A Plea and Working Model for Teaching the European Survey Today

With the demise of the older Western Civilization course, one of the major challenges of teaching the survey has been the search for a new narrative and focus. Another major challenge is showing the relevance of European history to students who are less likely to have European backgrounds in the ever changing composition of the U.S.’s population today; and less likely to have studied any European history before going to university. I’ve found the two challenges and responses to them are related. While I acknowledge the new conceptual approaches to “the West,” I’ve found it useful from the viewpoints of both relevance and giving students a clear narrative to focus the course as a survey of Europe, rather than the West, however one constructs the latter. At the beginning of the course, students are taught that Europe is a major, dynamic region of the world today, characterized by a distinctive diversity and sharing of languages, peoples and cultures, over a relatively small area. And although it shares many of the same challenges as the U.S. (or American societies), European ways of understanding and dealing with these issues (e.g. multi-culturalism, migration) are different than ours. Specific units of the course introduce in a clear and straightforward way chapters in the making of the modern European state and society. There are a few excellent textbooks available, but finding one that is accessible to students without any background in Europe at all is difficult. Some of the ones that strive to show connections between the West and other global societies and integrate in themes such as gender and migration – while excellent conceptually – I’ve found to be too advanced for the students that I teach.