Uncomfortable truths about today’s history students

>> History is everywhere, and just about everyone has an opinion, says Marnie Hughes-Warrington. “It’s not like physics, say, where you need special tools and a special vocabulary to participate. That’s part of what makes history so exciting to teach and study.” Hughes-Warrington, associate dean, learning and teaching in Macquarie University’s Faculty of Arts and last year’s joint university teacher of the year (CR, 01.12.08), is a historiographer – someone who studies historians and the nature of history. She is joint leader, with her Macquarie history colleague Emeritus Professor Jill Roe, of the ALTC-funded project, ‘historical thinking in higher education’. The project team has so far interviewed 43 staff and surveyed over 1400 students in 11 universities across every state. The project arose from “fundamental curiosity”, she says. “There has been a lot of discussion around articulating standards, spurred on by processes like the review of the Australian Qualifications Framework, and it seemed a good idea for us to have input – to discover what the profession thinks is important, where our students are coming from, and how this feeds into teaching and assessment. Historians are by nature always looking for evidence. “Historical thinking is at the core of what it is to be a historian,” she says. “It differentiates the professional from those who enjoy and are interested in history – which is just about everyone. But there are lots of different theories about what it is. “Some say it’s a special kind of literacy, or a special kind of consciousness and understanding. Others say – and I’m more inclined to this view – that it’s latent in most people, and not even peculiar to this discipline. It takes lots of hard work and training to develop, but it’s not beyond most people’s reach.” In a forthcoming article on the ALTC project, historical thinking is described as being “about contextualisation, understanding change, empathy and developing skills in scholarship”, with students in particular favouring the notion that it’s tied to the connections between past and present. Teaching academics will find some of the project’s findings disturbing. “Three things stand out for me,” says Hughes-Warrington. “First, students are inclined to privilege secondary over primary sources when asked to rate the usefulness of tasks. This shows that we need to pay more attention to the nature of evidence and how to handle it – complemented by more classroom activity.” The forthcoming article on the project mentions one such activity – a “forgery exercise”, where students are asked to create their own primary source document, which is then mixed in with genuine documents for other students to critique. “It leads the student to think about evidence, its text, construction, materiality, audience, and underlying agendas or purpose,” the article says. Hughes-Warrington’s second stand-out finding is the lack of a clear differentiation between what first year and third year students think the subject is about and what’s important. “We would hope to see stronger evidence that their understanding of the subject is not just growing but evolving,” she says. “The third surprising thing is that the students we surveyed rated working online, and watching and discussing film and television, as among the least important activities in developing historical thinking, with more traditional scholarly activities – reading books and journal articles, engaging in discussion with academic staff in the classroom, and attending a lecture – at or near the top. “That’s out of step with large national studies in the US and here, as well as our interviews with lecturers, which show most people come into contact with history, and feel a stronger connection with the past, via the media than other activities such as reading books or studying a formal course in history. “It’s important for historians to acknowledge this, and to help students engage with these forms of representation in a critical and constructive way.” The project has also revealed that teachers need to be more explicit about the influences of bias and context on evidence. Students don’t always understand that writers and speakers of history – including themselves – are helping shape the narrative. “Lecturers intrinsically understand this, and are sometimes inclined to skip a step; to assume that their students do too,” says Hughes-Warrington. “Even interpreting the writing on a piece of clay is complex; it’s easy to forget just how complex that can be for an 18 year old.” The final report of the ALTC project, which is conducted in partnership with the Australian Historical Association, the History Teachers’ Association of Australia and the Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, is expected in August 2009. Go to www.altc.edu.au/project-historical-thinking-higher-education-macquarie-2007