Studies in Higher Education

Vol. 36, No. 7, November 2011, 763–780

Exploring historical thinking and agency with undergraduate

history students
Adele Nyea*, Marnie Hughes-Warringtonb, Jill Roec, Penny Russelld,
Desley Deacone and Paul Kiemf
aFormerly at the Department of Modern History, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia;
bCentre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching (CALT), Monash University, Caulfield
East, Australia; cDepartment of Modern History, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia;
dDepartment of History, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia; eSchool of History,
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia; fAustralian History Teachers
Association, Sydney, Australia
Taylor
Studies
10.1080/03075071003759045
CSHE_A_476426.sgm
0307-5079
Original
Society
02010
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Dr
adelenye@tpg.com.au
000002010
AdeleNye
and
in
for
Article
Higher
(print)/1470-174X
Francis
Research
Education
into Higher
(online)
Education

Recent research on historical thinking has instigated important disciplinary

conversations and changes in pedagogical practice. They have, however, largely
focused on the primary and secondary school sector, highlighting the gap in
corresponding research into tertiary education. It is important to look at the
experiences of history students at tertiary level, to assess the impact of perceptions
and practices on graduate employment outcomes and transitions to research
careers. In 2008 a national scoping study on student and staff perceptions of the
nature and purposes of historical thinking was undertaken at 12 Australian
universities, involving 1455 student questionnaires and 50 interviews with
academics. This article examines student and staff perceptions of the social
benefits of historical thinking, highlighting the great potential for transformative
learning and civic contribution, and the vital role of agency in this process.
Keywords: history; undergraduates; agency; purposes of education; qualitative
research

The last decade has seen an intense focus on curriculum review and renewal. Quite
often, renewal is driven by staff perceptions of student need, and focuses on the topics
that should or might be taught. In 2008, a research team from five Australian univer-
sities, the Australian Historical Association (AHA), the History Teachers’ Association
of Australia (HTA) and the Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DASH)
agreed that it would be valuable to scope student and staff perceptions of the nature
and purposes of historical thinking, and in particular, to note where their views
diverged. The resulting study involved 1455 first and later year level history under-
graduates completing a questionnaire, and extended interviews with 50 history
academics at 12 universities. This article follows an analysis of staff and student
perceptions of the activities that are most associated with historical thinking (Nye
et al. 2009). Its focus is on the ways in which students and staff think about the
purposes of historical thinking. It explores the way in which the findings generated a
series of conversations about student agency and the markers of transformative learn-
ing within an undergraduate degree cycle. Such conversations are pertinent not just for

*Corresponding author. Email: adelenye@tpg.com.au

ISSN 0307-5079 print/ISSN 1470-174X online

© 2011 Society for Research into Higher Education
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075071003759045
http://www.tandfonline.com
764 A. Nye et al.

the history discipline but across the higher education sector, where debates over
student agency prevail and intersect with aspects of knowledge making, assessment
strategies and graduate attributes (Barnett 2009; Bradley et al. 2008; Jones 2009;
Hammer and Star 2004; Schwartz 2009; Smith and Ottewill 2008).

