Remembering Australia’s past project: pre-service history teachers, national narratives and historical consciousness

Abstract

Historical consciousness is a complex phenomenon that has been defined, in the North American tradition, as how we understand and relate, both cognitively and affectively, to the past (Seixas 2006), and in the German tradition from which it arose, as the act of orienting oneself in time through the construction of narratives about the past (Rusen, 2004). It manifests through the narratives we use to make meaning of the past and our relationship and attitude to particular times, events and groups. In post-colonial Australia, the so-named History Wars controversy of the 1990s and early twenty-first century brought into question how aspects of national history should be interpreted and how they should be represented in everyday historical cultures, such as museums and film, and in school curricula (MaciIntyre and Clark 2004; Sharp 2017). The Remembering Australia’s Past (RAP) project, conducted by a history research group at an Australian regional university in New South Wales, sought to examine how pre-service history teachers articulate a narrative of national history. These participants engaged in the study of history during or in the immediate aftermath of the History Wars, and they will have an important influence as future History teachers. Using an open-ended narrative methodology, the project aimed to explore what pre-service History teachers know, understand and believe is important about Australia’s past. This paper will report on what events, people and groups were viewed as historically significant in these national narratives and make some preliminary observations on the influences that shape the pre-service History teachers’ national narratives.