Teaching and Learning History

Geoff Timmins, Keith Vernon, Christine Kinealy

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780761947738, 9780761947721
• eBook ISBN: 9781849206549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

?This book, informed by exceptionally wide inquiry into current history teaching practices in the English-speaking world, is a real achievement. The authors convey current context and challenges with great insight, and they move through possibilities in sequencing, content, skills and assessment, without strident comment, extending our knowledge of options and pitfalls in the process? - Peter N. Stearns, Provost, George Mason University

?Comprehensive, persuasive, and at all times accessible in style and argument, this text both encourages and empowers university historians to review and enhance their teaching practices. All key facets of programme development are explored with reference to an extensive and well-chosen range of international examples. The chapter on the historian?s skills and qualities of mind is one of several that I will be referring to frequently? - Jeanine Graham, Senior Lecturer, History, University of Waikato

?... the varied findings make fascinating reading ... this book should be required reading for everyone involved in teaching history: there is plenty here for us all to learn from? - ESCalate

?In providing such a clear, informative and thoughtful exploration of the current state of history in higher education, and in helping to raise the quality of critical debate about its future, this book contributes greatly to the growing scholarship of teaching and learning in the discipline. It should also become a vital resource for all historians who wish to honour the old dictum that, in teaching as in research, the one duty we owe history is to rewrite it? - Professor Paul Hyland, Director of History in the Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology

?[E]xtremely useful... provides a thought-provoking and useful discussion concerning the task of actually teaching history at university level... This timely book needs to be read widely, and the many issues it raises should command our closest attention? - Higher Education Review

Over the last 10 years or so, history as an academic discipline has become steeped in controversy and introspection. Additional areas of interest have opened up, fresh perspectives and approaches have been offered, and new teaching and learning strategies have been advocated. There has been an increasing emphasis on producing well-qualified graduates equipped with the skills, knowledge and attitudes to cope with the changing demands of the world of work.

This book suggests how these issues may be managed. The authors identify and discuss the underlying principles, and consider ways in which they can be applied at module and programme levels.

The Teaching & Learning in the Humanities series, edited by Ellie Chambers and Jan Parker, is for beginning and experienced lecturers. It deals with all aspects of teaching individual arts and humanities subjects in higher education. Experienced teachers offer authoritative suggestions on how to become critically reflective about discipline-specific practices.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 - The state of the discipline
• 2 - Progression and differentiation
• 3 - Content matters
• 4 - The historian's skills and qualities of mind
• 5 - Learning and teaching
• 6 - Assessment issues
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index