Historical thinking: a background

Australian and international research on historical thinking has largely reflected on
how primary and secondary students learn to think about historical significance,
evidence, continuity and change, historical perspectives and how they understand the
moral dimensions of history (Seixas 2006, 1–2). Exploration of the development and
impact of students’ historical thinking in higher education occupies a much smaller
body of research. Researchers have broadly agreed that throughout our lives we
encounter history on a daily and personal basis, and as a result we develop individual
methodologies for recognising, understanding and shaping our own histories
(Anderson, Day, and Rollason 2006; Becker 1932; Seixas 2006; Wineburg 2001).
These perceptions of history informed by prior learning provide a basis for the
study of history at school or university but this, in itself, can be problematic (Bailey
and Hughes-Warrington 2009; Seixas 2006). Researchers explain this disciplinary
challenge by suggesting that historical thinking is an inherently unnatural act, one that
requires complex contextual, reflective and deconstructive undertakings (Anderson
and Day 2005, 333; Wineburg 2001). Indeed, one interviewee in our study stated ‘that
the things that they sometimes instinctively turn to I do suggest to them is not always
the best way to go about it’.
Wineburg suggests that the untrained reader is likely to view evidence as an
authoritative source of information, while the trained historian will privilege the ques-
tions he or she asks of the evidence (Wineburg 1991, 511). He later explains that, as
a student comes to understand the contested nature of history, their sense of certainty
is thrown into disarray. It is this period of disarray, confusion and rethinking the idea
of history that has the greatest potential for transformative learning (2001, 91). To
propel through the confusion, students need to develop and demonstrate a sense of
agency, a willingness to engage with the questions of history in an analytical way.
Researchers agree that this requires the student to develop their own sense of critical
and moral reasoning and empathy (Anderson and Day 2005; Barton and Levstik 2005;
VanSledright 2002; Wineburg 2001). The task is further complicated by the need to
understand the context of the evidence, historiography and the self (Rüsen 2005, 28–
30; Seixas 2000, 26). Rüsen suggests that a process of orientation must be undertaken.
Developing historical thinking requires that students learn to navigate all the complex-
ities of history and attempt to orientate themselves in relation to that history.
To embark on and to sustain any of these processes requires a sense of agency.
Agency is understood in this article to be conscious and informed action for which one
takes responsibility and accepts ownership (Bandura 2001, 6–8). In the context of
historical thinking it is the willingness to navigate the ontology of historicism: to
actively seek out knowledge, locate the self in that knowledge and participate in the
disciplinary conversation.

Why should we be so interested in historical thinking and students?

It is widely accepted that the narratives of history and forms of memory are interpre-
tive constructions. In turn they become a politically and morally infused cultural
 Studies in Higher Education 765

vehicle. Within the school system students are vulnerable to the political rhetoric of
national curricular debates. From the UK, Lee asserts: ‘Whatever else it does by way
of acquainting them with different kinds of past, history education in schools should
give students an intellectual apparatus for handling history’ (2006, 155).
From the USA, Wineburg has warned of the influence of corporate popular culture
on student understanding of the past (2001, 7). He has continued to highlight the
ongoing tensions and stated in an interview that ‘A knowledge of history gives us the
ability to wrestle truth from the noise created by the cacophony of voices in the world’
(Lucas, 2008, 40). Seixas has highlighted similar views in his attention to the need to
look at the intersections between public perceptions or collective memory and history
education. He issues a compelling warning of the inevitability of ‘the normative
dimension’ pervading policy (Seixas 2008, 29). Exploring these dimensions of history
education leads to the view that students must learn to deconstruct all forms of histor-
ical knowledge. As Yerxa asserts, from a US perspective, history has had an ‘empha-
sis on themes of contingency, human agency and narrative tensions’ (2008, 19). It is
more than feasible that this view is relevant on an international scale; certainly it is
pertinent to Australian history. History debates in Australia, however, have also
largely focused on the themes of contingency and narrative tensions, while agency has
received little, if any, attention. In our study, agency, and more specifically student
agency, emerged as a site that is in need of further exploration.

How can students benefit from historical thinking?

It is timely that these disciplinary strengths are more closely explored (Bailey and
Hughes-Warrington 2009; Pace 2004). To do so we need to examine students’ will-
ingness to navigate and engage in a particular type of scholarship in the light of ques-
tions surrounding the social benefits of historical thinking. The notion of social benefits
in this article refers to the skills and attributes an individual gains from their study.
They can be linked to many and varied ‘graduate attributes’ found in university state-
ments on learning outcomes. They are the intellectual skills, and the sense of personal
agency, that students take in to the home, the workplace and the broader community.
Such benefits are highlighted in a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary
research projects. Barton and Levstik (2005), for example, demonstrated in their study
of children in the USA that agency in history entails being imaginative, empathetic,
responsible and open minded. They argued that students ‘are also agents in their own
learning and in their own lives’ (209). These assertions are also relevant to the under-
graduate and graduate history student in higher education, and for thinking about the
possibilities for their contribution to the broader community.
Historians are well placed to act as agents of knowledge building and change, yet
there is little research on the social benefits of history in higher education. From the
broader field of higher education, research on social benefits has emphasised the
notion of citizenship. Around the globe, at all levels of government and in education,
‘active citizenship’ is being put forward as a means of evoking a sense of individual
and collective identity (Brown, Lipsi-Mumme, and Zajdow 2003; Demircioglu 2009;
Murray 2007). This is in a manner similar to Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic
memory, where the individual and collective identity coalesce via a common ground:
in our case, via the university (2007, 629).
Debates about the ways in which universities contribute to a civil and ethical
community continue in Australia (Bradley et al., 2008; Hammer and Star 2004;
766 A. Nye et al.

