Discipline boundaries

I've been thinking about discipline boundaries for much of the day, and I'm wondering if there's a generational trend toward interdisciplinary work that I've been unaware of. Or rather, I've certainly been aware of interdisciplinary work and do much of it myself in the form of cultural studies scholarship, but I think I hadn't realized that this tendency is perhaps true for some generations of scholars and not for others. Perhaps my sense of all of this has been skewed because my dissertation director is probably 40 years older than I am (she's now retired) and taught me most everything I knew about cultural studies work. Or maybe my ideas about these generational differences are skewed the other way by how strange St. Martyr's is.

Here's the story that prompted this thought: The history department at St. Martyr's is doing a job search for a new professor. This new professor will teach in the interdisciplinary program that I direct, so I've met with the candidates and had interesting conversations with all of them; based on my conversations with them, I'd be happy to have any of them be the top choice, although I do certainly have my ranking of them. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any of their teaching demonstrations, which conflicted with one of my classes, so I've had to go on the assessment of the folks who have seen the candidates teach. The candidates' sample teaching has been in a class in this same interdisciplinary program; I don't know if this is typical or not of sample teaching (I'd never experienced it before), but the candidates are simply told what was on the syllabus for that day, and that's what they teach.

And it's this teaching that brings me to a question for the historians. The professor whose class the candidates have been teaching uses a textbook, one of those survey type books. I find these  difficult to teach from myself; the narrative is usually neatly wrapped up, and I often find it difficult to find an entry point into the topic without just repeating everything the chapter said. For the "history" part of the interdisciplinary classes I teach (not that I really distinguish between history and literature in that way), I rely instead on primary sources for the most part but also some scholarly secondary works. So I've felt really bad for a couple of the candidates who had to teach from the textbook in their sample, since that's what this professor had on his syllabus for that day. One of the candidates actually asked me during our conversation whether the program mandated use of this or any textbook in this program, and she was much relieved when I said that I never used a textbook; she confessed that she'd found it difficult to prepare her sample teaching since she never used this kind of book either.

So this afternoon, three history colleagues, including the search chair, were chatting outside my door about the candidates for the position; two of the faculty were being, I thought, overly critical of some of the candidates' teaching. So I stepped out into the hall to share with the search chair my impressions of all three candidates and to say that I thought two of the candidates had been at a disadvantage in having to teach from this textbook, unlike the other candidate who got a primary source to teach. In particular, I shared the above conversation about the one candidate whom they were particularly dissing, since I thought she was in all likelihood a better teacher than they thought since she usually doesn't teach from textbooks.

The history colleague who was being most critical turned to me at that point and said, "But remember, we're not hiring an English professor; we're hiring a history professor, and that's what history professors do. They teach out of textbooks that explain what happened." I unwisely said, "No, they don't! Or at least they don't have to, and lots of historians don't teach that way at all." She looked really annoyed, and I belatedly realized that it was rude as a non-historian to explain to a historian how historians taught. So I smoothed things over and stepped back into my office. And the search chair also teaches in the same interdisciplinary program that I do, and he doesn't tend to use survey textbooks, and he thought all of them were pretty good teachers, and his ranking of the candidates is similar to mine, and, as I said, all of the candidates were really pretty good, so I'm not worried about who is going to be my new history colleague.

But I am curious and want to check in with the historians in the blogosphere about what kinds of books you use in your history classes. Because, really, what do I know? I took a total of one history course when I was an undergrad, and I've been told repeatedly that I teach history like an English professor -- it's all about the texts for me, so I read presidential speeches and newspaper accounts and photographs and song lyrics in much the same way that I read fiction and poetry; or at least the questions that I ask are fairly similar, even if I use specialized analytical approaches for some texts and not others (obvious example -- I don't ask questions about rhyme and meter when analyzing photographs, clearly -- although I do still ask about formal properties, which I think is a similar question).

And I'm wondering if this is mostly about a generational difference. The critical history colleague, for example, is only 10 years older than I am but seems to have a completely different outlook on academic disciplines than I do. She once said to me, "I'm a historian, so I care about what happened, not how people said things" (i.e., in primary sources), which caused me to about fall out of my chair with shock. I thought we all cared how people said things! But maybe I just can never escape my English-prof-ness.

