Pedagogy and the practice of academic history in late-twentieth century Britain

Abstract

In the final decades of the twentieth century, academic history was beset by powerful anxieties that played upon the self-confidence and sense of identity of its practitioners. While this ‘crisis’ has been widely discussed in terms of historical writing, its pedagogic dimensions have been largely absent. This article examines the place of pedagogy in the public life of the discipline, the nature of academic historians' beliefs about teaching and on student learning, and the influence of these upon practice at a time of considerable change in British higher education. It uses the notion of a ‘moral order’ to explore dominant notions of educational ‘good’ in the discipline and analyse the tensions between a mainstream, and often implicit, pedagogic paradigm, an ascendant instrumentalist policy discourse in British higher education and revisionist voices within the discipline. Finally, it advocates a more expansive and reflexive stance to pedagogy grounded in attentiveness to taken-for-granted beliefs, assumptions and aspirations, their histories and the practices that stem from them, and a willingness to subject these to public scrutiny through informed critique, contestation and reinvention.