Schwartz 2009) and in Britain (Smith and Ottewill 2008). Graduates of history, in
particular, might be encouraged to consider how they can participate in active citizen-
ship (Cooper, Dilek, and Nichol 2009). As Iacovetta et al. suggest, the historian
contributes to the community as ‘scholar and teacher and [provides] the links between
intellectual inquiry, informed debate, and active citizenship’ (2008, 9). Similarly,
Jones has argued that the discipline develops valuable self-reflective skills. She
suggests, ‘Historians are able to view their own theorising through a number of lenses,
and hence turn their critical gaze upon themselves’ (2009, 92).

How might we enrich the disciplinary and sector-wide discussions about learning
and teaching?
Having considered the significance of developing historical thinking skills and what
they might offer undergraduate students, it is the role of agency that has emerged as
worthy of exploration. It was also pertinent to construct a project that would bring the
student voice to the floor of the debate, alongside the literature and the voice of the
academy. The subsequent data could become a conversation with potential to affirm,
counter or transform some of the disciplinary, as well as sector-wide, assumptions
about learning and teaching. In particular, the study was an opportunity to identify
what the markers of transformative learning of an undergraduate degree cycle were,
and what innovations or innovative thinking was already set in motion in Australian
universities.

Methodology
The aim of the project was to identify variations and similarities between staff and
student perceptions of historical thinking, and to map the challenges and opportunities
to develop historical thinking in higher education. As a national scoping study, the
research group sought out a strong representative group of participants, including first
and later year undergraduate history students, and early and later career academics.
Disciplinary and institutional online statements provided an additional angle on the
data.
This study was a collaborative one and sat within a qualitative framework with
quantitative elements. It was based in grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1999) and
was also informed by the idea of situated knowledges, taking into account the
construction of knowledge through lived and embodied experience (Genat 2009;
Haraway 1991; Nightingale 2003). The interviews were held in formal and informal
settings on campus using standard oral history techniques (Perks and Thomson 1998).
They were implemented in a manner to encourage a conversational and relaxed
exchange, that would evoke self-reflection on lived experience in the education
setting. The questionnaires were mostly delivered in tutorial classes, rather than in
lectures. The tutorial room is less formal, and it was hoped that students would feel
comfortable to speak their minds as well as ask questions, if they needed to. The
students were asked:

(1) What is historical thinking?

(2) To rank a series of activities associated with historical practice in order of their
usefulness in the development of historical thinking.
(3) What are the social benefits of historical thinking?
 Studies in Higher Education 767

Table 1. Participating universities and valid responses to question 3 of the survey.

No. of No. of Interviews
first year later year with
University Abbreviation students students historians
Macquarie University, NSW MQ 211 30 2
University of Sydney, NSW USYD 62 117 2
University of New South Wales, NSW UNSW 104 64 0
University of New England, NSW UNE 57 22 3
University of Queensland, QLD UQ 30 78 4
Australian National University, ACT ANU 39 13 3
University of Melbourne, VIC Melb 114 119 4
La Trobe University La Trobe NA 36 3
Monash University, VIC Monash NA NA 8
University of Tasmania, TAS UTAS 93 30 7
Flinders University, SA Flinders 40 53 7
University of Western Australia, WA UWA 45 47 7

