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YC INNOVATION ABSTRACTS x67!

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tA Published by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development
With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Sid W. Richardson Foundation

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TEACHING HISTORY IN THE TWO-YEAR COLLEGE: SOME CURRENT CHALLENGES

I teach at a large urban community college of some 5200 students. We have the rather typical student body
for colleges of our type: the majority of our students hold full- or part-time jobs; many are married with fami-
lies; all are commuter students; about half attend at night; many are the first generation in their families to at-
tend college. For many, college is only one of several competing demands on their time. Their average age is
26. About 20% are Black and 7% Hispanic.

Like most history teachers, I was raised on the traditional lecture-discussion method and gave no thought
to changing when | began teaching in the late 60s. However, my school, like many, went through the self-
pacing phase several years ago. It was mandated that self-paced sections of certain courses would be offered,
and I found myself developing and teaching such sections of our Colonial through Reconstruction U.S. History
survey.

My course involved 12 unit exams plus a final, three mandatory class meetings early in the semester, and
periodic individual conferences with students thereafter. I concluded that only a certain breed of student can
succeed in such a course: those who are highly motivated to learn, those who can work weil on their own with
little guidance, and those who have a considerable amount of self-discipline. For these students, and I did have
some, the course was highly satisfying.

Unfortunately, though, most of our students do not fit this description. As I mentioned earlier, for many
of them college is only a part-time commitment competing with other priorities in their lives. Many of them
have weak study skills. Especially if they are recent high school graduates, their reading and writing skills tend
to be dreadful, to put it charitably. Self-discipline is a concept unknown to many of them, at least as it pertains
to college. The recent high school graduates have come from an environment where, most likely, they took five
or six courses, were challenged little if at all, and were routinely passed on to the next grade. Now in college,
they believe they can also take and pass four or five courses with as little effort as in high school—plus work
20-30 hours a week, of course. By the end of the first or second semester, the truth begins to sink in for some of
them.

None of this is a surprise to those who have been in higher education for any length of time. None of us
was shocked by the spate of recent national attention directed to the weaknesses of our public educational sys-
tem. Our reaction was probably something like: “It’s about time the rest of the citizenry learned what we’ve
known for years.”

Where do we go from here?

At my college the emphasis is no longer on self-pacing, although we have not entirely abandoned the con-
cept. I submit that we who teach history (and the other social sciences, for that matter) have a different obliga-
tion and agenda before us.

(1) We must work to develop in our students basic learning and study skills and self-discipline. This means such
mundane but essential things as adhering to deadlines in a course, maintaining grading standards, and seeing to
it that our students take remedial courses as needed. | am pleased at the trend in my school and others to insti-
tute academic assessment of entering students and place them in appropriate English and math courses. We can
also devote a little time in our own courses to teaching skills essential in studying history.

(2) We must require meaningful amounts of reading and writing in our courses. Teachers who demand no writ-
ing are looking out for their own comfort, not for the welfare of their students. Six years ago Dick Cavett told a
university graduating class:

I can imagine your saying to yourself . . . I'm sorry the language is ailing but there’s nothing |
can do. It doesn’t affect me anyway, since that’s not my field. I can still get through the day. I
can always get my meaning across .... [ am here this afternoon to say it does affect you, and

there is something you can do. No matter what you majored in; you're still English majors.
We're all English majors whether we like it or not.
To paraphrase Mr. Cavett: “We're all English teachers whether we like it or not.”

 

op Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712