Alan Booth

The practice of university history teaching

Provides a guide to good practice and its development in the teaching and learning of history in universities and colleges. Its contributors examine recent thinking on the teaching of the subject, survey current practices, and provide practical advice to teachers and departments at a time of considerable change. Using a variety of approaches grounded in research, experimentation and reflection, the authors address central issues facing history teaching today. Topics covered include: scholarship and history teaching; teaching adn academic careers; creating an effective learning context; skills and the history curriculum; modularization; teaching students through active learning; devising imaginative seminars; teaching with larger classes; using the Web as a teaching and learning resource; and integrating IT into the history curriculum. There are also essays on the role of fieldwork, teaching oral history to undergraduates, rethinking the history essay, practices of seminar assessment, developing assessed group-work, assessing learning outcomes, and learning from feedback on assessment.

Self, others and society: a case study of university integrative learning

There is currently an over‐emphasis on the economic aims of higher education at the expense of the aims of personal and social transformation. This article proposes a specific approach to integrating educational aims. It draws on the works of Jürgen Habermas and Martha Nussbaum to conceptualise integrative learning as a simultaneous focus on self, others and society. A small‐scale case study of five lecturers from different disciplines is employed to explore the value of the conceptual framework by illustrating variation in how integrative learning is understood and practised in contemporary pedagogical conditions.

Rethinking the Scholarly: Developing the Scholarship of Teaching in History.

In the Humanities the notion of scholarship is fundamental to professional identity and prestige. Among historians scholarship is still overwhelmingly identified with research, and research of a particular kind, which has come to dominate ideas of what it means to be a professional historian. The valuing of one aspect of professional practice has diverted attention from pedagogic issues, and relegated teaching and learning to a secondary status within the discipline. This article challenges this prevailing orthodoxy, and explores recent efforts to forge a more flexible conception of disciplinary scholarship that can address and acknowledge teaching and learning in a more serious fashion. It considers and elaborates on the notion of the scholarship of teaching in history, and provides an account of recent developments in practice towards the creation of a disciplinary identity better able to serve the needs of faculty, students and the discipline as a whole in the 21st century.

Learning history in university: Student views on teaching and assessment

ABSTRACT The challenges to humanities teachers in higher education have dramatically intensified in recent years. Changes in teaching methods are clearly required but what these should be is a matter of urgent debate. Recent educational research suggests that any response should begin with a careful consideration of student perceptions and needs. This paper attempts to address this issue for one subject, history, though it should possess a wider relevance. It is written in the hope that the student voices it records will facilitate a more informed and positive approach to the changes facing the subject.

‘Wide-awake learning’ Integrative learning and humanities education

This article reviews the development of integrative learning and argues that it has an important role to play in broader conceptions of the undergraduate curriculum recently advanced in the UK. It suggests that such a focus might also provide arts and humanities educators with a hopeful prospect in difficult times: a means by which the distinctive value and potential of these subjects might be articulated and promoted. Interviews with humanities students and lecturer case-studies from a UK initiative in integrative learning are used to ground the argument advanced and provide illustrative examples of practice.

‘The Traditional Standpoint of Historians’: Tradition and the Construction of Educational Identity in Late Twentieth-Century British Higher Education

In the final decades of the twentieth century, history in British higher education experienced major challenges that highlighted fundamental issues of educational purpose and value. As the hitherto private world of university history teaching and learning began to open up to public scrutiny, what emerged was a statement of what one subject representative body called ‘the traditional standpoint of historians’ on undergraduate history education. Drawing particularly upon evidence from national discipline consultations and recent rethinking of the representation and uses of tradition, this article argues that the appeal to the educational past was more complex than public statements suggested and that more critical scrutiny of historys educational traditions might play an important role in imagining pedagogic and professional futures.

Passion: The Place of Passion in History Teaching in a Standards Environment

What place does passion have in teaching history in contemporary higher education? How can we place it in a standards environment? This chapter examines the role of passion in history pedagogy and why it matters. It explores the experiential realm of history lecturer motivations, ideals and experiences and the love of the subject that fuels a sense of identity as historians and educators. It considers the link between the will to teach (and learn) history, the emotions and teaching effectiveness and argues that in the increasingly regulated conditions of higher education passion is a resource needed more than ever. Finally, it urges university historians to acknowledge and amplify a voice too often submerged in the discipline’s public curricular and pedagogic discourse, as an integral part of efforts to persuade multiple audiences why higher learning in the subject matters.

Irish Exiles, Revolution and Writing in England in the 1790s

In 1791 Thomas Butterworth Bayley, Manchester’s most active and observant magistrate, wrote to the Home Secretary of the difficulties of maintaining order in the rapidly expanding cotton capital of England: The trade of this country is wonderfully prosperous. It produces its attendant evils, amongst these I include a very numerous and foreign population, especially from Ireland, estranged, unconnected and in general in a species of exile. These men are full of money from the high state of wages and are frequently filled with liquor and engaged in desperate affrays.1 Ten years later this, in many ways traditional, complaint about the disorderliness of the ‘low Irish’ had acquired a new and more frightening dimension. The immigrant Irish were now associated with political subversion, a stigma they were to carry through the nineteenth century. Exile and subversion merged and became indistinguishable in the public mind during this revolutionary decade.

Reviews : A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the age of the French Revolution, London, Hutchinson, 1979. 594pp. £12.00

ly high as ’200 to 250’ and that of the Commons, at ’480-odd’, 78 too low. These are startling aberrations. However, having got them out of her system, Professor Hatton ’settles down’ at least as quickly as George I; and she subsequently succeeds, with the aid of the two invaluable new sources which she uncovered in the course of her research, the G6rtz and Bernstorff archives, both in beautifully illuminating the Whig schism of 1716-17 and in challenging two of the most commonly accepted orthodoxies about her subject that George never acquired any working command of the English language during his reign and that, partly on this account, he ceased attending Cabinet meetings in 1717 and never reappeared. I am bound to add that the evidence adduced on both counts leaves me, personally, still among the doubters, but every reader should be grateful for being made to think again about these matters.