Anecdotally, some students were not particularly confident answering some of the
questions put to them, stating, for example, in one case, ‘but we haven’t studied this
yet’. A few of the students wrote, ‘I have no idea’. Occasionally, students left sections
blank. However, the student response rate to the third question was strong, with only
4% of first years and 3% of later year students submitting invalid or blank responses
(see Table 1). In contrast, 35% of all participating students gave invalid responses
when asked to rank activities in order of their value in developing historical thinking.
By the conclusion of the data collection process, students from 40 course units had
been surveyed. The subject areas were diverse, including ancient and modern history,
survey and specialised courses. Given the large size of the data set, analysis was
primarily shaped by using the qualitative software program NVivo. More than 20 indi-
vidual themes or nodes were developed to code the data, reflecting the many ways in
which historical thinking can be explained. These themes were developed during the
data collection phase and underpinned by research on historical consciousness and
historical practice in education (Lee 2006; Nye 2007; Rüsen 2005; Seixas 2006;
Wineburg 2001).

Results
In the first of the three tasks in the questionnaire students were asked, ‘What is histor-
ical thinking?’ A majority of students (70% of first-year students and 66% of later-
year students) identified it as an agentic process. These results indicate that most
students saw historical thinking as something one does – one criticises, analyses,
explores and investigates – rather than a body of knowledge that needs to be mastered,
or a set of specific skills. These things students do are reliant upon a sense of willing-
ness to engage in a cognitive process that is shaped by disciplinary knowledge. Yet,
in the interviews with lecturers in this study, and as shown in other studies (Anderson
and Day 2005, 338; Brinkworth et al. 2009; Johnston and Kochanowska 2009; Lizzio,
Wilson, and Simons 2002; Ulrikson 2009), student prior expectations of university
study are not always aligned with what they encounter.
768 A. Nye et al.

It has been shown that many entry-level university students are likely to expect to
be presented with a more scientific pedagogy than tends to be offered in the history
discipline (Calder 2006, 1363). They often expect ‘the facts’ to be accessible, and a
practical, formula-based approach that they can use as a vehicle for succeeding at
university. The lecturers interviewed agreed:

Students will tell you what you want to hear so you are never quite sure. They are very
savvy these days; they will ask who are the left-wing or right-wing teachers. And they
will tailor their answers and they are quite open about it. They know that there are key
words.

So I want to knock that out of the students who have a formulative approach or strategy.
You know there are those students that are very intense to teach. Who always want that
direction from you … I sometimes want to say, go make some mistakes! It is going to
be time consuming but you are going to get a lot more out of it.

Calder (2006) has reminded us that previous generations of history lecturers shared
this view, and their courses focused on ‘coverage’ of established histories. Calder
argues that an ‘uncoverage’ is called for, where students must navigate the cognitive
contours of the discipline. In our study we found that this is exactly what is occurring
in history and other humanities disciplines in Australia, where there is a tendency to
focus on critical thinking, interpretation and an inherent sense of a disciplinary epis-
temology under contest. Many students are forced to rethink their perceptions of what
historical practice is, what the historians’ tools and evidence constitute. They must
even rethink the very legacy of historical knowledge as it disseminates through collec-
tive memories of global communities. It is important, therefore, to be thinking about
both disjuncture between student and disciplinary expectations and the transformative
learning or the shifts in thinking that occur within the undergraduate cycle, in partic-
ular the way in which they are dependent on personal agency and an interaction with
ideas about the construction of knowledge.
The second most common response to question one (27% of first-year students and
26% of later-year students) was that historical thinking was about developing an
understanding of the connections between the past, present and future. Historians and
departmental statements echoed this sentiment. There is a considerable and diverse
body of research based on this aspect of history (Boix-Mansilla 2000, 391; Lowenthal
1999, 231; Salber Phillips 2006, 91–92; Spiegel 2007, 5). Many of these debates
incorporate contested notions of absence and presence, or visibility and invisibility;
the imagined nature of historical narrative and of historical proximity and distance.
The students, however, tended to adopt a less complex interpretation. They regarded
the present as a political, economic and sociological culmination of the past. The
concept of ‘events’ featured strongly, acting as markers of significance, change and
chronology in the students’ comments. These results indicate that more research needs
to be undertaken to consider the way in which students are othering the past and prior-
itising a simplified notion of events. Our concern here affirms Seixas’ assertion that
there is a clear need to examine the connection between collective memory and history
education.
In a second question, students were asked to link historical thinking to a list of
activities. The results highlighted a disjuncture between student and staff views.
Students privileged secondary sources, with a definitive 63% of all students ranking
books and journals in their top three choices. In contrast, the interviews with staff, and
 Studies in Higher Education 769

