History 2000 Conference Report |
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History 2000 Conference Report |
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| The first national conference on developing
teaching and learning in higher education in History was held at Bath Spa University
College, 15-16 April 1999, under the auspices of History 2000. Over one hundred delegates
attended twenty-five papers presented in five parallel sessions. Delegates and presenters
of papers came from across the UK higher-education sector, and some from further afield,
most notably the United States.
The aim of the conference was to provide a national forum for the discussion of current practices, innovations and strategic issues for the discipline, and the papers presented covered a wide range of topics. There was, however, particular emphasis on the practicalities of teaching History today - with classroom issues (such as skills development, seminar participation and assessment, progression, feedback and the uses of C&IT) particularly to the fore. Also well-represented were sessions dealing with strategic issues for the discipline in the UK, such as the status of teaching and its role in our academic lives; the future of the history curriculum; and the decline in schools History and in the numbers taking A-level History. The two Keynote speakers, Professor Harold Silver, Co-ordinator of a research-funded Learning Society project on innovations, and Professor Peter Stearns, Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, shared their findings on innovation in teaching and learning in higher education, and trends in history teaching in the United States. Harold Silver noted some key trends in innovation in the UK, notably in the move towards collaborative or team work, in projects involving work outside the classroom (including with employers), in simulations and role-playing, in oral presentation, and in skills assessment. He observed that there were many innovators but that these were not always well-supported within departments and institutions, and suggested how a more innovation-friendly culture could be created - including recognition of achievement at university level and the need for departments to formulate clear teaching and learning strategies which encourage teaching development and recognise its value. In a fascinating discussion of trends in teaching in the US, Peter Stearns explained how there was growing concern to take history teaching more seriously among professional historians, demonstrated by the increasing tendency for professional associations such as the American Historical Association and Organisation of American Historians to include teaching sessions in their annual conferences. He also drew attention to the development of more systematic training programmes for postgraduates in teaching, and the beginnings of a changing balance between teaching and research in the academic career, all of which boded well for the quality of history teaching in the future. He also raised some key problems for History as a subject, especially the fact that most students taking the subject in the majority of universities are not History majors, and many teachers who go into History school teaching are not subject specialists. He also noted the increasingly American focus of the curriculum and the retreat of European history. In terms of teaching, challenges currently facing university history teachers in the USA include the need to articulate more explicitly the nature of historical skills and the purpose of studying the subject, to train students to think historically, to establish clear subject progression within modularised systems, and to demonstrate more clearly the relationship between historical and transferable skills. Many of these issues carried a resonance which echoed in discussion throughout the two days of the conference, and formed central issues raised at the plenary session which explored ways forward for university history teaching. Participants agreed particularly on the importance of devising effective means whereby ideas, experience and findings about good practices in history teaching can be pooled, and emphasised that much can be learned not only from experiences in this country, from the USA and elsewhere, but also from the world educational research into teaching and learning in higher education. This was a message emphasising the need for co-operation and collaboration in the interests of the development of the discipline as a whole. Over two days of discussion, what was particularly striking was the spirit of co-operation and support which prevailed throughout the event, and which we hope will be the hallmark of future conferences. Academic rigour is important in teaching development, but so too is a context which enables discussion of experiments, ideas and good practice in a relaxed and non-partisan manner. The feedback reports showed that the conference was successful as a means of generating and sharing a great number of practical teaching ideas and, importantly, as an occasion to meet together and share personal experiences of teaching History.
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