Mar 3, 2005
Teaching Africa II: The Possibilities of Sequencing
Continuing my response to Ross Douthat’s indictment of Harvard’s curriculum (I’m now reading Douthat’s book Privilege), I will add parenthetically that I think Douthat got a bit excessively beat up by some of his critics. It’s true that Douthat’s complaint that none of his professors “pushed back” on their students, or that it is possible to graduate from an elite university without being challenged, has as much or more to do with the students as it does the institutions or faculty. It's also fair to say that the way he made this criticism was a bit whiny. However sympathetic I might be to his criticisms of undergraduate curricula, I don’t think there is any way to design a challenging course of study that cannot be avoided by some students. Students have to take responsibility for their own education: a curricular program designed around confronting the weakest or most irresponsible student is going to be horribly confining or boring to the best or most dedicated pupils.
In any event, I do think Douthat has a point about the relative internal incoherence of the vast majority of curricula at elite universities and colleges, that it is possible even for a well-intentioned, dedicated student to find it a struggle to connect their courses and find some kind of knowledge that is shared or general through them. In my last posting on this issue, I observed that constructing a new core curriculum would be genuinely difficult, both in general and in terms of the role of my specific area of expertise, modern African history.
There’s another strategy that occurs to me. Perhaps rather than trying to shoehorn the busy hustle and bustle of the typical curriculum into a single unified and highly structured core, faculty could take what they’re already doing but add explicit linkages for the students. The best way I can think of to accomplish this would be to eliminate the conventional departmental major across the board and instead construct linked sequences of already-existing courses where a student would be required to take all parts of a sequence and where a certain number of completed sequences would be required for graduation.
I’m thinking a bit here of how I went about my own undergraduate studies. I double majored in English and History at Wesleyan University. Each of those departments allowed a significant amount of flexibility in the way they constrained a major: English majors needed to take a pre-1800 course, while History majors at that time had to choose from one of (I think) five subject tracks to focus on. Basically, I think I got a lot of added value out of the curriculum by pursuing an enormous number of courses in related subject areas—the developing world, colonialism and imperialism, and so on—both in and out of my departmental majors. Yes, I also got value from courses that were outside of that topical focus—a course I did with Stephen White called Law in Medieval Iceland was one of the best methodological courses in history I’ve ever had, for example.
The benefit of this strong topical linkage between the lion’s share of my courses is that I graduated with some sense of a coherent competency in a few highly focused areas as well as the conventional “critical thinking” skills that a liberal arts education is supposed to impart. Douthat’s concern is that there are Harvard undergrads and undergrads at similar institutions who may get the critical thinking experience but who lack any sense of a coherent mastery of some particular concrete subject.
Let me use my own department as an example of both the problem and the possibilities. A student has to take nine credits to complete a history major. Two of those credits can be AP credits. One can be earned abroad. Our upper-level Honors seminars count for two credits. So it’s possible, let’s say, for a major to have two AP credits, a credit in the history of Spain picked up while abroad, my course The History of the Future, my colleague Bruce Dorsey’s course Murder in a Mill Town, my colleague Lillian Li’s survey of modern Chinese history, a double-credit Honors seminar in the history of fascism from my colleague Pieter Judson, and our senior research seminar required for majors. I feel very comfortable saying that this student will have been exposed to the methodology of history, a variety of approaches to the discipline, some very challenging examples of critical thinking, and some really great teaching from the various professors. A really gifted student is going to be able to forge some powerful linkages between those different subjects and make them “speak” to one another. Most students, though, are going to end up very capable critical thinkers who have a hodgepodge of specific knowledge.
So let’s fix this without mandating a core curriculum and making me get rid of my favorite course (History of the Future) or making Bruce Dorsey get rid of his amazingly cool Murder in a Mill Town, and so on. Instead of saying, “Ok, you can choose what you like for your nine credits”, we offer instead sequences such as “The United States in the 18th and 19th Century” in which the student must take the following existing courses:
History 5a United States to 1877
History 7a African-American History to 1877
[the student would have to take these both first as introductions, then in any order:]
History 46 The Coming of the Civil War OR History 48 Murder in a Mill Town OR History 42 The American Revolution
English 51 Fictions in American Realism
Pols 17 American Political Thought
Religion 2b Religion in America
The student taking that would still get all the exposure to critical thinking and historical methodology, but they’d also have a competency, a depth, in a single subject. It’s 7 credits, so most Swarthmore students could easily be expected to do 3 or 4 such sequences in their time here.
If I look over our curriculum, I see at least four such sequences that I could comfortably fit all my existing Africa-related courses in. One would be “Modern Africa”, which would link my courses to related courses in economics, political science, and literature. Another might be “Culture and Consciousness in Africa and the African Diaspora”, which could encompass my courses with courses in dance, religion, music, and literature. A third could be “The Atlantic System and Slavery in Africa and the Americas” which would link my courses with those of several of my colleagues in the department and to colleagues in religion and elsewhere. A fourth might be “Globalization and Comparative History”.