And I'm thinking of all of this tonight because, in addition to this conversation with the historians, I also had a meeting with the English department, an unusually rancorous one for us. Since one of our candidates dropped out before his flyback after getting an offer elsewhere, we were deciding which of our next small pool of top contendors to invite to campus. And the senior profs, one in particular, were really pissing me off by going on and on about "sociological" ways of reading literature that weren't appropriately "humanist, or literary." That is, anyone who uses a cultural studies approach was dismissed as being a bad or at least shallow literary scholar because they weren't asking "the big questions" about tragedy and human meaning that this senior prof thinks are the proper realm of literary scholars. And in this professor's view, literature asks big questions, while "sociology" (apparently his shorthand for any cultural approach) asks small and uninteresting questions. I took umbrage at his statements, as did another colleague, mostly because we both do cultural studies work and got mad that this senior prof has repeatedly scorned the very kind of work that we do.

So these two conversations seemed to be pointing toward some sort of generational division among scholars. Although, now that I think about it, my cultural studies lit colleague is about the same age as my textbook-using historical colleague, so that doesn't make sense. And I've just realized that the previous sentence contrasts "cultural studies" with "textbook-using," which doesn't exactly make sense.

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Okay, let me try this again: I think I'm trying to get at two different questions, which is why I'm confusing myself. One question is about strict or permeable disciplinary boundaries. That is, do historians do something that is at its essence different from what literary scholars do, and does that something have to do with "what really happened" versus "how people talk about things," or questions of fact versus questions of big human meaning? I would come down on the side of permeable disciplinary boundaries, and I'm wondering if this is a generational thing.

And the second question goes back to textbooks, and whether that's what most historians teach with. An easier question, although I think it does relate in some ways to this definition of history as "what really happened."

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Geez, this blog post was a big muddle, I know, and I can't even bear to go back and reread it and try to sort it out. So I'm going to post it in all of its muddledness.

Comments

[trillwing]

I think this might indeed be a generational thing, though I certainly don't have any experience teaching history (just literature and American Studies). My understanding is that the "old school" historians buy into that grand narrative stuff, while cultural studies types (my Ph.D. will be in cultstud, BTW) are all into the postmodern fragmentation-of-narrative, context-is-infinite deal.

That said, in the spring quarter I'm to teach an American Studies course on the 1890s, and it will be heavy on the history, so I'm using a blend of approaches, including a survey text on the Gilded Age that includes some primary source documents, but which I'm using primarily so that students can get a sense of the events of the decade. The other books are a work of creative nonfiction (The Devil in the White City) and an anthology of writing from the 1890s. We'll see what students prefer and what works best from a pedagogical standpoint, but I have my hunches.

As far as the candidates' teaching talks go, I don't think you need to feel too badly on their behalf. There are ways to make a survey text come alive through supplemental materials that can be presented during lecture (e.g. 3D cultural artifacts to pass around class, film clips), and the best candidates are going to find ways to connect with students despite the text. I think it's possible for a good history professor to assign reading from a survey text IF she doesn't just go over the reading during lecture or discussion and IF she supplements the textbook reading with primary source documents and artifacts. Of course, such a professor is going to have to have relatively high expectations of her students--i.e., that they've done the reading and come to class ready to integrate ideas presented in class into the historical timeline.

Mostly I'm just thrilled to hear a history department is willing to look at cultural studies types. Because that's exactly the type of position I'm seeking. :)

[terminaldegree]

Oh, how interesting!

As an undergrad, I took one history class, which used a short textbook. It included selected readings from primary sources. The prof avoided the whole "names, dates, and battles" approach, too. We also had to read several other primary sources (Machiavelli, St. Benedict, etc.). It was kind of fun, actually. Of course, I had no idea what the term "primary source" meant. (I didn't figure this out until grad school.)

In my music history courses, we used texts and supplemented them with source readings. I liked the combination. Luckily, my profs were (mostly) fantastic and didn't simply repeat the textbooks.

[slantedtruth]

Hmm, I have yet to teach, but the history courses I have proposed for fall only use a textbook at the introductory level, and only because i teach a part of the world with which the students are, for the most part, completely unfamiliar. Plus, I need to cover 5000 years of history in 13 weeks. That said, I temper the assigned reading from two different textbooks (which are rather scholarly, and not rote survey course textbooks) with an assigned primary source, and we'll spend time in class discussing said material object/text.

There is a huge range in how historians teach, but my approach is to balance 'what happened' with 'how people understood what happened,' which I think is crucial to getting students to think critically about the past. I teach about an area of the world where the manipulation of the historical narrative of the 'past' was a key part of modern political, social, economic and cultural processes, so 'what happened' is always in question, both to scholars and to those who lived through the historical moment.

that said, i think that when historians make comemnts about 'what really happened' they are suggesting these sorts of contrasts. for example, i am routinely exasperated with my anthropologist friends who go on about 'historicity' but get dates, facts wrong. also, they sometimes fail to think about historical processes, and focus on superficial understandings of one event without properly contextualising it. so when i am being a nitpicky historian and making a fuss about my disciplinary boundary, i tend to remind others that the details matter, as does the context in which they emerge. but 'how people talk about things' is always already part of that equation.

meh, this is muddled, but i have yet to have some coffee!

