Disciplinary Training and Public Purpose in University History Teaching

Abstract

Green considers here the implications of history with public purpose for teaching in universities. She argues for placing analysis—the processes of historical reasoning—in the foreground, focusing on developing students’ critical self-consciousness, their skills in handling messiness and ambiguity and their ability to solve problems in groups. The cognitive moves historians practise provide a model for pedagogy in the classroom, which can cultivate students’ sense of the efficacy and value of their own historianship. The chapter discusses ways to encourage and assess analytical history, emphasising the value of such training regardless of students’ future careers. Green finally outlines the limitations of seeing public history as a separate field requiring specialist training and reflects on the importance of applied thinking for the discipline as a whole.