SESSION 1 What should we know about our national past?

Professor Geoffrey Blainey

 

ABSTRACT

Public debates about History in Australia (and especially school History) often revolve around the question:
What should we know about our national past?

In this keynote, Professor Geoffrey Blainey will explore this broad question reflecting on his long career as a historian and public commentator.

 

BIO

According to the Oxford Companion to Australian History, "Geoffrey Blainey is the most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and - in the 1980s and 1990s - most controversial of Australia's living historians." Author of some 40 books on Australian and world history, he is also well known as a public speaker. Many of his books appear in foreign editions, making him probably the most read Australian historian, internationally.

 

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SESSION 2 Making Australian History - A Conversation with Anna Clark

Associate Professor Anna Clark

 

ABSTRACT

In this session, Associate Professor Anna Clark will discuss her latest book Making Australian History (Penguin, 2022), which challenges the way we think about the past, the academic discipline of History and the Australian nation more broadly. The conversation will be of direct interest to history teachers working with Australian History content in Stages 4-6 and with the ‘key questions’ component of HSC History Extension.

 

BIO

Anna Clark is a historian at the Australian Centre for Public History based at the University of Technology Sydney.
She is the author of Making Australian History (Penguin, 2022) and has written extensively on history education, historiography and historical consciousness.

 

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SESSION 3A Localising Histories in the 7-10 Curriculum

PRESENTER - Martin Douglas

 

ABSTRACT

Our schools are microcosms of our communities. The people, the stories and the physical structures that exist in these communities all contribute to broader historical narratives. How can we as History teachers engage students in their local stories? Professor Colin Kidd, a historian at St Andrews in Scotland, has claimed that ‘History is, to some extent, inescapably nationalist’.
This presentation aims to provide some practical examples of how local histories can be integrated into the school curriculum in order to explore and challenge our national stories and develop greater historical consciousness among students and teachers.

 

BIO

Martin Douglas is currently the Head Teacher of History and English at Corowa High School, NSW.

 

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SESSION 3B Addressing historical and moral consciousness in our classrooms

PRESENTER - Associate Professor Heather Sharp

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, it is difficult to ignore the global growth in popularity for autocratic governments, including in some countries which for decades had either strong democracies or were moving towards stable democratic governance. History educators are curious about how current and historical events and issues can and should be approached. This session draws on research conducted by the Historical and Moral Encounters Research Group (Sweden, Finland, Australia) in high school classrooms on the topic of The Holocaust to gain a better understanding of how students think about and reason with complex issues involving traumatic histories. In making practical connections to the classroom, this session discusses the analysis of teenager reasoning and explores historical consciousness and the moral dimension with a focus on educating for democratic citizenship.

 

BIO

Associate Professor Heather Sharp is Deputy Head of School Research at the University of Newcastle. A former high school History and English teacher, her PhD was on historical representations of Indigenous Australians and British heritages in textbooks. You can read her full bio at: www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/heather-sharp

 

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SESSION 4 Engaging Authentically with Indigenous Histories

PRESENTER - Matt Poll

ABSTRACT

There are several new nationally focused museums of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island art and material culture and significant expansions to existing museums and galleries in progress across nearly every State and Territory in Australia. These have created a greater demand on truth telling and ethical collaboration with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island community representatives in relation to depicting authentic voices of Indigenous community history. But there is a big difference between simply representing Aboriginal cultural knowledge and history and actually involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices and perspectives in the process, not just the finished product. In this session, Matt will draw on recent examples to reflect on the importance of building authentic consultation into the representation of Indigenous histories and what considerations teachers might keep in mind as they explore these aspects of Australian history in schools.

BIO

Matt Poll is the newly appointed Manager of Indigenous Programs at the Australian National Maritime Museum. Prior to this appointment Matt was Curator of Indigenous Heritage collections and repatriation project officer at the University of Sydney, where his most recent projects included two new exhibitions at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, ‘Gululu dhuwala djalkiri: welcome to the Yolŋu foundations’ and ‘Ambassadors’, both of which opened in November 2020.

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SESSION 5A Teaching History in a post-truth world

PRESENTER - David Nally

 

ABSTRACT

This session will explore how post-truth has been defined over the past three decades, its prospective and emerging impacts on education, with a few suggestions about how it might be addressed in the future. The first segment will provide an overview of debates about post-truth, as well as phenomena that it is regularly associated with, particularly fake news and mis/disinformation. This will be followed by some suggestions that history teachers might use in their planning to begin to mitigate the impact of post-truth via forms of critical literacy, as well as developing cultures of inquiry and thinking.

 

BIO

David is a HSIE Coordinator (Stage 6) at Brigidine Catholic College, Randwick. He is also currently completing research with the University of Newcastle into post-truth, its impacts on education and societies more broadly, and possible solutions.

 

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SESSION 5B Is disciplinary history still relevant in secondary schools?

PRESENTER - Jonathon Dallimore

 

ABSTRACT

Over the past 40 years it has been increasingly popular to frame secondary school History through a disciplinary lens. School History, it is often said, should, at least in part, reflect what good historians actually do and how they think. In NSW, the lengthy rationales and descriptions of aims set out in History syllabus documents claim that history is a ‘distinct academic discipline’ with unique modes of thinking that help students navigate their own identity, their national history and the world more broadly. This session aims to both defend and challenge
the disciplinary approach to secondary History and offer some practical suggestions as to how teachers might continue to consolidate and expand their disciplinary knowledge.

 

BIO

Jonathon Dallimore is currently the Executive Officer (Professional Services) at the History Teachers’ Association of New South Wales.

He also teaches History Methods courses at the University of NSW and the University of Wollongong.

 

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SESSION 6 (panel discussion): History and History teaching in the 2020s

 

PANELLISTS

  • Professor Michelle Arrow (Macquarie University)
  • Matt Poll (Australian Maritime Museum)
  • Martin Douglas (Corowa High School)
  • Dr Catherine Arends (Ravenswood)

 

This session will involve a moderated discussion about some of the challenges and opportunities of doing and teaching history in the 2020s. It will also include some time for questions from the audience.

 

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