Alan Booth - Teaching History at University: Enhancing Learning and Understanding

Active research and fresh historical insight are necessary to keep a history school and its teaching alive; but equally necessary is the realisation that the teaching of history is as honourable, as useful, as arduous, a task as historical research and the writing of history books.

(Kitson-Clark 1973)

For most historians in higher education, teaching is an activity to which they devote the greater part of their time and energies on a day-to-day basis. It is a task undertaken not merely out of contractual obligation; it also provides the opportunity to share a love of the subject and to see students develop as historians, learners and individuals. In a survey of over a thousand historians conducted by the Organization of American Historians in 1993, a significant number reported that interaction with students constituted a particular satisfaction. For many, the desire to teach had been an important factor in drawing them into the profession, and the joy in seeing young people come alive to history and watching students grow and mature was a principal source of personal reward (Thelen 1994: 945). Teaching offered the opportunity to help others to connect more deeply to their past and to themselves and develop both subject and life skills. As one historian put it: I hope that through my teaching I can open young people's eyes about our nation's past and encourage them always to ask, Why is X the way it is? How did X get to be so? If I can do that, I've helped train a generation of inquisitive, curious minds which will be able to pursue achievement in a variety of fields (Shrock and Shrock 1994: 1098). Similarly, responses to an annual survey of university history departments in the United Kingdom since 1994, conducted by themagazine History Today, testify to the strength of historians professional and personal commitment to high-quality teaching and learning (see, for example, Fitzgerald and Hingley 1996; Barker 1997). As one historian comments, reflecting the views of colleagues in all types of institution: Despite the RAE [Research Assessment Exercise] and our research mission, the bulk of our resources continue to be derived from and directed towards the provision of high-quality teaching (Bates 1999: 56).

As the above quotation indicates, such surveys of professional opinion also reveal frustration at the distorting effects of recent trends within higher education. Thus one historian remarks that the academic reward system encourages historians to write for academic audiences, especially other historians, and discourages them from reaching out to multiple audiences. It also discourages them from trying to be good, effective teachers. They don't get rewarded to do this (Thelen 1994: 939). Most criticism, however, is reserved for the subjection of history programmes to an accounting mentality in which everything is regarded as measurable and comparable, an approach widely linked in the minds of historians with a managerialism that runs counter to traditional academic values of autonomy, integrity and collegiality (see Ramsden 1998; Adams 2000; Newton 2000). The growth of student numbers on a dwindling unit of resource creates further resentment, not least because it threatens to erode the relationship between teachers and students considered integral to high-quality learning and teaching in the subject (Fitzgerald and Hingley 1996; Evans 2003). Thus W. Thompson (2000: 74) detects a trend throughout the Western world