The Backwards Survey

by Cliopatria

Here's a second concept course, though the idea is neither new nor mine, and maybe it's not really a concept course if several people have done it. Still, I would really like to try this someday.

The Backwards Survey
"Every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events prior or contemporaneous ... it is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements. And this Chaos, boundless as the habitation and duration of man, unfathomable as the soul and destiny of man, is what the historian will depict, and scientifically gauge, we may say, by threading it with single lines of a few ells in length!"
-- Thomas Carlyle,"On History"

Annette Atkins described this idea in the AHA's Perspectives several years ago, and Kenneth Hermann has apparently been doing this for some time too: teaching a history survey course backwards. (Kevin Drum blogged about the idea also, mentioning a high school teacher in Nebraska who was expressly prohibited by his school board from teaching this way.)

Here's how it works. In week one, you start with the present, maybe by discussing some obvious recent event, or by brainstorming with the class a list of contemporary issues and problems that you care about and want to try to explain (I like the way Atkins' piece describes this initial step.) That first week ends with the question: what do we need to know about the immediate past to understand this present? The students' homework is to look into the immediate history of the issues and events the class has flagged, and come to their next class prepared to talk about them. In week two, you repeat the process for that recent past. What do we need to know about the deeper past to understand these events? In week three, you go a little further back. And every subsequent week you travel further backwards in time.

This isn't just a cute trick. As Hermann's essay points out, it only makes sense for teachers to begin with the known and move to the unknown. Yet history courses violate this principle all the time. Teaching backwards begins with our students, with what they know and care about most. Yes, it is an unabashedly presentist approach, but I'm not sure that's a terrible crime. And is it any more presentist than turning all history into a narrative that leads inexorably up to us?

Hermann and Atkins both say that their students were not confused by going backwards. On the contrary, they seemed able to grasp more complex patterns and causal relationships than they did in traditional history surveys. You could argue that starting from the present isn't actually"backwards" at all, it's natural and instinctive. The deep past is more distant than the recent past. It takes longer to get there.

Atkins and Hermann also reported greater student interest and enthusiasm. Going backwards, each week's history is a puzzle to piece together. It gets the students asking,"Why did this happen?" and"What happened before?" Which are, I think, more compelling questions, and more intrinsic to the real work of historians than,"What happened next?" It's not like you can ever generate much suspense on the latter score anyway. (Cue Edna Krabappel as the last bell of the school year rings:"Children, wait! I didn't tell you how World War II ended!")

Atkins warns,"the point isn’t to convince the students that they stand at the bottom of a funnel, the inevitable result of all that has gone before, but the reverse." And this may be what interests me most about this idea. Because the backwards survey course shouldn't just be a pre-written textbook read back to front. As any event you care to talk about will have a myriad of contributing causes, predecessors, and contexts, you cannot know when the class begins exactly where it will end. The professor's homework each week is to get out ahead of the students--which is to say, behind--to track upstream in the directions that interested them, the questions raised and the places discussion went in class. Of course the professor has considerable ability to shape and direct discussion, to open or close avenues of inquiry that look more or less fruitful. But part of making this course work would be remaining open to contingency, and shifting some responsibility for direction onto the class itself. The ultimate goal of the backwards survey is not coverage but what Lendol Calder calls"uncoverage", enlisting students in the undertaking of digging up history, of looking backwards and asking,"why?"

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Rob MacDougall - 5/17/2008

Oscar, thanks very much for that. It's very interesting for me to hear how these notions actually worked in practice.

My wife is actually doing research on how history teachers responded to 9/11. I'll have to tell her your story.

Oscar Chamberlain - 5/17/2008

I used this approach for several years in an interdisciplinary gen ed course that combined US since 1945 with a Comm Arts course on group discussion. Students researched topics related the course for Group discussion and then presented those topics. For each set of discussions we assigned general topics and then let them narrow those down. Over the course of the semester, those topics formed themes.

It certainly was not perfect. It mirror-imaged one of the basic problems with the survey. If you start in 1945; it is sometimes hard to get to the present. If you start in the present, you have trouble getting back to 1945.

In my particular context, I think it worked well for the following reasons. One, the Comm Arts instruction took considerable class time. As Rob notes, this approach can help reinforce the connections between events over time that I was not always able to communicate fully.

Second, I was teaching at a 2 year campus, and many of the students had very weak background in history. Going from the known to the unknown was one way to generate greater interest in and inculcate greater understanding of the history of the last 50 years.

Finally, one week into the first semester that we did this, 9/11 happened. Starting with the present allowed me to be sure that the course communicated to the students the circumstances that led to 9/11 and the background to those circumstances. I believed that doing so was a civic duty as well as a historians duty. This was certainly a factor in my continuing to use this approach.

Rob MacDougall - 5/16/2008

Well, "gimmick" / "concept course" may just be synonyms with different connotations.

I'm all for courses organized around strong questions too, but I think the backwards course offers one (not the only) way to bring a stronger sense of inquiry and purpose to a survey class like "Canada since 1900" or "the U.S. since 1877" - which despite being the most common and most often mandatory courses, are often very weakly conceptualized.

I stand by the idea of beginning from the known and moving towards the unknown. Or towards the "less known", if you like. No matter how good their prior exposure to history, it's safe to assume my students are more familiar with 2008 than with 1877.

One other thing the backwards course has going for it is that any other starting point but the present is going to be arbitrary and incomplete.* Why start the U.S. survey at 1877? Well, Reconstruction ended. But we don't know why that's important without knowing the Civil War. But we don't know what that's all about without knowing antebellum history, and then it's turtles all the way down. You ask: "Isn't it the historian's job to point out that we can't really know the present without knowing a good bit about the past?" Absolutely yes! That's the whole raison d'etre of the backwards survey course.

(*Unless you're starting from the Big Bang, I guess, and that's my next concept course.)

Sherman Jay Dorn - 5/16/2008

Starting with the present and working backwards seems to me more of a gimmick than a functional organization for the course. Yes, you can drive a course with a strong question (which would come from starting with the present, if tending to generate a presentist focus), but why not start with the strong question and organize the course around that rather than the backwards chronology?

I also admit I cringed at the claim that "it only makes sense for teachers to begin with the known and move to the unknown." Isn't it the historian's job to point out that we can't really know the present without knowing a good bit about the past? It's also probably wrong to assume that high school students have had no exposure to history. They may have had exposure to bad history, or they may not think of what they are fascinated by (the lives their grandparents lived, or the civil-rights stories they've grown up with) are historical. But they don't come to you or me tabula rasa on history.

Jonathan Dresner - 5/15/2008

My wife, in HS, had a US history survey which started with WWI, then doubled back to Columbus after reaching the present (on the grounds that the 19c is pretty well-traveled ground, though she claims she never got much between the Civil War and WWI. Neither did I, and my classes were linear).

My late aunt used to start a US survey with a unit on the last 10-20 years, during which the students would collectively make a list of some of the biggest issues. Then they would go back to the beginning and use those issues as the themes which dominated the year.

I've often thought about that model, especially for my modern Asia courses: start with a contemporary movie and/or personal narrative (I love using first-person stuff), spend some time discussing it, then go back to the beginning. That way the course starts in a relatively familiar place.

I don't know that it would work all that well for my pre-modern courses: the ending place is already sufficiently unfamiliar to students that constructing it from the ground up makes more sense.

For World History, it's already so damned whiggish that I don't see the point.

Alan Allport - 5/15/2008

Just wanted to say that I am really enjoying these, Rob. Keep 'em coming.