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Abstract
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 history's educational traditions might play an important role in imagining pedagogic and professional futures.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof. Eric Evans for his helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this article. Thanks are also due to three anonymous referees for their constructive critical comments.
Notes
Alan Booth is a member of the School of History at the University of Nottingham, UK.
[1] Kogan, ‘History’, 38.
[2] Anxiety about purposes was of course far from new. See, for example, Plumb's, ‘The Historian's Dilemma’ which reflects on a post-World War Two ‘crisis in the humanities’. In the 1980s and 1990s, However, it assumed a particularly acute form.
[3] See, for example, Gardiner, What is History Today?; Cannadine, ‘What is History Now?’
[4] Stevenson, ‘The End of History’; Cannadine, ‘British History’; ‘Making History Now’; Thompson, What Happened to History?
[5] Booth, ‘Pedagogy and the Practice of Academic History’; Cuban, How Scholars Trumped Teachers, esp. Ch. 3, 5. These demonstrate how as historical research became more diverse, rigorous, and prominent in twentieth-century disciplinary systems of esteem, history teaching assumed a more lowly professional status.
[6] For a careful analysis, see Stevenson, ‘The End of History’. For a graphic statement on the condition and morale of university historians, see Cannadine, ‘Making History’, 3.
[7] Figures are taken from the UK Department for Education statistics: Department for Education. Student Numbers in Higher Education—Great Britain 1982/3–1992/3. London: HMSO, 1994.
[8] For discussion of this, see Halsey, The Decline of Donnish Dominion; Timmins, Vernon and Kinealy, Teaching and Learning History; Rothblatt, The Modern University and its Discontent; Trowler, Academics Responding to Change; Henkel, Academic Opportunities and Policy Change.
[9] A parallel organisation (PUSH) was formed in 1988 by historians in public sector institutions (the polytechnics and colleges of higher education). PUSH (Public Sector History) and HUDG merged upon the polytechnics being awarded university status in 1992.
[10] On this see Silver, Tradition and Higher Education, Ch. 6.
[11] Jacobs, ‘Edward Shils’ Theory of Tradition', 139.
[12] Readman, ‘The Place of the Past’, 199.
[13] Phillips and Schochet, Questions of Tradition, xi.
[14] Phillips, ‘What is Tradition?’, 6.
[15] Clifford, ‘Traditional Futures’, 152, 153, 156.
[16] Bevir, Logic of the History of Ideas; Bevir and Rhodes, Interpreting British Governance; ibid, ‘Interpretive Approaches’; Bevir, Rhodes and Weller, ‘Traditions of Governance’; Bevir and Trentmann, Governance, Consumers and Citizens.
[17] Bevir and Rhodes, Interpreting British Governance, 3.
[18] Ibid., 17.
[19] Ibid., 32–3. For critical views on Bevir, see, for example, Ankersmit, ‘Comments on Bevir's Logic’; McAnulla, ‘Challenging the New Interpretivist Approach’.
[20] On academic cultures and tribes and a valuable survey of trends, see Becher and Trowler, Academic Tribes and Territories.
[21] Phillips and Schochet, Questions of Tradition, xi.
[22] Church, ‘Constraints on the Historian’, 135. See also Connell-Smith and Lloyd, The Relevance of History, Ch. 4; Kenyon, The History Men, Ch. 7 on the predominantly unselfconscious nature of academic socialisation and its reliance on sustained graduate research as a guarantor of competence in all spheres of professional activity.
[23] ‘Responses to the HUDG Academic Standards Questionnaire, April–May 1997’: HUDG archive, Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
[24] For a critical analysis of this language, see Trowler, ‘Captured by the Discourse?’
[25] For an informative history of the CNAA see Silver, A Higher Education.
[26] ‘Responses to the HUDG Academic Standards Questionnaire, April–May 1997’: HUDG archive, Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
[27] This process was accompanied by a growing number of compulsory training courses for newly appointed lecturers, and by government-sponsored pedagogic innovation initiatives committed to promoting a ‘new’ educational professionalism. See Henkel, Academic Opportunities and Policy Change; Trowler, Academics Responding to Change.
[28] See minutes of HUDG Plenary Meeting, 26 October 1996; ‘Draft Statement for Heads of History Departments on the QAA's Scheme of Academic Review’, 21 March 2000: Minutes of HUDG Steering Committee, 26 February 2000: HUDG archive.
