Penny Russell

Exploring historical thinking and agency with undergraduate history students

Recent research on historical thinking has instigated important disciplinary conversations and changes in pedagogical practice. They have, however, largely focused on the primary and secondary school sector, highlighting the gap in corresponding research into tertiary education. It is important to look at the experiences of history students at tertiary level, to assess the impact of perceptions and practices on graduate employment outcomes and transitions to research careers. In 2008 a national scoping study on student and staff perceptions of the nature and purposes of historical thinking was undertaken at 12 Australian universities, involving 1455 student questionnaires and 50 interviews with academics. This article examines student and staff perceptions of the social benefits of historical thinking, highlighting the great potential for transformative learning and civic contribution, and the vital role of agency in this process.

Historical Thinking in Higher Education - Staff and Student Perceptions of the Nature of Historical Thinking

This article provides an introduction to the results of a nationwide scoping study of student and staff perceptions of the nature and roles of historical thinking. In 2008–09, over 1400 students and 50 staff from 12 universities around Australia completed interviews and questionnaires. This research report examines student and staff responses to the second questionnaire item, asking for an assessment of the connection between particular activities and historical thinking. The national data reflected a surprisingly consistent pattern of responses and highlighted at least three things which should be of interest and concern to academics: first, students far more than their teachers associated the handling of secondary sources with historical thinking; second, students drew few connections between online work and historical thinking; and third, there were few discernible differences in the responses of introductory and upper-level students. These findings underscore the need for sector-wide work on promoting primary materials work with students, for developing the opportunities provided by computer-assisted learning and articulating and communicating to students the standards of achievement valued by the profession as marking the development of historical thinking at tertiary level.

The Allure of the Nile: Jane Franklin's Voyage to the Second Cataract, 1834

When Jane, Lady Franklin, set off on a voyage up the Nile as far as the Second Cataract, she abandoned many of the prescriptions of genteel feminine behaviour. Yet she dreaded social condemnation, and shrank from being thought ‘masculine’. Her diary of the voyage represents her complex negotiation of two alternative identities, as authoritative, imperialist traveller and as self-conscious, vulnerable lady. These identities were irreconcilable, and the possibility of an alternative was constantly defeated both by Jane Franklin’s cultural prejudices and by her debilitating awareness of herself as object, susceptible to criticism and dependent on admiration.

Girl in a Red Dress: Inventions of Mathinna

Abstract This article seeks to do the impossible: to unsettle the fixity of fictions that have been so long in circulation that they have taken on the appearance and solidity of fact. Mathinna, the Aboriginal girl who lived at Government House under the care of Lady Franklin in the early 1840s but was abandoned at the Orphan School when the Franklins returned to England a few years later, is an elusive historical subject. Stories and images of Mathinna have circulated for a century and a half, drawing sustenance from each other to entrench powerful sentimental tropes about her life. The article argues that we should be wary about the origins of these sentimental stories, and about their capacity to be reworked into acts of historical recovery.

‘Citizens of the World?’: Jane Franklin’s Transnational Fantasies

During the middle years of the nineteenth century, an English woman sent forth a series of appeals to foreign nations for aid in the quest to save her husband’s life.

An improper education? Jane Griffin's pursuit of self‐improvement and ‘Truth’, 1811–12

In April 1811, the nineteen-year-old Jane Griffin carefully drew up a ‘Plan for the employment of time & improvement of the mind, arranged according to the nature & relative importance of the studies necessary to be daily pursued’. Dissatisfied by the limits of her formal schooling, and possessing the rare privilege of time at her own disposal, Jane was eager to pursue a serious course of study and reflection. That she could boldly outline a plan for so doing was a consequence of her particular family circumstances: an indulgent and wealthy father, no mother, and two sisters willing to take responsibility for the domestic and social obligations that fell to the daughters of the household, leaving her relatively free to pursue her own wishes. The plan itself, however, and the yearning for improvement that it articulated, were a product of the particular constellation of ideas that coalesced around the issue of female education at that period. In a path-breaking article published in 1977, Miriam Lerenbaum suggested that although early biographers of eighteenth-century literary women tended to assume that the education of each was remarkable and even unique, the predominance of the pattern might suggest that ‘Many other young women of the time, without the inclination, talent, or temerity to pursue literary careers, may well have had a similarly “improper” education’. More recent and broad-ranging discussions of female education in this period have served to strengthen her point. In this article I pursue the tensions and contradictions inherent in one such ‘improper education’, for a young woman who, although she did later achieve

Travelling steerage: class, commerce, religion and family in colonial Sydney

This article outlines the purpose and approach to be pursued in a new project, a history of Sydney written from the point of view of a middle-class Congregationalist family, the Thompsons, who emigrated from London in 1834. Such a history allows us to explore class, kin and community in global as well as local contexts, to understand the intersections of public and private life and to gain new insight into class formation in the mid-nineteenth century. It also endeavours to respond to the challenge posed by Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath, of writing “history that people want to read”.

‘Unhomely moments’: Civilising domestic worlds in colonial Australia

This article explores the multiple connections between the colonisation of Australia in the nineteenth century and the formation of domestic worlds as the site for ‘civilising’ children. The affective bonds of family were often regarded as an indispensable element in the nurture and training of children, but where the bonds of ‘natural affection’ seemed to pose an obstacle to the civilising project, they were ruthlessly severed.

TLO 8: Identify and Reflect Critically on the Knowledge and Skills Developed in the Study of History

Encouraging students towards an informed yet independent stance of critical reflection requires a delicate balancing act. This chapter explores a range of strategies, from direct teaching about questions of historical epistemology to the creation of opportunities for students to discover and wrestle with such questions for themselves. It argues that every stage of the tertiary history curriculum should include stimulus for original, independent, critical and creative reflection, room for discovery, and a safe space for trial and error, re-evaluation and growth.

Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling

It is a book at least as much about what people thought and said about the empty north, as what actually happened on its literal ground. Aligning with the contemporary style of Australian history-writing more generally, this is rather more a cultural/intellectual history than an economic/social history. There are some peculiar publishing and scholarly conventions that I imagine Palgrave insisted upon. There is citation information and copyright at the start of each chapter; either because chapters are planned to be electronically copied and sold individually, or in anticipation of individual chapters being separated and copied. Either way, the effect of a monograph is diminished. A very short ‘Select Bibliography’ does not do justice to the very large number of Australian historians who have worked over this material before. This is more of a problem precisely because the endnotes to each chapter are spare: mainly to primary documents; occasionally to other studies. But Palgrave – presumably – have pared the notes right down, so that the reader has no real sense at all about previous scholarly debate over content and analysis. There is no historiographically framed introduction, as is increasingly becoming conventional. McGregor is not alone here, but I remain troubled by this trend. It is entirely the case, as McGregor states, that the empty north idea came to shape the nation’s self-image. It still does. This will be the go-to book that documents that long history.