This approach has the disadvantage that it defers any discussion of curricular changes where we might have to ask whether we have too little or too much of certain topics, or whether there are core issues and subjects that are relatively excluded from our curriculum. It would also require a lot of changes to departmental programs which are highly sequential and extremely demanding at Swarthmore, primarily in the sciences. It would be experienced as a frustrating constraint by many students. There's also the problem of what to do with creative, interesting courses that don't really fit any easily defined sequence: I don't know, for example, what one would do with my History of the Future course.
But it strikes me as a much easier and ultimately more fertile strategy than trying to take the often wonderful curricular variety now available and shoehorn it into a tightly prescriptive core curriculum.
In any event, I do think Douthat has a point about the relative internal incoherence of the vast majority of curricula at elite universities and colleges, that it is possible even for a well-intentioned, dedicated student to find it a struggle to connect their courses and find some kind of knowledge that is shared or general through them. In my last posting on this issue, I observed that constructing a new core curriculum would be genuinely difficult, both in general and in terms of the role of my specific area of expertise, modern African history.
There’s another strategy that occurs to me. Perhaps rather than trying to shoehorn the busy hustle and bustle of the typical curriculum into a single unified and highly structured core, faculty could take what they’re already doing but add explicit linkages for the students. The best way I can think of to accomplish this would be to eliminate the conventional departmental major across the board and instead construct linked sequences of already-existing courses where a student would be required to take all parts of a sequence and where a certain number of completed sequences would be required for graduation.
I’m thinking a bit here of how I went about my own undergraduate studies. I double majored in English and History at Wesleyan University. Each of those departments allowed a significant amount of flexibility in the way they constrained a major: English majors needed to take a pre-1800 course, while History majors at that time had to choose from one of (I think) five subject tracks to focus on. Basically, I think I got a lot of added value out of the curriculum by pursuing an enormous number of courses in related subject areas—the developing world, colonialism and imperialism, and so on—both in and out of my departmental majors. Yes, I also got value from courses that were outside of that topical focus—a course I did with Stephen White called Law in Medieval Iceland was one of the best methodological courses in history I’ve ever had, for example.
The benefit of this strong topical linkage between the lion’s share of my courses is that I graduated with some sense of a coherent competency in a few highly focused areas as well as the conventional “critical thinking” skills that a liberal arts education is supposed to impart. Douthat’s concern is that there are Harvard undergrads and undergrads at similar institutions who may get the critical thinking experience but who lack any sense of a coherent mastery of some particular concrete subject.
Let me use my own department as an example of both the problem and the possibilities. A student has to take nine credits to complete a history major. Two of those credits can be AP credits. One can be earned abroad. Our upper-level Honors seminars count for two credits. So it’s possible, let’s say, for a major to have two AP credits, a credit in the history of Spain picked up while abroad, my course The History of the Future, my colleague Bruce Dorsey’s course Murder in a Mill Town, my colleague Lillian Li’s survey of modern Chinese history, a double-credit Honors seminar in the history of fascism from my colleague Pieter Judson, and our senior research seminar required for majors. I feel very comfortable saying that this student will have been exposed to the methodology of history, a variety of approaches to the discipline, some very challenging examples of critical thinking, and some really great teaching from the various professors. A really gifted student is going to be able to forge some powerful linkages between those different subjects and make them “speak” to one another. Most students, though, are going to end up very capable critical thinkers who have a hodgepodge of specific knowledge.
So let’s fix this without mandating a core curriculum and making me get rid of my favorite course (History of the Future) or making Bruce Dorsey get rid of his amazingly cool Murder in a Mill Town, and so on. Instead of saying, “Ok, you can choose what you like for your nine credits”, we offer instead sequences such as “The United States in the 18th and 19th Century” in which the student must take the following existing courses:
History 5a United States to 1877
History 7a African-American History to 1877
[the student would have to take these both first as introductions, then in any order:]
History 46 The Coming of the Civil War OR History 48 Murder in a Mill Town OR History 42 The American Revolution
English 51 Fictions in American Realism
Pols 17 American Political Thought
Religion 2b Religion in America
The student taking that would still get all the exposure to critical thinking and historical methodology, but they’d also have a competency, a depth, in a single subject. It’s 7 credits, so most Swarthmore students could easily be expected to do 3 or 4 such sequences in their time here.
If I look over our curriculum, I see at least four such sequences that I could comfortably fit all my existing Africa-related courses in. One would be “Modern Africa”, which would link my courses to related courses in economics, political science, and literature. Another might be “Culture and Consciousness in Africa and the African Diaspora”, which could encompass my courses with courses in dance, religion, music, and literature. A third could be “The Atlantic System and Slavery in Africa and the Americas” which would link my courses with those of several of my colleagues in the department and to colleagues in religion and elsewhere. A fourth might be “Globalization and Comparative History”.
This approach has the disadvantage that it defers any discussion of curricular changes where we might have to ask whether we have too little or too much of certain topics, or whether there are core issues and subjects that are relatively excluded from our curriculum. It would also require a lot of changes to departmental programs which are highly sequential and extremely demanding at Swarthmore, primarily in the sciences. It would be experienced as a frustrating constraint by many students. There's also the problem of what to do with creative, interesting courses that don't really fit any easily defined sequence: I don't know, for example, what one would do with my History of the Future course.
But it strikes me as a much easier and ultimately more fertile strategy than trying to take the often wonderful curricular variety now available and shoehorn it into a tightly prescriptive core curriculum.