Country teaches: The significance of the local in the Australian history curriculum

Introduction: History as content knowledge

Before enrolling in a third year curriculum unit in teacher education, 138 primary pre-service teachers at a university in Australia were surveyed to determine the extent of their prior knowledge of Australian history. The questionnaire ‘What do you know about Australian history’ used a range of short answer questions. The questions were chosen because they related to the content of the Australian History Curriculum Years 3–6 (ACARA, 2012). The average score of the 138 students who participated in the questionnaire was approximately six out of 18 (36%). The highest score was 15 out of 18, and the lowest score was zero.

This lack of historical knowledge is not peculiar to Australia, and is common among teachers in related countries such as Canada, the USA (Osborne, 2003) and New Zealand (Manning, 2011). Given that Lawless (2010) and Clark (2008) argue that history ‘is much more than the ability to fill out blanks on a survey’ (Osborne, 2003, p. 588), should this level of content knowledge among primary pre-service teachers be a concern? Are these results significant in terms of the capabilities of teachers to teach history in primary schools? This article will suggest that neither historical content nor methods should be the initial focus of our preparation in teacher education.

How should we be preparing pre-service primary teachers to teach Australian history? In addressing this key question, I will draw upon several key academic contributions to demonstrate how the debate has stalled on content versus methodology. This examination of the literature will identify key problematics relating to the current discussion around the teaching of history in Australian schools. I will argue that history is local and needs to be studied locally, and to do otherwise is to disempower those children who do not abide by an epistemology that produces knowledge as disembodied and placeless.

History as methodology

An Inspector at the New South Wales Board of Studies, Lawless notes that there is more to history than teaching content knowledge. Effective and authentic teaching practice in history, she suggests, encourages students ‘to be curious and pose interesting and engaging questions about the past’ (2010, p. 22). Students should have:

the opportunities to engage in exciting classroom experiences that involve a range of sources, role play, oral history, museum and site visits, archaeology, interpretations, empathy, historical fiction and film, family history and heritage, local history, re-enactments and historical drama. (Lawless, 2010, p. 22)

In a study of what engages students in history classrooms, Clark (2008, p. 6) notes that ‘we all know what students don’t know about the nation’s history. But we are less clear on what they do know. For instance, how do they engage with Australia’s past?’. Clark (2008) conducted a study in 2006 of how students engage with Australian history in high school. In interviews with students and teachers at 34 schools across Australia, the response from students was categorical. They described Australian history as ‘dull and repetitive’ and most of the time they ‘seemed turned off’ (Clark, 2008, p. 14).

Should it be a surprise when students and teachers alike proclaim that topics such as federation are ‘as boring as bat shit’, with Clark (2008, p. 22) adding the rider, ‘Australians generally aren’t renowned for their great or reverential attachment to political history’. She notes this problem of connection to context in an interview with a teacher: ‘its [federation] extremely important to all Australians and it is an interesting story, but how do you connect a kid with that?’ (2008, p. 30). The teacher answers her own question by speculating that if children were to find federation engaging, ‘they’d do it from the local perspective, like what did the saw millers, the loggers and the fishermen and the berry pickers and the farmers think about federation and what did it mean to them in 1901 without iPods and faxes…’ (2008, p. 30).

Most curriculum planners and teachers are well aware that when students complain about learning that is boring, they are referring to the disembodied nature of that knowledge and learning, and that the content has nothing to do with them or with their experiences. The content is disconnected and distanced from their context of experience. We also know that these stories from the classroom highlight the futility of attempts to teach content that has been alienated from its place of production, through distancing techniques that most students of history will never come to know or recognise, irrespective of whether their classroom is in the city or in Arnhemland. On teacher observed, ‘it’s much more important for the Indigenous students [in my class] to learn about the gaining of rights’ and about the times when children were taken from their parents than it is to teach students about federation, which doesn’t have any relevance to them (Clarke, 2008, p. 31).