other studies, revealed that the teachers of history hold a clear preference for primary
sources as a crucial tool for studying history (Anderson, Day, and Rollason 2006, 244;
Nye et al. 2009).
The second most valued activity of the students was far less controversial, with
59% of all students ranking engagement with staff in the classroom in the top three.
Lecturers agreed with the students on the importance of staff/student interaction.
Indeed, a number described a significant advancement of student skills when they had
time and resources to offer them closer support; something like a small-scale version
of the supervision postgraduate students receive.
The students were equally homogeneous in their view of what they did not value.
Online work and presentations rated poorly, despite the current development and
burgeoning industry in online learning in the higher education sector. Lecturers,
however, tended to be sympathetic to student views. Only a small number of teachers
had significant online components for their internal students, and most of these teach-
ers discussed at length the difficulties and barriers to learning that they were
confronted with. Only two were enthused by the outstanding outcomes they were
achieving in their online assessment tasks. More research is timely here, to ask why
there are disparities between the views emanating from within the sector among staff
and students.
The third item – an open-ended one – asked students to identify any social benefits
of historical thinking. Figure 1 demonstrates the national trend where students held
largely shared views. Their views echo some of the current disciplinary epistemolog-
ical narrative, with a focus on knowledge making, the connections between the past,
present and future, and issues of social difference and tolerance. Staff were more
likely to prioritise critical thinking and many of the skills of the workplace, but
students do not appear to be able to articulate or highlight these skills in the same way.
A clear majority of students cited awareness: the idea that historical thinking
Figure 1. Student responses to ‘What are the social benefits of historical thinking?’.

contributes to a body of knowledge in society, both collectively and individually.

Students commonly included prefixes such as ‘broadens general knowledge’ and ‘a
greater understanding of the world’. This outcome for historical thinking was echoed
in a more complex manner in the interviews and is also discussed in the relevant liter-
ature. It alludes to the scholarship surrounding knowledge making, both individual
and collective. Barnett offers a useful deconstruction of the process by demonstrating
how knowledge and knowing are different concepts. Knowledge, he argues, might be
regarded as a collectively attested understanding, while knowing is an individual

Figure 1. Student responses to ‘What are the social benefits of historical thinking?’.
770 A. Nye et al.

undertaking and ‘has ethical properties’ (2009, 433). Knowing is an agentic process
and in relation to the history discipline is similar to Wineburg’s views on the develop-
mental moments of cognition, where perceptions of the world which seem natural are
undone and intellectually relocated (2001).
Past and present pertains to understanding the relationship between the two, and
is another field of inquiry discussed by lecturers and in the literature. It is a broad field
that encompasses the idea that the present is a construction of the past, but also
includes competing discourses such as the recognition of the importance of contextu-
alisation, and presentism – analysing and judging the past using contemporary moral
codes. Decision making refers to the acquisition of skills and knowledge which can
then assist us in making contemporary and future decisions.
The future pertains to the possibilities for shaping the future based on historical
thinking and knowledge. This view is held broadly by historians, but is the specific
focus of some contemporary research (Staley 2007). The ‘mistake theory’ is aligned
with the idea that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’
(Santayana 1905, 284). The idea of difference and tolerance is located within the
realms of social justice (Gale and Densmore 2000), civics (Iacovetta et al. 2008) and
empathy (Levstik 2001).
As one would expect, each of these themes was expressed with variable degrees
of sophistication. Some students provided complex assertions, while others offered
simplistic ideas and a perception of history as static and predictable. Analysing the
data opened up two fields for further inquiry and discussion: firstly, student optimism
and, later in the article, student agency. Both these issues are key markers of transfor-
mative learning and deserve closer examination from educators.
Student optimism, in this article, is regarded as faith in human nature and in
history. It suggests that the human experience is predictable and flawed, and that,
through the expansion of historical knowledge, good can prevail and a better world be
created. These are not necessarily things teachers want to discourage, but in epistemo-
logical terms it needs to be problematised. Students often argued that we can avoid
conflict, disasters or wars simply because we know about past events. Some provided
specific examples of the possibility for change, such as war and genocide. The follow-
ing comment is from a first-year student:

Analysing past events in order to gain an understanding of the world and our human
nature. Also to prevent catastrophic events happening again by finding out their causes
in the past.

