The updates to the Australian Curriculum History made in recent years (and finally published in 2022), provided a good opportunity to ask important questions that should be regularly debated. These include: what is secondary History education for? How should it be structured? What counts as appropriate knowledge to prioritise in secondary History?
While debates about these questions were unfolding, I made the argument that disciplinary History was still a useful goal of secondary history education – not the only goal but an important one that I think we would do well to keep. That argument was made in brief and for a more public audience. Across these posts, I’d like to set a bit more of my thinking out on this issue particularly as we approach another round of curriculum discussions for the NSW updates scheduled for 2023.
To do this, I have split this into two main parts. In part one, I aim to provide some background to explain where I think the disciplinary approach to school History ‘came from’ briefly weaving together some international, national and NSW-specific trends. In no way is this intended to be a comprehensive history. In this part, I also try to briefly capture what disciplinary History currently looks like in NSW.
In the second part, I will then explore some criticisms of disciplinary History (in a secondary education setting) and try to offer some ideas for possible ways forward.
In essence, two key arguments run throughout these parts.
I want to argue in favour of the idea that disciplinary history should feature as one of the frameworks for secondary History education while still acknowledging that this is not the only framework.
The disciplinary approach to school History is not a ‘territory to be defended’ (though at times that might be necessary), but rather it is something we should see as evolving and changeable; something, to borrow from E.H Carr, that we should be in constant dialogue with to ensure that it does not become static.
There is an important major assumption underneath these ideas that needs to be clarified and that is that I think traditional disciplines/subjects are very powerful ways of making sense of the world and can be useful within and beyond their own disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, I also believe that the secondary curriculum could and should offer more than traditional subjects only. This is obviously a major educational debate that I simply do not have time or space to include in this discussion, but the important point to note is that, in defending disciplines, I am not suggesting that they are the only frame for learning, but an important one.
Finally, it should be said that these posts are partly motivated by wanting to contribute something to the upcoming curriculum discussions that sits above what we can probably expect if recent debates are anything to go by: a lot of culture warring, uninformed commentary and rabidly partisan ‘hot takes’ on what students are and/or should be learning in History classes. It is also partly motivated by an attempt to make sense of where History education in its current form in NSW has come from and to consider where it could be refined and improved. I suspect this will become an evolving project that I will add to over time.
Background Part 1: The Changing Education Landscape of the past 50 years
In the postwar period, and particularly from the 1960s and 1970s, History education in many parts of the world was reconceptualised [1]. Though this does not capture all the nuance and messiness of how this developed, it is generally fair to say that the emphasis in much secondary History moved away from content coverage and the subject became more an introduction to key aspects of the academic discipline of History though it should be remembered that the former has not completely disappeared and the latter was not an entirely new invention. The disciplinary emphasis includes the ideas that historians often use in their analysis (such as causation and continuity and change) and more practical aspects of what historians often do (such as finding and using evidence to develop narratives and arguments about the past).
This broad trend was not linear, since disciplines had been a part of academia and education well before the Second World War. As far back as 1913, for example, the English History teacher Maurice Keatinge argued that: ‘... our pupils must be confronted with [historical] documents, and forced to exercise their minds upon them’ [2]. The idea of working with primary sources or doing critical history in schools was not a post-war invention, much less an invention of the 1970s [3].
There were also many debates along the way and there was plenty of open resistance (see part 2 of this post to read about some of the early objections), including the argument that students, particularly in mass compulsory schools, were simply not ready to study history in a critical manner [4]. There also appear to have been institutional obstacles to a neat or complete disciplinary approach to history in secondary schools. In some systems, for example, school inspectors monitored teachers' coverage of syllabuses to ensure that they were moving through content at an 'appropriate pace', and this could encourage more breadth of content coverage and less depth; more teaching through the story and 'the facts' and less teaching to work critically with aspects of the past.
So, although history in secondary schools may not have moved from a completely discipline-less approach to the opposite after Second World War, I think it is still reasonable to say that the disciplinary conceptualisation was strengthened whilst other concerns such as imbuing a preferred national ethos became less prominent (though there are still advocates for this kind of thinking).
