“Doing” History in the Classroom – Anna Clark

Issue 1 | March 2009

What is happening to the teaching of history? Academics like Anna Clark believe that for many Australian school students, learning about their nation’s history is about as bad as history gets. For Mark Lopez, bias and political correctness has censored out many of the facts of the past for a record of alienation or denial. Anna Clark, with Stuart Macintyre, is co-author of The History Wars which sparked months of intense debate about the way historians, politicians and others choose to interpret the Australian story. Mark Lopez is the author of The Little Black Schoolbook – The Secret to Getting Straight “As” at School and University. Anna Clark and Mark Lopez addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 24 March 2009.

“DOING” HISTORY IN THE CLASSROOM

ANNA CLARK

This talk comes off the back of a research project I was working on until last year, which looked at the teaching of Australian history in schools. I interviewed 246 high school students, history teachers and curriculum officials from all eight Australian states and territories for the research. This large, qualitative project was never intended to be a statistical survey of students’ historical knowledge. Instead, we wanted to ask how do students connect with the past. What do they find interesting about Australian history? What don’t they enjoy? Do they think it should be a compulsory subject? If so, how should it be taught?

But before I get onto these classroom perspectives that form the bulk of my results, I want to begin tonight with two contrasting views from outside today’s classrooms about Australian history education. The first is from Eva, an old family friend of mine who migrated from Poland to escape the totalitarian regime there in the late 1970s and begin a new life with her family in Australia. The second is from Brian, a former colleague from Monash University.

Eva is a highly educated public servant by training and recently became a guide at Parliament House as a way of enjoying semi-retirement. We had dinner not that long ago and we talked about the history education research that I happened to be in the middle of. Eva was shocked at the state of the subject in schools. As a Parliament House guide, she couldn’t believe how little young Australians know about their democracy and history. She thought national history should be mandatory, even based on rote learning, in order to inculcate the essential national facts about the past. Her own education had been biased and misleading, she said. And she felt it was critical to teach students the facts about their heritage and history if they are to become nationally literate.

On one level, I think Eva’s sentiment is hard to disagree with – and many of us here no doubt share her concerns. In 1997 a national survey showed that only 18 per cent of those interviewed knew that Edmund Barton was Australia’s first Prime Minister. And, in a 2006 report on the state of civics and citizenship, only 23 per cent of Year 10 students knew that Australia Day marked the arrival of the British in 1788.

Such ignorance is clearly a problem. Knowing the nation’s past puts its present into a context that is meaningful and comprehensible. It means understanding Australia’s political institutions and civic life. Only a few weeks ago, the latest results of students’ civics and citizenship knowledge again raised significant concerns about how much young Australians understand (or don’t understand) of the world in which they will soon be voting.

But my response to this belief in the primacy of core national knowledge (most respectfully, I might add, because Eva’s a dear friend) is this: will teaching more facts get students closer to Australian history? I’ll leave this rhetorical question for you to consider while I go on to share Brian’s contrasting view.

Brian was a colleague of mine at Monash University. He had been a highly experienced secondary history teacher and a history method lecturer for education students. But when I gave a paper at the faculty on some of the research I was up to, I again found myself agreeing to disagree – but for very different reasons. Brian listened generously to my work, but he thought that any mandating of the subject was simply foolish.

Brian felt that students should be exposed to the fun of history, and only by enjoying it – however it came – would they go on to be interested in Australia’s past. For him, “the facts” were the least important thing about the subject. If students had fun in class, and learned to love history, he reasoned, they’d form a lifelong interest in the subject. Again, I think this view contains some important and valid ideas. In particular, it critically acknowledges the way students learn and engage with history – and that’s not through an emphasis on facts alone.

But I have reservations, too, about exclusively taking on such an approach. For one thing, I think we should be aiming to teach students to be historians, to DO history in the classroom. While that certainly doesn’t mean a fixation only with content, it also doesn’t mean that content can be done away with altogether. Doing history requires knowledge and expertise: debates in class don’t work without background knowledge, for example; and you can’t have informed opinions without knowing “what happened” at some level.

Combine these very different views with a dash of politics, and a splash of media sensationalism, and you begin to get a sense of why Australian history teaching generates so much heated discussion. Despite the fact that we all agree there’s a problem, it’s very hard to come up with a solution that everyone’s happy with – especially students and teachers themselves.

Just think of the media furore surrounding former Prime Minister John Howard’s Australia Day speech in 2006, when he suggested that Australian history teaching required a “root and branch renewal”. Supporters cheered the prime minister’s strong stance against what they perceived to be the dominance of pedagogically progressive and politically biased history curricula. By contrast, while many teachers and historians supported Howard’s public support for the subject, they didn’t see the answer coming in the form of a mandated, content-driven national history curriculum.