Rüsen’s analysis of the ontogenetic processes of historical consciousness clearly

locates this optimism in the early traditional and exemplary stages – where history is
regarded as predictable, stable and therefore simplistic (2005, 28–30).We need
students to shift from this comfortable but largely unproductive position of thinking
about history. A lecturer describes the dilemma:

I was listening to the debate this morning on AM [a radio program] about the new
secondary history curriculum and somebody said ‘It should all be about facts, I don’t see
why students shouldn’t learn facts’, and this is of course exactly what some of our
students come in with – that it is as if we have this undifferentiated knowledge about the
past and that is what history is. So an important part of the challenge in first year, for
those who do come in with that sort of notion, is to get them to move away from that, to
think in terms of asking questions about the past and about the significance of the present
or in terms of what happened next.
 Studies in Higher Education 771

As Rüsen suggests, there are two more progressively sophisticated levels of under-
standing; first, the critical stage where the story of history is problematised, where we
think more about the moral dilemmas of the construction of history and of the concept
of ‘otherness’ (2005, 32). Then he describes the more complex genetic stage, where
history is understood as being in a state of mediation, and historians appreciate the
temporal nature of all facets of history (12). Lecturers in this study made similar asser-
tions and many offered examples where transformative learning occurs:

I think the biggest one is the kind of aha moment that comes usually when one student,
and it was always in the medical history course, when looking at these ideas for hysteria
for example, will say, ‘these ideas were outmoded, doesn’t that mean that in a hundred
years from now someone will see that our ideas are outmoded’, and so as far as I am
concerned that moment crystallises the whole meaning of what history thinking is. It is
to be able to see a moment in the present as a moment that will become somebody else’s
idea of history, so we mustn’t think of ourselves as dinosaurs, but a lot of people ahead
of us are going to.

Markers of transformative learning: locating the mistake theory

The assertion that we can identify and learn from mistakes and patterns of the past is
one shared by many students. This position reflects a faith in certainty, and provides
a sense of security and confidence. The subsequent historical narratives emanating
from it are likely to be static and the anomalies left unproblematised.
Teachers of history are aware that one of their tasks is to help students understand
the complexity and temporal nature of historicism itself. Our findings resonate with
those of Anderson and Day (2005), who described the need for the deliberate creation
of purposive learning environments in history classes in universities. It is important
that educators reflect on engagement, transformation and progression, and the envi-
ronment in which they best occur. While we found a shared commitment among
lecturers to propel students from a state of safe optimism to agentic and enthused scep-
ticism, the timing and approach varied.
As one historian stated, the process often begins with an unsettling of established
‘truths’:

[My course] raises all sort of epistemological questions on history. When I start the class
I always pose the question to students: What is History? Is there such a thing as a recov-
erable past? Can it be said that the past exists? What are we doing as historians? Are we
trying to rediscover or discover what happened? Or are we fashioning a kind of a notion
of a past for our own presentist purposes? And these type of things.

Another historian suggests this is an inherently personal process:

You are always there wanting them to argue and to think about history at that level of
argument, to see it as being always under contest. And I think different students get there
at different times.

We can track student progression by the trends evident in Figure 2. These indicate that
students at almost all participating universities were less likely to rely on the mistake
theory the further they progressed through their degree. Echoing the progression of
Rüsen’s categories (2005), students tend to move away from the simplistic views of
history as they move through the undergraduate degree cycle.
772 A. Nye et al.

Figure 2. The percentage of students who suggested we can learn from the mistakes of
the past.

