also an in-depth knowledge of how history works and why it’s important.

    Makenzie, you’ll have to look at the original piece, but I think he has his students write a paper for each week’s section, before they read the textbook (a Friday assignment) and using only the primary source documents (they are due on Wednesdays). Evidently the papers improve over time. Then I think he depends a lot on class participation. I’m not certain if there is more assessment going on.

    Anonymous, as I’ve been saying, I still think giving our students a long, complex narrative of American history (where the New Deal fits in broadly, not just in the context the government’s relationship to business) is very important. Otherwise, why does it matter that the New Deal happened in the 1930s?

    Keep the comments coming though. This is very instructive.

  8. IIRC, Caldor’s assessments look like this: 1) He requires the students to write film critiques, so they’re not just watching movies to pass time, but learning to critique visual representations of history (which is where most people get history these days). 2) The do short assignments and papers using primary documents from that week’s topic, with each assignment teaching a skills such as formulating good questions, developing hypotheses, making connections between documents, “sourcing” documents, and making evidence-based arguments. He gives the students feedback and expects them to incorporate it into the next assignment or short paper. They also discuss in class the documents and the cognitive skill they practiced in the assignment. 3) They compare and contrast the two textbooks and then come to class prepared to discuss how historians interpret and assign meaning to the past. In order to ensure the students read and come prepared, he gives short reading quizzes on these days. 4) At the end of the semester, rather than a final, the students write a five-page essay making a case for one or the other book, providing reasons and evidence to support their choice. So the key difference here is that aside from the quizzes, there’s no memorization or tests, just frequent short assessments.

    I’ve had mixed results this semester with the approach. I spend one week on each topic, which lines up fairly well with the textbook chapters we read, from pre-contact through the Civil War. I only have 23 students, so the discussions usually go fairly well, but I suspect that for classes with 100+ students you’d need to rely on TA’s to do a lot of this in their sections.

    I don’t do the movies, primarily because I didn’t have time to select films that would go along with that week’s topic and do what I wanted it to do.

    On the primary source workshops, Calder suggests using a reader, which I’ve done, but the weakness here is that readers usually have documents that are really only connected by time period, not subject, so the students are forced to do the assignment with widely disparate documents. So I think I’ll try using Sam Wineburg’s website, historicalthinkingmatters.org, which provides clusters of documents that treat specific events, such as Rosa Parks’ activism or the Social Security Act. I think having the students work through documents that treat the same subject, but from different perspectives, gets them closer to doing what historians do in their research.

    On the two textbooks, I’ve found that students have a hard time remembering what one textbook says, much less what two say. And my first year students don’t seem to have developed the ability yet to really take good notes on what they read so they can make informed contrasts between the two books and then come to class prepared to discuss them. The purpose of the assignment is to help the students realize that historians make interpretive decisions, but I think there are simpler ways to do it than having them march through two textbooks.

  9. Scott, thanks for these tips. The syllabus for the first half of the survey is great, and a good model to ponder over.

    And David G., thanks for your input. It’s good to hear what this sounds like on the ground. Using a website for docs is a great idea too–saves money and you have total control. Major Problems is good too, but I have a hard time fitting it all in!

    Still, if you wouldn’t mind letting us know how things go at the end of the semester, that would be really helpful.

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