The strengthening of the disciplinary approach appears to have been shaped by at least four factors.
First, the longer-term influence of academic disciplines on school subjects that had already begun to shape the way subjects were taught
Second, the expansion of secondary schooling in many parts of the world from the 1960s and 1970s
Third, the more intensive theorising and research on how to teach specific subjects (such as History) in secondary settings
Fourth, a perceived ‘threat’ to History as a subject in secondary schools (which has not entirely disappeared but rather tends to come around in waves).
As already pointed out, discussions about school History stretch back well beyond the Second World War. In the postwar period, however, many aspects of education and schooling were rethought and some were radically changed. In a NSW context, perhaps nothing had more wide-reaching consequences than the Wyndham Scheme implemented in the 1960s which made secondary school compulsory for all children. This laid the foundation for a range of opportunities and challenges in education, not least of which was how to best educate students in secondary schools when it was not their choice to be there – something that continues to be a major area of debate.
Other more specific changes to the way school subjects were conceptualised and taught also emerged as the experiment with compulsory secondary education continued. To some extent, this was influenced by newer ideas and theories in psychology and education often lumped together as ‘constructivism’. Though this is often poorly understood and simplistically conflated with vague notions of 'discovery learning', constructivist ideas tended to emphasise, among many things, the importance of student involvement in the process of education in building and constructing knowledge on the basis of what they already know.
In a practical sense, the disciplinary emphasis was also inspired to some degree by a fear that subjects such as History may lose their standing in an ever more crowded curriculum and during periods when experiments with pedagogy were/are advocated – such as interdisciplinarity or the combination of 'humanities' subjects into more general approaches such as Studies of Society and Environment – and when the economic imperatives of education were/are emphasised – such as skills training, job-readiness, etc. With the enormous expansion of the technology industries throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, this remains a persistent issue as STEM (or one of its variations) is widely promoted (often with significant funding that more traditional subjects like History find hard to match) in the so-called ‘fourth industrial revolution’.
In this broad context that shaped many democracies after the Second World War, the Schools Council History Project (SCHP) was launched in 1972 aiming to rejuvinate the way school History was taught in England. The project continues and according to its website:
‘The Schools Council Project History 13-16 was set up in 1972 to undertake a radical re-think of the purpose and nature of school history. It sought to revitalize history teaching in schools and to halt the erosion of history’s position in the secondary curriculum.’ [5]
More specifically, the Schools Council History Project aimed to achieve several goals including:
Making history more relevant to the lives of young people
Engaging students in the process of historical enquiry (such as asking questions, using sources and developing arguments – things that probably feel very natural to trained history teachers in the 21st century)
Ensuring that the history curriculum (in England) included content broader than just national history
This certainly shaped the way that History education in Australia, perhaps particularly in NSW, developed from the 1970s. At times, practitioners and advocates of the Schools Council History Project were brought to Australia to run professional learning events and to model the way these ideas were being implemented in England. Enthusiastic advocates in Australia also helped spread many of these ideas organically such that it appears to have built a momentum of its own in parts of Australia. A brief examination of NSW history syllabuses from 1972 to 2012 demonstrates that these kinds of principles also became prominent in the way secondary History was conceptualised within the curriculum. More on this later.
As disciplinary approaches gained more traction in different places, research into this also became more widespread. For example, Peter Lee and Denis Schemilt are often highlighted as important influences on the way History education evolved and their research and commentary covered a wide range of issues relating to History education in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, Sam Wineburg also made a major contribution to discussions about secondary History education when he published several articles on using primary documents in history education followed by his book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (1999). His subsequent work with the Stanford History Education Group and his more recent books have continued to advocate for a disciplinary approach to school History particularly centred on working with documents and critical reading of texts. Many others have also made contributions to this including Peter Seixas, Carla Peck, Rosalyn Ashby, Stephane Levesque, Christine Counsell and many more.