[La Lecturess]

Hm. As you know, I'm a lit person myself, but from my college history courses (of which I took quite a few), I'd say it's a mix. I took an AWESOME post-WWII American political history course, with a newly-minted (1993) PhD, that read pretty much entirely primary sources, and especially polemics: Feminine Mystique, God and Man at Yale, Why We Can't Wait, What I Saw at the Revolution, Backlash, etc. We also had two textbook type books, on presidential elections and the media and electoral shifts in America. Awesome!

The two classes that did serious textbooking were courses on Roman history and Greek history, one taught by an ANCIENT prof. But I also had a really great Stuart England class taught by an equally old, retiring-after-this-semester prof that used lots of texts, some of them covering the same subject from different perspectives, some of them microhistories, and at least one cult-stud work.

And my Reformation Europe class, taught by a prof who must have gotten her degree in the early 1980s, was almost all primary sources.

Okay, so clearly this comment is all about my reliving my great history courses in college! But my point is that in my experience, courses can be taught either way.

[meg]

For a lit person, I'm pretty darn historical -- I use economic data to give students the backstory on courtly love, etc etc.

And every time I've used a textbook (including the class for which it was mandated, at a previous institution), it has backfired on me.

Even in History of the English Language, the textbook is more trouble than it's worth. Next time I'll find some way to do without.

[AnglicanMouse]

I am a History Ph.D. For the time being, I'm not teaching, but if I ever go back to the ivory tower my preference is to assign primary sources with a textbook for background.
I was a TA once for a professor who assigned a textbook and a few primary sources. The students had paper topics on the primary sources, but the professor forbade the TAs to use the primary sources as fodder for the class discussions we had to run. (she thought the students would all wind up writing the same paper otherwise) This drove me absolutely crazy. I tried to get the students (in an introductory American history class) to talk about the textbook as a constructed "text" itself, but they didn't really get it. "But if it's in the textbook, things must have happened that way! " "Our textbook is 700 pages long - how could they have left anything out?"
Anyway, WN, I'm glad that you'll have a good history colleague regardless of how their search shakes out.

[purechristianithink]

Hmm. I'm not a professor of any kind, but I was a history major back in the day. I had an experience in a theater elective class that speaks to this issue, I think. We were doing scenes from The Lark which is a play about Joan of Arc. My first impulse was to go to the library and check out biographies of Joan of Arc to prepare for acting the roles in the play. But the theater prof told us, "Don't act the history, act the character," which I couldn't understand at all. Wouldn't knowing more about the history make portraying the characters more accurate? But he explained that the Joan in the Lark was not the historical Joan of Arc, she was a literary invention of the playwright. The play was not about an historic representation of "what really happened" it was a literary vehicle which used an historic event as a device to explore transcendant human questions. So that was my crash course in the difference between literature and history. And btw, most of my history profs didn't rely primarily on a textbook. We usually had one assigned, but it was just one resource among many.

[af]

I teach an introductory religion course that's mainly history (although it also deals with theology, ritual, etc.), and I've found that if I don't use a textbook, I have to *be* the textbook; students really like knowing the "basics" and too much ambiguity can drive them crazy. Of course I bring in primary sources, for maybe a third of the reading, and these are great for discussions. But I do like having "facts," because in these intro courses where they have absolutely no background (e.g., "wait, the Virgin mary was Jewish?" or "wow, I didn't know *that* many Jews died in the Holocaust") they're a crucial starting point.

[Ancarett]

I'm a historian who teaches with textbooks in some cases (for Western Civ and some survey topics) I find it a great resource for the students to consult as they work through topics. And, while we often move through the subject, chronologically, I don't teach out of the textbook. I'd be appalled if someone did or tried to tell me that history professors "teach out of textbooks that explain what happened."

No -- we may not always work through close readings of text as English professors are wont to do (though I'm more in that camp than not) but we should be more creative and engaging than simply copying a narrative and draping it around a stuffed fetish of "the facts."

Now, I'm off to teach one of our majors' courses -- I approach it as a thematic class in three parts where we tackle topics such as causality and histories of the Holocaust or economic analyses and the Reformation.

[What Now?]

Thank you, all, for this interesting conversation (which I certainly don't mean to cut off with this comment!).

