Paul Sendziuk

If we build it, will they come? Saving the history tutorial and rethinking assessment

As teaching programs in university history departments strain under the pressure of increasing class sizes, diminished budgets and fewer staff, savings in time and money have been sought by reducing the number of tutorials offered to students. Charting the history of one university’s attempt to make cuts to the humanities tutorial program, this article critiques the arguments used to justify such measures, and mounts a defence of the tutorial system, although not of the way in which students have been traditionally assessed and taught. It argues that if tutorials are to be saved and they are to enliven student learning, teacher-historians need to rethink the way in which they assess students and organise their teaching activities. This article has been peer reviewed.

‘Urban Degeneration and Rural Revitalisation’: The South Australian Government's Youth Migration Scheme, 1913–14

Abstract This article examines the social context and motivations behind the establishment of the South Australian Governments youth migration scheme of 1913–14. It investigates to what extent the concept of ‘urban degeneration and rural revitalisation’, as defined by Keith Williams, influenced the British and Australian proponents of the scheme. While the British proponents were clearly stimulated by anxiety about the degrading effects of poverty and the urban environment, it is argued that the South Australian sponsors of the scheme were driven by a complementary, but noticeably different, motivation. South Australian proponents feared that the ever-increasing migration of people from the States rural districts to the capital city was jeopardising South Australias otherwise ‘unstoppable’ agricultural expansion. These two beliefs were largely harmonious but ultimately diverged with regard to applicants from reformatory schools.

Cogs in the Machine: The Experiences of Female Munitions Workers and Members of the Australian Women’s Land Army in South Australia, 1940–45

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’.

TLO 7: Construct an Evidence-Based Argument or Narrative in Audio, Digital, Oral, Visual or Written Form

The movement towards privileging ‘authentic’ forms of student learning and assessment, and employer demands for university graduates to possess the ability to work in groups and communicate through a variety of non-textual means, has encouraged history academics to rethink the way in which they teach and assess their students. This chapter provides a brief critique of the written essay as the best means for students to communicate their ideas and be assessed and suggests a variety of alternative activities to develop student capacities to construct evidence-based arguments and narratives.

Delivery: Relics of the Past? Rethinking the History Lecture and Tutorial

Increasing student enrolments in higher education and burgeoning class sizes have required creative approaches to delivering course material, especially if active learning on the part of the student is the aim. In this context, traditional forms of course delivery such as lectures provided by a ‘sage on the stage’ and tutorials have been criticised as ineffective and expensive. However, thoughtfully designed to accommodate student needs and desires, history lectures and tutorials can still play an important role in higher education.

Forgotten people and places: 'Stalin's Poles' in Persia, India and Africa, 1942-50

Often overlooked in histories of displaced persons (DPs) who came to Australia after the Second World War are those who suffered Soviet rather than Nazi aggression, and who found salvation in DP camps outside of Europe. This article addresses this relative neglect by exploring the fate of Polish citizens who were deported to the Soviet Union during the war and spent up to eight years in DP camps in the Middle East, India and Africa before arriving in Australia. These camps provided a level of security and physical, psychological, and moral rehabilitation that historians argue was largely absent from the European DP camps after the war. This article has been peer reviewed.

Australian History Now

me that such a derogatory slogan is used, given that Macknight has researched this trade route extensively, perhaps more than anyone else, and presumably with some interest in the people involved. It is also a shame that the same expression is used in the introduction by Clark and May, presumably copied from Macknight (7). Tacon’s work here and elsewhere dwells on the visual narrative of the contact experience, the depiction of the Macassan voyages in rock art in Northern Australia. The chapter he writes with Sally May focusses on north-western Arnhem Land, but, as they note, this is just a “snapshot of a much wider and more complex Macassan-related rock art heritage” (129). They analyse paintings of a Macassan boat (prau) and knife. Such boats often feature in the rock art of Northern Australia and also in bark paintings. In one painting of a prau, there are depictions of Macassans and Aboriginal people working together. Ian McIntosh demonstrates how careful we need to be when talking about Aboriginal relationships with the Macassans. He claims that the Yolngu of eastern Arnhem Land had good relationships with the Bayini, pre-Macassan traders, but not with the Macassans. “Even the trepang itself rejects the visitors [Macassans] at Cape Arnhem in Lamamirri waters. It sends up a torrent of seawater and its own intestines to capsize Macassan fishing canoes” (102). The Yolngu saw the Macassans, the Japanese, and Europeans as intruders who did not treat them justly (as expressed in Yothu Yindi songs). In many other places, there was, however, mutual respect and good working relationships. A United Nations World Heritage cultural route listing would surely require understanding of such cultural links generated by the trade. Regina Ganter’s chapter deals mainly with the Australian side and Marshall Clark deals with Sulawesi. Dedi Supriadi Adhuri focusses on the voyages and the fishing. Sandy Blair and Nicholas Hall bring many aspects of the history and heritage together very well. There are some curious diversions in this collection, as, for example, Anthony Reid’s long section on the Australian military in Indonesia in the twentieth century and the description of a Malaysian museum in Chapter 10, but all the chapters, in diverse ways, raise fascinating questions about Australian history, about historical links to Asia, about Aboriginal negotiations with foreigners, about heritage and what should be done to acknowledge it in our schools, courts, and collective memory.