Much of this thinking has been influential in Australia. To take just two examples, in 2019 Routledge published Historical Thinking for History Teachers: A New Approach to Engaging Students and Developing Historical Consciousness. Although the book included a wide variety of chapters, it demonstrated a clear connection to the international scholarship briefly mentioned above. Even more concretely, in 2021 Cambridge University Press published Teaching Secondary History which brought together academics and teachers in Australia to provide a more practical textbook-style introduction to teaching History in Secondary schools directly aimed at an Australian audience. Many of these chapters explicitly emphasised themes prevalent in the international literature relating to historical thinking/historical reasoning/historical consciousness that had become increasingly popular since the 1970s. Both books clearly demonstrate that the disciplinary approach to secondary History has become more prominent in Australia.
Background Part 2: The Australian National Curriculum
The development of the Australian National Curriculum provides more immediate background and helps to explain the shape and specifications of the NSW Secondary History syllabuses. Both the original version (1.0) published in 2010 and the updated versions, the last of which (9.0) was published in 2022, included a disciplinary framing for secondary History. Although there are some variations between the versions, they included recognisable historical thinking concepts such as causation, change and continuity, perspectives and so on drawn straight from the decades-old international and Australian literature.
Part of the reason for this is that the person who led the project to write the History component of the National Curriculum, the late Professor Stuart Macintyre, believed in the importance of disciplines in education. In his keynote address to the Australian Curriculum Studies Association Conference in October 2009, he said:
‘Like mathematics and science, history is a discipline: that is, it is a bounded form of knowledge with epistemological principles that govern its methods of inquiry, rules of evidence and forms of interpretation ... The decision to base the curriculum on disciplines was important and sensible, but by no means an obvious one. In higher education and research, as well as school education, disciplines are on the back foot ... Disciplines are often described as silos, a lazy and ahistorical metaphor ... On the contrary, they are powerfully durable ways of organising knowledge and advancing understanding ... Unlike mathematics and science, however, history is both a discipline and something more.’ [6]
In addition to agreeing wholeheartedly with the jab that describing disciplines as ‘silos’ is ‘a lazy and ahistorical metaphor’, I think his comment also captures something important about History more specifically: that it is ‘both a discipline and something more’.
What this ultimately meant, is that the History component of the first version (1.0) of the National Curriculum included requirements to introduce students to the discipline of History but at the same time to explore History in other ways and from other perspectives. Since all the states in Australia agreed to implement this curriculum in some form, and NSW agreed with the proviso that it would ‘adopt and adapt’ it rather than implement it wholesale, we should expect there to be some overlap with what we currently have in NSW with what the National Curriculum required.
Disciplinary history in NSW: The Current Syllabus
So far, the story has focused mainly on international and national factors that have helped push NSW secondary History further towards a disciplinary foundation or frame over the past fifty or so years.
What this has downplayed is the momentum that built up within NSW towards disciplinary History and the way that this appears to have influenced developments in Australia. There is no question that since the 1970s, a disciplinary focus for secondary History education in NSW has become more pronounced and more codified. It has also been proudly defended by some teachers, academics and individuals within institutions such as the History Teachers’ Association of NSW. In fact, when most states combined History, Geography and other ‘humanities’ subjects into larger units such as ‘Studies of Society and Environment’ (SOSE) or ‘Human Society and its Environment’ (HSIE), NSW rejected this and History was preserved as a distinct subject. Some have used this to suggest that, in the world of secondary education at least, NSW is the ‘history state’. The creation of the HSC History Extension course has only added weight to that idea.
I should make the point here that I think it is entirely possible to point this trend out without falling into the trap of a 'progress' or 'triumph' narrative that assumes that we have moved categorically from some kind of dark ages to an enlightened present. As I have written elsewhere in trying to make sense of this history: '... there is no 'whig interpretation' of our current [syllabus] documents demonstrating a long march toward improvement' and the same could be said for how History has actually been taught [7]. I've seen brilliant History teachers in operation who talked little about 'historical thinking' and other similar ideas. The presence of more explicit disciplinary ideas is also no guarantee that what happens on the ground is always of high quality, especially if History classes are thrown to teachers operating outside their field of expertise as they often are. Still, what I'm suggesting is less about actual teaching practices and more about how History has been framed in NSW.