The debate didn’t end on Australia Day. In August that year the government hosted a national History Summit, attended by historians, teachers, and esteemed public commentators (some of whom stand here before you tonight). And some months after, following significant toing and froing between the Department of Education and Prime Minister’s Office, a prime ministerial Guide on the Teaching of Australian History was released, in time for the 2007 federal election.

You might even remember the leader’s debate from that election, where John Howard responded to Kevin Rudd’s “education revolution” with a quip of his own: “my education revolution-if I can borrow a phrase”, he said, “would be to restore those basic standards, bring back trades education and restore a proper narrative and a proper understanding of Australian history.”

The Rudd Government’s National Curriculum Board recently released its own national curriculum document on history, which was again met with considerable comment in the media. It seems that many of us have opinions about what should be taught. My question tonight is, how does this translate in the classroom itself?

As one teacher I interviewed in Tasmania a few months after Howard’s 2006 Australia Day speech put it: “Oh look, you read in the paper all the time about the history the kids should know and I keep thinking, ‘right, come into a classroom and teach it’. It doesn’t work.”

So let’s go into the classroom to get a sense of Australian history teaching. Sadly, and overwhelmingly, the responses from students in my research were pretty negative about the subject. Perhaps perversely, students’ disinterest in the subject seems inversely proportional to the public and political disquiet that’s generated every time it makes the news.

As Amy, a Year 10 student in Canberra lamented, “Like I’m fascinated with European history, but with Australia it’s like, bleurgh, because it’s always going to be here.” Jake, a year 11 student from Brisbane, was blunt in his judgement: “If they pretended there was a civil war, it would be much more interesting,” he said. “But there wasn’t, so it’s boring.”

Despite their rather bleak assessment, however, students overwhelmingly believed Australian history is important to know (and most even thought it should be a compulsory subject).

When I spoke with a group of Year 12 students from a public school in Darwin and asked them whether they thought Australian history should be mandatory, they all said “yes”, almost in unison. Then Tani added: “But they’ve got to spruce it up because I remember learning heaps of Australian history earlier on and I just was so bored by it.”

Ramah, a year 10 student from an Islamic College in Western Sydney, thought it was vital to know because “history’s all around us. Like you wouldn’t see someone going on the news and talking about maths.” So the idea of studying the subject isn’t the problem for students, it’s what they learn, and how they learn it. In particular, students complained of endless topic repetition, while teachers lamented a lack of teacher training and professional support in history.

When I asked Les, a Year 10 student at a public school on the New South Wales Central Coast, whether he thought learning about Indigenous history was important, he said, “Yes, very much so. Although at the moment we learn it bang, bang, bang in year 7, 8, 9, and 10, but too sporadically. It needs to be comprehensive.”

For a group of Year 11 students at a public girls school in Sydney it was federation that raised their ire. Kate said that she “saw the same film about the states’ different railway lines about six times!” “It’s not that it’s boring,“, said her classmate Pia, “but I think it’s because it’s so repetitive.”

This of course means the need for better-trained teachers with adequate support and professional development. And teachers themselves were the first to admit this. Sally teaches at a public high school in regional Victoria, and strongly advocated proper history training for history teachers. “Well if I had my way, the main thing is that we’d have trained history teachers teaching history,“, she said. “I think our courses are really good but what we’re lacking is trained history teachers and I think that’s a real concern.”

What I found most interesting was the ways students articulated how they thought the subject could be better taught – and their views corresponded remarkably with those of their teachers. Students weren’t interested in bludging their way through Australian history, but they were convinced that it could and should be more engaging. There’s no point teaching Australian history if students won’t connect with it. This doesn’t mean having fun at the expense of knowledge, as Brian contended; but nor does is it mean emphasising content at the expense of classroom engagement.

The last thing students want are teachers who “are just doing it because they know they have to”, says Felicity, a year 10 student from Canberra. Or a classroom where the students are “just looking at words and copying them down,” says Lily from Brisbane. “They almost don’t go into my head – they just go from my eyes to my notes.” Instead, students want history that is complex and engaging. When I asked a group of year 12 students from a public school in Darwin how they learnt history best, Natalie said it was the questions raised in class by their active and encouraging teacher:

We did a lot of debating last year, like arguing our different sides, and I think one of the really big components is having good teachers. I think what made that so interesting was that we had really good teachers who know their stuff and have like actively engaged us and they’ve questioned our opinions, and it’s just been a really good experience.

Ryan, a year 12 student in New South Wales, said he liked the fact that “everyone’s allowed to have their own opinions” in history. “Like, you’re allowed to have yours – I don’t care – as long as you can kind of back up your evidence.”

Fifteen minutes is a short time to present an argument about the need to get the debates over history education back into the classroom-after all, that’s where it has to be taught. Students are keenly aware that they should know “what happened” in Australia’s past, but they should also want to learn to form their own opinions, and understand that those opinions can be disputed. In other words, they want to engage with Australian history by doing it in class. And it’s this engagement (a real historical engagement) that I think we should strive for in Australian history teaching.

Note: original names have been changed.