In a study that has the potential to explicate how kids do connect with history, Clark concluded that it comes down to good teaching, that history must be ‘taught well’ (2008, p. 145). She returns to a key issue raised by teachers time and again in interviews, that history is linked to place, and children like history when they are connected to the local. Yet this key point is overshadowed by her conclusion that history can succeed in schools when teachers employ engaging methodologies. The crucial point made by the teacher above that not even the most engaging and effective teacher will convince a class of Aboriginal students in Arnhemland that they should know about federation, is overlooked and forgotten. The crucial issue raised through the student-interviews that historical knowledge is taught as disconnected from the student experience is not addressed. Her study ultimately proposes that history is produced in relation to a carefully honed teaching methodology, which draws upon evidence from the past to arrive at interpretations and conclusions.

The origins and purpose of history

In an insightful article Can history succeed at school? Gilbert (2011) examines the goals of the proposed Australian history curriculum, arguing that the purposes of teaching history have not been clarified. He proceeds to investigate the problem of content selection noting that the study of history cannot determine what is important for students to know. Gilbert adds that historians have not been able to determine which questions are worth asking, and this was highlighted in Clark’s (2008) interviews with students. While politicians and parents might think that they know what students should know, the children themselves may not be interested in such questions. And hence Gilbert returns to the main issue around what criteria or model can be used to select the appropriate content, apart from perhaps using periods of time as an organisational framework. He adds that a chronology of past events is unlikely to engage students in any serious problem-solving and decision-making (2011, p. 252).

Problems over defining curriculum content lead Gilbert back to a focus on the historians’ conceptual categories. He compares narrative explanation and conceptual models of historical process to privilege the argument that narrative experience is unable to offer explanation. He (2011, p. 253) argues that historical narrative is more a form of description of what happened, and fails to employ the bread and butter of historical method, evidence to explain and justify. He suggests that narrative is a low order skill that ‘fails to offer the deep knowledge for problem-solving in history’, drawing upon Vellerman (2003, p. 22) to add: ‘telling a story is often a means to being believed for no good reason’. Scott (1991) built upon such critiques to support the proposition that narrative lacks the explanatory and evidential power required of historical discourse.

In a radical challenge to historical method at the time, Scott (1991) questioned appeals to personal experience as a source of evidence for writing history. She observed that in personal historical accounts, seeing has become the origin of knowing, and writing its reproduction and transmission. She brought to an abrupt end the growing supposition that experience is knowledge, and argued instead that experience is mediated through discourse just as the historians’ conceptual categories filter what is observed and known. She was highly critical of those historians who privilege experience over a conceptual framework in order to lay claims to the truth that ‘I was there so I know’. She proceeded to argue that ‘experience is not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain’ (1991, p. 797), thus positioning language as the foundation and organiser of historical knowledge. Similar arguments were developed by Clifford (1986, 1988) in the field of ethnography and by critical feminists (Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1991, 1993) around this time. They began to question whether experience could constitute a cultural reality or truth. They turned their analysis to an examination of how knowledge is produced in western science.

Gilbert explains that narrative ‘fails to offer the deep knowledge for problem-solving in history’ (2011, p. 253), and so he turns to a set of benchmarks of historical thinking, evidence, cause and effect, change and continuity, empathy. He observes that these benchmarks now constitute ‘the foundational ideas of the discipline’ in terms of their contribution to the organising framework of the syllabus. They accept narrative as having an object insofar as it refers to something outside itself. Narrative is conceptualised as a conveyor of meaning or as a tool to explain. It is capable of explaining an external world, but only through the lens of personal experience (Vellerman, 2003).

Both Gilbert (2011) and Vellerman (2003) conceptualise narrative as a tool with an object or referent. They equate narrative discourse with ‘knowledge’ and hence they draw a separation between the narration and the interpretation of the historical event, via the narrative. They both argue that narrative aims to explain, and therefore to represent events (knowledge) to others, accurately or otherwise. Vellerman (2003, p. 20) posited that narratives ‘act on the emotional cadence in the audience’ to produce ‘a subjective understanding of how to feel’ about historical events. She proceeded to argue that ‘memorable experiences are the ones that we have stored in the form of stories’, and that such stories, based as they are on individual memory are ultimately unreliable in places such as courts of law and in psychology.

