Winter 2004

Talking History

Who says you can't change history?

History teaching has changed dramatically since the not-so-good old days of the 1960s. BRIAN HOEPPER explains how, when and why the changes came about in his brief history of history teaching.

The good old days

I still remember it. I was in grade 6. We all had a copy of a small hardcover text. From the page headed ‘Canada and Australia’ we learnt that Australia was a ‘new’ country, ‘thinly inhabited by wandering tribes of black fellows’, and that the ‘short history of Australia’ was ‘mainly, though not quite entirely, a record of peaceful development’.

Looking back, it was bad enough that such tales of the past were published in government-issued textbooks. What was worse was the way the texts were used. Reading around the class. Underlining central facts. Annotating key words. Memorising. Enlivened now and then with a dramatic embellishment by the teacher. Never was there the slightest suggestion that these were ‘versions’ of the past. Rather, they were undisputed chronicles.

This was the ‘Old History’, a term coined in the 1970s to describe longstanding practices in both primary and secondary schools in Britain, Australia and other former colonies. The Old History was Eurocentric and celebratory. Heroes abounded. Great deeds and national exploits intersected neatly. The textbook and the teacher were omniscient and authoritative. The students were compliant and accepting. And a moral purpose pervaded the classroom, as historical tales affirmed the value of loyalty, courage, perseverance and ‘being British’.

The ‘New History’

How far we have come! Dramatic changes in teaching and learning History began in the 1970s. The catalyst was the British Schools Council History 13–16 Project. Cutting-edge materials promoted a ‘New History’. Put simply, the New History asserted that historical knowledge was debatable and that, in part, students could and should construct their own historical knowledge through inquiry. In Australia in the late 1970s, keen history teachers and syllabus writers began to embrace the spirit of the British project.

The emphasis on inquiry has been the most important development in the teaching and learning of history in Australian schools since the 1970s. In every State and Territory, syllabuses defined new sets of aims and objectives incorporating, with varying terminology, ‘knowledge’, ‘process’ and ‘skill’ objectives. Teachers explained how a ‘unit of work’ should be focussed on a ‘key question’—‘Why did Europe plunge into warfare in 1914?’—rather than being encapsulated in a topic/title like ‘World War 1’. By the late 1970s, publishers were responding with textbooks that encouraged inquiry and provided historical sources of evidence.

They were heady days but, to be honest, the texts and classroom practices were sometimes a bit half-baked. For example, students certainly got their hands on historical sources, but were often asked to do little with them beyond basic comprehension. Similarly, some of the early textbooks tended to use historical sources to support claims made in the textbook’s narrative, rather than to stimulate inquiry. At the same time, photographs and other visuals tended to be decorative or, at best, illustrative of the narrative. And perhaps most worrying was a tendency for students to take sources at face value, assuming that they were honest, accurate and credible records—an echo of the ‘undisputed chronicle’ of the Old History.

The 1980s and beyond

By the 1980s, however, a welcome sophistication was emerging among syllabus developers, teachers, students and textbook writers alike. A lot of energy went into describing the processes of inquiry in school history. Beyond comprehension and analysis, students began to interpret texts, wrestling with the challenges of language and the sometime elusiveness of meaning. Perhaps the greatest breakthrough came with the focus on evaluating sources of evidence—asking penetrating questions about the credibility, reliability and usefulness of those sources.

Through evaluation, students came to understand the limitations of the historical record. Those limitations can be summed up in one word—‘partial’. Historical sources are partial in that they are incomplete; we never have all the evidence about a past event or situation, only a part. And they are partial in the sense of reflecting a preference; in other words, historical sources are seldom objective, but rather reflect the beliefs, assumptions and values of those who produce them.

There are other limitations. Historical sources may be expressed in foreign or even ‘lost’ languages, may be ambiguous or may have been deliberately or inadvertently altered during the passage of time. Although these problems are mostly the concern of professional historians, students of history should be aware of the ways in which historical sources can be problematic.