Drawing on longer traditions, the influence of the Schools Council History Project and more locally developed ideas about education and History, then, NSW began to push towards a disciplinary foundation for History well before the National Curriculum appeared. Looking at all the NSW History syllabuses since 1972, a colleague and I found that this move towards disciplinary History was a clear trend across the six documents [8]. A small taste of the ways in which this was expressed as the intention of the syllabuses (not necessarily the way that they were actually implemented in classrooms) is provided in the table below dating back to the 1972 document.
Syllabus | Extract |
|---|---|
1972 | Studying history should: ‘… lead students to an awareness of some of the problems and techniques of the historian’. |
1982 | ‘History is a systematic study of the past … (it is) not a fixed body of knowledge. It is subject to differing views’. |
1992 | School history: ‘Introduces students to the unique methodology of the historian’. |
I think the language here is important:
'... lead students to an awareness of SOME of the problems and techniques of the historian'
'INTRODUCES students to the unique methodology of the historian'.
I suspect the intention was never to pretend that 12 year olds would have mastered the entire History discipline before moving into Year 8. I also suspect that the intention was not to suggest that students could not enjoy learning about interesting stories, peoples and events while these aspirations were added to the mix. More on this in part 2 I hope.
In the most recent version of the NSW Stage 4-5 (year 7-10) syllabus, the rationale claims that:
‘History is a disciplined process of inquiry into the past that helps to explain how people, events and forces from the past have shaped our world … History as a discipline has its own methods and procedures. It is much more than the simple presentation of facts and dates from the past. History provides the skills for students to answer the question “How do we know?”’ [9]
The 2012 version also included a range of ‘skills and concepts’ that must be embedded throughout the stages including disciplinary ideas that have been clearly borrowed and adapted from some of the research and literature on historical thinking identified above. These include:
Continuity and change
Cause and effect
Perspectives
Empathetic understanding
Significance
Contestability
Comprehension: chronology, terms and concepts
Analysis and use of sources
Perspectives and interpretations
Research
Explanation and communication
In this sense, the disciplinary ideas at the foundation of the syllabus have certainly become more explicit, codified and concrete. I would go a little further and argue that this has also been mostly helpful as it provides History teachers with a workable, if imperfect, set of ideas and a common language with which to shape useful and powerful teaching approaches without overly constraining them. At risk of labouring the point, I think it's possible to say this without claiming that 'things are obviously much better now for everyone', without assuming that good History teaching did not exist prior to the more recent documents and without being naive to the many challenges that this also brings in the context of mass, compulsory secondary education.
There may be a case, then, for arguing that developments in NSW and other states influenced the national curriculum as much as the other way around.
So far, I’ve mainly narrated and described (often considered to be the ‘lower order’ stuff which is unfortunate I think). The next post tries to present more analysis and debate.
Endnotes
[1] For an interesting insight into particular aspects of this, see Jim Hagan, 'Making a History Syllabus in NSW Fifty Years Ago', Teaching History, Vol. 43, No. 2, 2009, pp. 28-31
[2] Maurice Keatinge, Studies in the Teaching of History, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913, p. 38
[3] Anna Clark, 'Progress of the Past: History in New South Wales, 1972-1999, p. 107: https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/10661/1/2008004017.pdf
[4] Geoffrey Elton, ‘What Sort of School History Should We Teach?’ in Martin Ballard (ed.) New Movements in the Study and Teaching of History, London: Temple Smith, 1970, p. 224
[6] Stuart Macintyre, ‘The challenge for History in the National Curriculum’, Keynote Address – Australian Curriculum Studies Association Conference, 2 October 2009, pp. 4-5
[7] Jonathon Dallimore and Michael Condie, 'Fifty Years of 7-10 History in New South Wales: An Overview', Teaching History, Vol. 56, No. 1, March 2022, p. 37
[8] Dallimore and Condie, 'Fifty Years of 7-10 History in New South Wales: An Overview'
[9] 'History K-10 Syllabus', New South Wales Education Standards Authority, 2012, p. 9
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