Gilbert takes the position that children need to grow up with a respect for evidence and its importance to public discourse. This respect for evidence to accompany opinion must be taught at school so that children learn to think before they shoot-off an opinion, hence the proposed return to the use of primary sources in primary schools through the Australian history curriculum. Children need to learn a range of historical concepts such as ‘cause and consequence’, ‘change and continuity’ and ‘historical empathy’ to solve historical problems. Gilbert concludes that historical significance is produced not through situated experienced, but through cognition. Students need to engage with the higher order thinking tasks of analysis, and these are not produced, he argues, through the personal.

However, if we return to Clarke’s survey of history students in 34 schools, we find that the texts that are removed from situated experience are those that disillusion and alienate students. The students in her study were not motivated by a discipline that distanced them from the object and context of study. And yet much of the literature around the introduction of new history curriculum for primary students has unwittingly adopted a position where cognitive process is privileged over personal experience. Despite the recognition that children are bored with decontextualised historical knowledge (Clark, 2008), there is little attempt by designers of the history curriculum to explore how any other knowledge could be produced outside the interpretive imagination of the classroom. Adopting a framework of concepts to read and understand Australian history does not appear to be a recipe for engaging the interest of students in the discipline.

Much of the debate around the proposed Australian history curriculum has oscillated between the dichotomies of personal experience and scientific objectifications. History has in the main been taken out of its place and presented as a ‘standardised, placeless curriculum’ (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 8). And because experiences have been taken out of their place and made to stand objectively ‘on their own’, historians no longer ‘know what to remember and what to forget, what to let go of and what to preserve’ (Rose, 1992, p. 16). The discipline has become placeless.

Meanwhile, Nakata (2007, p. 218) argues that Indigenous students need to learn the conceptual discourses of the world, lest they remain isolated in ‘intellectual separation and isolation’. In the context of higher education, Nakata (2011) proposed that Indigenous students must be taught how conceptual knowledge is constructed so that they, like other students are able to use these discourses of power in appropriate ways. They must learn for example, how evidence is used to construct an opinion in the quest to produce new knowledge.

I take the position that all students need to know how to interpret and explain, but they also need to recognise that conceptual knowledge will not make their historical studies any more interesting, intriguing or engaging. Clark’s study (2008) cited above is testimony to this. How to improve the level of student engagement with the study of history has been the focus of this article. In exploring this question, I have suggested that recent analyses of the Australian history curriculum have centred on whether good history teaching should privilege conceptual understanding and explanation, or narrativising experience in the context of place-based education. I will propose in the remainder of this article that a solution to the question of what constitutes good history teaching can be sought in the nature of the language that we expect students to learn.

Teaching history in primary schools: Key issues

An examination of literature on the new Australian history curriculum raises four key issues for the teaching of history in primary schools.

First, I have argued that the Australian history curriculum (primary) privileges a western epistemology that relies on the production of knowledge as disembodied; and employs concepts which are often culturally bound, for example, cause and consequence, empathy, evidence and linear sequencing. Knowledge remains representational and children continue to talk about the world outside the classroom. Many teachers are creative in how they bring the outside world into the school through techniques such as scaffolding. But the meaning that is constituted through such teaching methodologies continues to be an artefact of the real. Suggested approaches in the literature examined here do little to disavow students of an understanding of knowledge and learning as ‘boring’ and disconnected from their lives (see Clarke above).

Second, the history curriculum supports a conception of historical knowledge as a priori. It assumes that knowledge is there, and historical significance is produced through individual interpretations. The meaning(fulness) of a text is reinforced as an individual pursuit, and the teacher’s task is to show students where to look in order to locate the evidence. This approach to teaching history suits a middle class majority of students, but not necessarily those students who associate a system of meaning-making with the social construction of literacy (Gee, 2004, 2005; Luke, 1994).

Third, a conceptual approach to teaching history undermines those students in Australia who rely on narrative as their primary form of communication. The hierarchy of texts that already exists in many schools is reinforced through a conceptual framework, where argumentative and expository texts are privileged above narrative. Of course, students from all backgrounds in Australian schools need to learn the so-called powerful texts (The New London Group, 1996), but their own texts of communication should not be disempowered and marginalised. To do so will further disadvantage students of history in rural and remote areas.

