Reply to ‘Reaching a crisis point’: UC Berkeley humanities professors lower expectations for assigned readings

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "‘Reaching a crisis point’: UC Berkeley humanities professors lower expectations for assigned readings"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It really depends on the discipline. For studying literature, you should be reading full texts. The entire point is to study this work in its full form. Reading "excerpts" of Dickens or epic poems will produce shallow understanding of the texts.
[b]
History, however, can be covered a variety of ways. Older, denser texts on ancient history can be excerpted and anthologized. [/b]This method has long been used to teach undergraduate students. Those who have the interest to explore full texts can do so in graduate work.

The history professor interviewed sounds ridiculous. I guarantee his students have been skimming large swaths of his assignments for decades. What he is likely really annoyed by is the inability to give students who truly do not learn the material the low grades they deserve without getting harassed. But that is another issue.[/quote]

The bolded is a great way for unintentional biases to infect our view of history even more. Like - would you really want your kid getting an excerpt from historical sources on the Pilgrims in the 1950s? Or 1880s? So much stuff that we now consider important might be cherry picked over to make them meet the view of the Pilgrims at the time, for example.

It's bad enough that certain historical authors often get backgrounded to make a point (for example when we try to show how bad white European men of the 16th century are we tend to ignore the ones who were questioning the terrible practices of the time, versus when we use to try to glorify the Pilgrims in order to make New Englanders feel like the source of American culture we tend to ignore some of their worse traits). This would just amplify that.

I'd much rather our [b]historians[/b] be able to read and analyze as much primary source material as possible.[/quote]

That's good for historians but not necessarily for history students. The teacher is there to teach. They need to decide excerpts and anthologies, present biases. It doesn't all need to be full texts for a required "Eastern History" course fulfillment or whatever. [/quote]

DP. Maybe not for general education classes, but my experience as a history major was that there was very little excerpting in classes aimed at people concentrating in history. We read mostly full text primary sources. Some of that is going to differ based on specialty, because we have a lot more primary sources to wade through for some periods (I did mostly took classes in periods where we don't have a lot of texts).

A person who graduates with a BA in history should be able to hit a masters program ready to do the work. If they've not regularly grappled with full primary sources, I don't see how they'll do that.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics