Gestalt and the Alt-Ac Conversation
Have you noticed that not only are we, as a society, demanding bachelor’s degrees for entry level jobs that used to only require a high school diploma, we are now demanding the “right” degree for each job? This hyper-professionalization means that it is harder than ever to transition to a new field or climb the ladder. Generally, the discussion centers on the need for specific skills and knowledge. Perhaps there are good intentions. I grant you that my art history degree is not a substitute for, say, a nursing degree. But there are a great number of careers benefit from transferable skills. The impact of hyper-professionalization is that we silo knowledge and waste people’s time and energy by placing obstacles in their transitional path.
This is happening everywhere and in every field. Despite pleas to “think outside the box” we are stuck repeating that cliché because everyone is most decidedly encourage to stay in their boxes. Well-meaning people are exacerbating the problem because our population is not securely employed. And that scrapping over scraps is particularly evident in the various professional fields related to history.
With the academic job market in continued meltdown, and PhD production still in full swing, much of the post-PhD advice for historians centers on “alt-ac” or alternative careers. Much of the generalized advice is to find a job in a museum or historical society or possibly secondary education. Then, Twitter roared with disapproval: Public history takes specialized education; being a high school teacher takes specialized education; one cannot just take a history PhD and do other work!
I get it. I do. Once you have dedicated yourself to a particular type of training, you become protective of it. But with hyper-professionalization we are taking protective to a whole new level. We have come to embrace this idea that one must now have even postgrad training to do specific work and there is no overlap. You stay in your lane, and I’ll stay in mine. I want to be fair and recognize that every career has specific skills that take time and instruction to master. But I think we have lost more than we have gained through hyper-professionalization.
To get back where we need to be, I think we need to start looking at all forms of historical teaching — public, academic, secondary education, popular — and apply the psychology of Gestalt.
Gestalt is a term often applied to art theory that says the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You can separate parts and examine each individually — each part can have its own value — but when put together it becomes something more than each individual component.
How does this apply to historical fields? Rather than prizing one field of study over another, we need to promote the value of working together. A public history grad might have more experience with public presentation or exhibits design, but without the deep historical knowledge on how to present the importance of any given history, the exhibit experience might be wonderful but have little lasting impact. Humanities are necessary to cultivate the best of society, but when the presentation of that history lacks the bigger picture, it can become entertaining trivia rather than insightful commentary that shapes public discourse. We need both. We need the people who know how to grab attention, and we need the people that know how deeply teach.
Essentially, the fight between “alt-ac” and “ac” is the wrong fight. And that is what happens when we fight over scraps of funding. So rather than buy into this system, with principles of Gestalt in mind, how do we reorient and restructure?
Here’s one thought. I was searching for grants for a project I would like to do that is outside of the norm, meaning I have to find a grant that will provide a little leeway. First, thing you should know is that it basically doesn’t exist. Despite the idealized view that grants allow for the chance to really try something new, grants are extremely conservative. There’s a reason that the joke is that the way to get grant money is to prove you can use it by already have grant money. Grant funders like sticking with what they already know. But for this project, I wanted to create short videos. I have dabbled, but it’s not my skill set. I thought, “I will find a grant for video making, wow them with my take on historical presentation and use the grant money to pay the video-specialist! Surely this is brilliant.” What I discovered is that these grants do exist, however, they exist if and only if you have the video skills. A filmmaker can apply for National Endowment for the Humanities grants to present history without any history background, and use the grant to pay someone for historical research, but a historian cannot apply for a grant to present history by hiring someone with the film-making skills to produce the product.
What this says is that the content matters less than the presentation. And I think we all suffer from that because more people are going to turn to public and popular formats to learn history than to academic. We already know the sad statistics about how Americans don’t really know or understand history. Teaming up is a logical step, but it has to go both ways.
It feels like we all have pieces of the method to teach, but we guard our territory so fiercely we refuse to recognize what someone else brings that we need. I volunteer with a historical society that prizes public history and museum studies degrees over all else. I also volunteer my time and resources in the public schools. In all cases, I end up frustrated over what historical knowledge is lacking on the part of well-meaning people. Because we aren’t really allowed to approach it as a whole picture — each just the individual parts — it’s hard to even have the conversation about what is missing in our approaches to broadening historical understanding.
Keeping in mind gestalt, together alt-ac and ac training are more than the sum of our parts. If we keep insisting on our parts alone, then society as a whole will suffer. We will continue standing in a dark room with a flashlight rather than flipping the switch and illuminating the whole space. But we can’t get there by territorially fighting for hyper-professionalization; we have to see we need the expertise of both and fight together for the funding to make it happen.