Narrative experience does not need to be conceived as an inferior discourse. Azarian-Ceccato (2010) tells how narratives are practised as a form of socialisation in an Armenian community in California where the stories of Armenian genocide in 1915 Turkey are retold from one generation to the next as if they are forever present events. These narrative experiences act as a collective production of the community. They are not so much about past events, as much as they are about the present community. The narratives allow the community to realise itself in place. The narratives act to position the individual within a group, and provide the individual with a collective identity, just as memories of land (e.g. of the seasons, winds, plants and animals habits) give people an identity in-place. Narratives allow Armenians to connect with self, place and community. They depend on the social construction of meaning.

Fourth, the history curriculum disadvantages those students who live far from the ‘making of history’, and far from the designers of the curriculum. Federation, for example is relevant to those children living in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, but less so to those living in the north of Australia. Curriculum designers would generally argue against the parochialism of local knowledge, implying that children must learn to think nationally and globally in order to broaden their horizons (note the return to history as content in this argument). This position, however, has little to do with the importance of producing historical significance. The confused notions around how to teach history reinforce Gilbert’s (2011) observation that curriculum designers are indeed confused about the question, why teach history!

In 2006, the then Prime Minister, John Howard at a National Press Club lunch hinted at how we might approach this very question. Howard (2006) observed that ‘young people are at risk of being disinherited from their community if that community lacks the courage and confidence to teach its history’. Gilbert interprets this position from Howard as an argument about identity, which it surely is, but it also overlooks the crucial point concerning identity in relation to community, that the teaching and learning of history must occur in relation to ‘place’. The purpose for teaching history seems to be quite clear here, at least for John Howard, in that it allows the student to locate him or herself in relation to a place that he or she recognises. Howard (2006) argued that young people get their place and identity through their interactions with family and community. History indeed comes from somewhere, and to objectify it further surely plays into the hands of those who would argue that ‘history is fiction’ (Curthoys & Docker, 2010).

Preparing pre-service teachers to teach history in primary schools

Issues of representation of historical knowledge also face those teachers who work in Indigenous education. Teachers are now required to include Indigenous perspectives in their classrooms, K-10. Yet the ongoing issues in this field continue to be ones of (mis)representation of Indigenous people (Nakata, 2011). Most students in both primary and secondary school learn about Indigenous people, but they rarely move beyond the generation of stereotypes (Harrison & Greenfield, 2011). Like the students of history in Clarke’s (2008) study, other students also report that they are bored with topics about Indigenous Australia (Harrison, 2012). This is understandable when we hear student–teachers report on how their school ‘does Aborigines in term 2’.

A solution to the problem of misrepresentation of Indigenous people in the Australian curriculum is becoming clearer as research (Harrison, 2011) begins to point to the need for schools to work closely with their Aboriginal communities and with the Elders from those communities. When children work directly with Indigenous people they appear to focus on the performative aspects of the relationship rather than on content and representations. They talk less about the world ‘out there’ while focussing more on what they do with Indigenous artists or storytellers (Harrison & Greenfield, 2011). The findings of recent research in Indigenous education provide some insight into how we might teach pre-service primary teachers to teach history?

Indigenous methodologies

Moreton-Robinson and Walter (2009, p. 3) argued that Indigenous knowledge cannot exist outside social relations to country:

As the Western economic and political systems became more broadly institutionalised, the knowledges system gradually became institutionalised within universities and the professions. Indigenous knowledge systems, of course, do not share this historical heritage. Rather, Indigenous peoples have developed their knowledge systems over millennia living on and alongside the land. Indigenous peoples’ knowledges are therefore predicated on societal relations with country.

Indigenist researcher, Martin (2003, p. 3) highlighted the difficulty for many students in attempting to learn the proposed ‘ways of thinking’ (concepts) of the Australian history curriculum when she wrote about her own knowledge and experience being ‘measured against pre-determined categories of culture’. Her (2003, p. 13) research questions focus on ‘location, or country’ adding that (2003 p. 9):

Ways of Knowing is specific to ontology and Entities of Land, Animals, Plants, Waterways, Skies, Climate and Spiritual systems of Aboriginal groups. Knowledge about ontology and Entities is learned and reproduced through processes of listening, sensing, viewing, reviewing, reading, watching, waiting, observing, exchanging, sharing, conceptualising, assessing, modelling, engaging, applying.