[29] ‘My View at Interview’: Professor A. Fletcher (n.d.), 2; HUDG archive, typed transcript.
[30] What follows draws heavily upon these: the 43 responses to the consultation over Teaching Quality Assessment in 1994, and particularly the 68 responses to the questionnaire that formed the basis of the 1997 and 1998 HUDG reports representing the views of approximately two-thirds of history departments in the UK. It also draws upon the 64 departmental responses to the national consultation on the History Benchmarking Exercise in November–December 1998. All are held in the HUDG archive, Institute of Historical Research: University of London.
[31] See HUDG, Submission to the National Committee; Standards in History.
[32] See Quality Assurance Agency, History Benchmark Statement. The responses to this consultation indicate that almost all the views expressed were the result of formal departmental discussion.
[33] Schochet, ‘Tradition as Politics’, 305. See also Jordanova's comments on the politics of pedagogy: History in Practice, 194.
[34] Ten of the original 13 members nominated were from pre-1992 universities, two from post-1992 institutions and one from a university college. HUDG Steering Committee minutes, 31 January 1998: HUDG archive.
[35] ‘My View at Interview’, 12. See also draft letter from A. Fletcher to J. Randall, 17 April 1998: HUDG archive.
[36] See, for example, the work of Kogan, ‘History’; Becher and Trowler Academic Tribes and Territories.
[37] Response to the draft History benchmarking document, November–December 1998 [hereafter Benchmark response] no. 31: HUDG archive.
[38] HUDG, Submission, 2.
[39] ‘The Making of a History Graduate’, The Independent 14 January 1999; ‘My View at Interview’, 3.
[40] Benchmark response no. 53.
[41] HUDG, Submission, 6.
[42] HUDG, Report of a Working Group, 11.
[43] See the observations of Kogan, ‘History’, 35.
[44] Peters, ‘Combining Innovative Professional Practice with a Traditional Subject’.
[45] Ibid. 105–6 where this model is contrasted with one provocatively called ‘good professional practice’. See also the account of diverging pedagogic models in history in Barker and McLean, ‘Students Making Progress’, 412–5.
[46] For brief introductions to this, see Connell-Smith and Lloyd, The Relevance of History; Cannon, ‘Teaching History at University’; Kenyon, The History Men, 277.
[47] Benchmark response no. 1. Nor, as Rothblatt in particular has demonstrated in his analyses of the history of liberal higher education, had it ever been: see his ‘Liberal Education in the English-Speaking World’.
[48] Rothblatt, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education, 197.
[49] Benchmark response no. 38.
[50] Benchmark response no. 13. See also response no. 14.
[51] Elton, The Practice of History, 148–9. See also his Return to Essentials, esp. Ch. 3.
[52] The Practice of History, 150, 154. For an analysis of Elton on historical practice, see Skinner, ‘Sir Geoffrey Elton and the Practice of History’.
[53] Benchmark response no. 41.
[54] Cannon, ‘Teaching History at University’, 252.
[55] Richards, ‘Uneasy Chairs’, ix, xii.
[56] Benchmark response no. 9.
[57] See, for example, Nicholls, The Employability of History Students; Timmins, Vernon and Kinealy, Teaching and Learning History.
[58] Roberts and Mycock, ‘Work-Based Learning on an Arts Degree’, 77.
[59] Nicholls, Employability of History Students, 3.
[60] Bevir and Rhodes, Interpreting British Governance, Ch. 2.
[61] On developments in these institutions see Pratt, The Polytechnic Experiment; Cowan, ‘History in the UK Public Sector’.
[62] Benchmark response no. 11.
[63] Benchmark response no. 33.
[64] Benchmark response no. 48. Whilst the remit of the History Benchmarking Group was restricted to single honours programmes, this demonstrates the sensitivity of many historians in the new universities.
[65] On the development and influence of departmental cultures, see Church, ‘Constraints on the Historian’; Parker, ‘The Development of History Courses’.
[66] Benchmark response no. 36.
[67] Silver, Tradition, 259.
[68] Quality Assurance Agency, History Benchmark Statement, 1.
[69] Benchmark response no. 34.