Faced with these limitations, students use the processes of critical thinking and critical literacies. And they exercise historical imagination and judgement. Historical imagination, far from involving flights of fancy (the popular sense of ‘imagination’), is a disciplined practice. It means recognising that sources do not speak for themselves (but need interpreting), that sources may be unreliable (and therefore must be evaluated), that the causes of events and the motives of people are obscure (and must be deduced). Using imagination to fill the gaps, students end up making the best possible judgements, while always conceding that their judgements are tentative and open to later revision.

When reading historians’ words, students are similarly alert. They realise that historians themselves have to exercise imagination and make judgements, and that their conclusions are consequently tentative. But, beyond that, they realise that historians research and write from a standpoint—a position formed by their knowledge, background, experiences, beliefs and values. That’s why, for example, Australian history has been enlivened recently by debates among celebratory and critical historians— the so-called ‘History Wars’ with their allegations of ‘black armband’ and ‘whitewash’ histories.

The coming of SOSE

It may seem paradoxical that, just as the above developments were establishing school history as a rigorous, critical subject, the place of history in the school curriculum came into question with the advent of Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE). There are, however, some positives. Within SOSE (or its acronymic equivalent in various jurisdictions), history was given an explicit place in the sun through the strand called ‘Time, Continuity and Change’. Further, issues of heritage, culture, change, causation and effect—the very stuff of history—pervade the other SOSE strands. Even more importantly, the inquiry processes promoted within SOSE are similar to (if not identical with) the processes of historical inquiry. Far from sounding the death knell of history in the junior secondary school, as feared, SOSE can promote it. As a bonus, the core status of SOSE in most jurisdictions means that greater numbers of secondary students get involved in historical studies.

In primary schools the promise has been even greater. It’s probably fair to say that some of the ‘Old History’ practices described above have lived on in some primary schools until recently. Most primary teachers, asked to be across the whole curriculum, have probably been less exposed to the ideas of the ‘New History’. SOSE, however, has invited primary teachers to engage more with the concepts of time, heritage, change and causation; with the issues of evidence; and with the processes of inquiry. To this end, it is notable that the federally-funded Commonwealth History Project has given roughly equal emphasis to the primary and secondary sectors.

A note about values

SOSE has foregrounded the values of social justice, democratic process, ecological sustainability and (in Queensland) peace. SOSE curriculum documents have emphasised how debatable these values are within Australian society and how they can take on even more divergent meanings in non-Western societies.

When teachers and students focus, through history, on people and practices remote in time, there’s an extra challenge. Put simply, how valid is it to ‘judge’ a past practice (for example, male-only suffrage, slavery, child labour, thoughtless exploitation of environments) using the twenty-first century values of social justice, democracy and sustainability? This very question can become a valuable focus for classroom debate, as students wrestle with the challenges of describing, explaining and judging the past.

A postmodern postscript

Postmodernist ideas don’t seem to have influenced school history teaching and learning as much as they have English curricula. History teachers can sense a palpable threat in postmodernist challenges to ‘truth’ (all truths are equally valid?), ‘texts’ (the death of the author and the validity of multiple readings?), and ‘values’ (value positions lack absolute foundation). But, when postmodernist ideas offer a corrective to unwarranted certainty, they are valuable in history. For example, students now acknowledge that subject peoples in colonial and other oppressive situations experience different realities, and think and write about them differently. As well, postmodernist and postcolonialist ideas remind students that Western values of democracy, justice and peace may be construed differently in other cultural contexts. These new insights encourage students to empathise, to experience something through another’s eyes—a valuable outcome of historical study.

Looking back, the changes since the 1960s have been dramatic. They have transformed the teaching and learning of history in schools almost beyond recognition.

Brian Hoepper co-edits ozhistorybytes for the National Centre for History Education. Previously he taught History and SOSE curriculum at Queensland University of Technology.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au