The designers would argue that the focus of the Australian history curriculum for primary students is on ‘significance’ within the context of personal, family and local history. That is, the new curriculum does focus on local community, from an objective distance. The significance or meaning of the local is produced and understood through cognitive concepts such as ‘cause and effect’, linear sequencing and through the privileging of expository texts over narrative. The ways in which meaning is produced through these key concepts will continue to suit those students who divide up their world in these ways, believing that significance is produced in our minds, yet alienate those who bring another epistemology to bear on classroom learning.

Gruenewald (2003) noted that ‘places teach us about how the world works’. Sobel (1998, p. 10) focussed on ecological education to conclude ‘what’s important is that children have an opportunity to bond with the natural world, to learn to love it, before being asked to heal its wounds’. The focus of the new Australian history curriculum could be on building children’s relationships to their community, rather than on building their individual cognitive skills and understandings about the community. These relationships are built through the child’s experiences with place, and through collective narratives of these experiences. It is difficult, however for western education to imagine a position other than where connections to country arise from students thinking deeply about them. Yet this is our task if we are to prepare teachers to teach the Australian history curriculum outside the arbitrary and parochial limits of ‘cause and effect’ and outside the discourses privileged in education that rely on dichotomies for their existence.

How can knowledge and learning of history be actively performative rather than representational? This question has gained greater clarity over recent years in the context of how to include Aboriginal histories and cultures in the curriculum? Teacher education courses have been plagued by issues of representation and objectivity. But an opportunity here is becoming clearer: the need for schools to work closely with their Aboriginal community/s, to connect with Aboriginal people and to ‘talk locally’ rather than stereotypically. Our task in teacher education is to help students make these connections. These connections will not be produced for most children in the contemporary classroom by reading books or looking at pieces of paper (see Gee, 2005; Unsworth, 2008).

Conclusion

It does seem odd that in the context of thousands of years of Australian history, along with the development of complex Indigenous epistemologies across the country that contemporary designers of the new Australian curriculum eschew this wealth of ‘knowhow’ in their attempts to develop their ‘own’ epistemology. Indeed, this article has described how some historians neglect Indigenous historical methods as unconvincing. However, they are not yet able to define history, or to identify what is important or to identify where history comes from (Gilbert, 2011).

This article has suggested that learning history is about learning how to read oneself in country. To take history out of place and put it in books and documents that teach about community is to ensure that children become further divorced from the place in which they live.

Although Gilbert (2011), Clark (2006, 2008) and Lawless (2010) provide us with valuable insights into the problems of teaching history in creative and imaginative ways, they continue to be caught within the content versus methods debate. Gilbert supports the teaching of history as a valuable method of teaching children how to think and conceptualise. Both Clarke and Lawless suggest that if teaching is effective then children will be inspired to learn Australian history. This approach may work in mono-cultural classrooms but its raises issues in contexts where different ontologies are at work. The debate so far has not addressed the question of how we can begin to ground the Australian history curriculum outside the teacher’s methodology. I have suggested in this article that learning history is already actively performative when the connections to people and community are performed on-country. Country teaches, unconsciously. An effect of modern formal education is that most teaching is about the world outside the classroom. We need to get students and teachers out there too.

The question of how we teach history in Australian classrooms ultimately returns us to the nature of education. What kind of education do we want for children? What style of student do we have in mind when we teach history? If we follow the path of the designers of the Australian history curriculum, we will be teaching students to be more thoughtful and analytical, and to be able to speak objectively about the world around them. That will help them to make strong judgements, with or without the ‘right’ evidence. But do we want a classroom (and a society) where children are making more judgements, informed or otherwise? We should also be thinking about how we would like children to speak about themselves and others. Some will complete their education firmly positioned within a discourse of explanation. They will know and understand how to speak with the authority of distance. Other students will find themselves within a place they know and respect.