AF, I know what you mean about having to *be* the textbook, which was the very reason that I once did use a textbook; I was so tired of having to fill in so many details for them. My frustration was that I either then had to go over the textbook reading in class (which I found boring; the whole point of the textbook as background reading was so that we wouldn't have to talk about these things and could concentrate on the sexy stuff!) or the students wouldn't read it (on the theory that if we didn't talk about it in class, it wasn't really important). But that may be because St. Martyr's students are Average with a capital A. Or it may be because I just wasn't very good at knowing how to use the textbook as background.

Another important fact here may be that I teach American stuff, so the students do have a basic background in the culture and the broad historical narrative. If I were teaching a course in, oh, early Chinese history, I think I would certainly use a textbook because I would assume that students had no background whatsoever.

Finally, I now want to *take* all of the classes that you all have described here, especially trillwing's 1890s course!

[Paris]

I teach medieval history and we ALWAYS use primary sources. There is generally one or two textbooks/surveys on the syllabus somewhere, but this is to help the students get a better sense of the chronology than is available in many primary sources. Regardless of how one handles them (what is said, how they say it - both are legit historical methods), the primary sources are what is most interesting about history.

[Anastasia]

my director believes that history is a collection of stories about stuff that happened a long time ago and that teaching it means, largely, telling the children the stories of what happened.

in upper level courses, he does have them come up with their own ideas, but he almost never uses primary sources. We read historian A's version and then we read historian B's version and then we talk about what really happened.

I do none of the above because I don't think that's what history is or is about. So, I do think it's generational.

but it's also area specific. ancient historians (say of the roman empire) are notoroius conservative intellectually. and that can include younguns.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Er ... also history here. I would say that there are generational differences, but also differences in approach. I do Early Medieval, and find that I have much more in common with the Late Antique/Classics/Early Medieval people than the later ones, in terms of how I teach and approach texts. That may be in part due to the fact that we all tend to use a wider variety of sources -- not so much archaeology, for example, for the late people. Also, I have a strong Classics background (would have been an Ancient person, but crashed and burned in my 1st year Greek class).
I have much more in common with any medieval historian than with modernists or Americanists. We just approach things differently -- and we even have some different standards for scholarship -- document editions are far more common for medieval than for later eras, e.g. And then there's the fact that a lot of modern historians seem to take a point of view that history is some sort of progression towards an undefinable end-point ...

Also, historiography seems to be much more important to modern and American historians.

But I use textbooks quite happily -- then I don't have to do too much of the narrative and can use a lot of primary sources. I think historians tend to read and use those sources very differently than lit people, though. There was an essay by Samuel Wineburg in the CHE about 2 years ago on this, and how historians need to teach "how historians read" better. I think it's included in his "History and othe unnatural acts" http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=yX1vCmJC0L&isbn=1566398568&TXT=Y&itm=1

[Oso Raro]

The Revenge of the Disciplines is what comes to mind after reading of your search committee conundrums, and some of the disciplinary questions that arise from it. I will try to be succinct here, but I think that interdisciplinary method, which originally was about bringing together history and literature (and later, sociology), not only has a long and tendentious history in the academy but perhaps has been too successful in its endeavour. All of which is to say that pretty much everybody does some sort of interdisciplinarity now, whether by intent or influence. Certainly younger scholars (PhDs post-1980) have been deeply influenced by interdisciplinary methodologies in their training. Cultural Studies, broadly understood, being one of many potent examples of the influence and confluence of interdisciplinarity in/on the profession.

Yet, as interdisciplinarity modalities of knowledge have spread, there has been a concomitant reaction in the disciplines, especially in history, towards these new methodologies of study. Some of these concerns are relatively legitimate, i.e. are people trained in two or more disciplines in a rigourous manner, or more compellingly, what do we mean by interdisciplinarity now? History is, in my mind, an incredibly reactionary professional field which has resisted interdisciplinarity in a facile and arrogant manner that allows (some/most? reactionary) historians to pat themselves on the back for their training, even as they become part of the mausoleum which is the contemporary university. As someone somewhere else said, there are many junior faculty interdisciplinary heads (mine included, at least at one point) hanging on the belts of entrenched old school disciplinary historians (and others).

This particular delusion is not particular to History, but is perhaps most pronounced in this field. The fantasy of method, I would argue, is increasingly that, but as we see in our professional and political cultures, fantasies of certainty and delusions of grandeur are more comforting that confronting the hard questions: what is it that we do? Why are we doing it? Is it relevant? How do we make it more so? Is tradition worthy? Am I intimidated by younger scholars? Why? Do I have room for difference, or must I enforce hegemony of thought?

FYI Joe Moran's Interdisciplinarity by Routledge is an excellent starting place for some of these questions.