Many students, however, begin with this view, and it is useful to explore the ways
Figure 2. The percentage of students who suggested we can learn from the mistakes of the past.

in which they express it, and the accompanying ideas about change. They expressed
the belief that historical thinking would bring an inevitable change for the better. They
often gave no explanation for how this might occur. Typical of the more straightfor-
ward and uncomplicated views of this kind is the following statement from a later-
year student:

Creating awareness about significant historical events. Educating present and future
generation not to repeat mistakes; e.g. war.

Another later-year student asserts that there is an inherent commonality among

humans that can be relied upon:

Not repeating mistakes, understanding how we arrived at the present, feeling connected
to the people/societies from the past. Gaining direction for the future. Realising we are
essentially the same.

One particularly optimistic student suggested historical thinking would lead to the
‘restructure of class systems, hierarchy and values’. There was also evidence,
however, to show that, by the time students were reaching the end of their degree
cycle, a number of them understood the need to complicate the narrative and to offer
a more articulate explanation about how the process of redemption might work:

Historical thinking is directly relevant to present society. It helps us understand the

mistakes and achievements of past generations, it generates complexity of thought,
recognition that a variety of opinions are to be tolerated. The political sphere is
conducted in light of significant historical background that continues to influence it. This
historical thinking is immensely important for contemporary society. (Later-year
student)

The following student describes how the nature of history and its constructs are useful
positions from which to think about history, but the mistake theory and learning from
the past idea fails to achieve its projected outcome:

Being critical. Critical of politics, social constructs etc. The one main thing I have learnt
from history is that nobody learns from history. I think forming an understanding of the
 Studies in Higher Education 773

past and how it is constructed can help in investigating the way elements of society are
presented. (Later-year student)

This student is frustrated by a lack of logical action: they regard the historian as having
both the agency and the ability to make significant change, although they are yet to
see the fruits of this process.
The popularity of the Santayana mistake theory (1905) perspective is not entirely
unexpected amongst the students, but Sandwell (2007, 26) argues that lecturers are in
part responsible for affirming nineteenth-century positivist views in their teaching
practice. However, this study did not find any evidence of this; rather, when asked
about the social benefits of historical thinking, lecturers pointedly commented on the
risk of ‘descending into clichés’ and their concern about hearing them in the class-
room. They consistently suggested that students should be encouraged to rethink their
approach to, and interpretations of, the evidence.

Agency, historicism and the self: a lesson in location

The notion of agency has provoked much debate across the disciplines. Some argue it
is erased or scarred by conditions of social malaise, the pressures of normativity and
its discursive influences (Bandura 2001; Thorpe 1998). For the purpose of this article,
we accept that agency and free will are somewhat under contest, but proceed under the
belief that contemporary students possess a significant degree of agency. How much
they employ it and the strength of their sense of self-efficacy will be variable. We can
say, however, that history teachers in higher education collectively encourage inde-
pendent thought and enquiry, and studies such as that of Anderson and Day (2005,
339) affirm this view.
In the higher education setting agency is approached in a more consciously
productive framework. Barnett, for example, has described the processes of ‘being/
becoming and knowing/knowledge’ and argued that ‘dispositions’ – the energy and
willingness to engage with the world and create knowledge – are crucial to student
development (2009, 433). Student agency within the history discipline is linked to the
ability to recognise and understand one’s role in the interpretation of evidence and the
recasting of the data. It is the vital step leading towards the generation of new knowl-
edge in the discipline (Lerner 1997, 211). A lecturer describes the process:

Many of them think that if you read something, it is in you or if you highlight something
it is in you, and in my experience you can’t be a good scholar and a good thinker or a
good historian unless you actually synthesise something in your own language and make
a place for it – in the internal architecture of their brain. That’s what I try to teach them
at first year.

As Wineburg has argued, this is not an easy process (2001, 17), and as Rüsen
suggests:

The location of the self, in terms of territorial reality as well as in terms of the mental
situation of the self within the cosmos of things and beings, has a temporal dimension.
It is only through the dimension of time that the location of the self becomes fixed as the
cultural habitat of groups and individuals. In situating themselves, subjects draw border-
lines to others and their otherness within the locality and temporality of a common
world, in which they meet and differentiate from each other in order to be subjects them-
selves. Such boundaries are normatively determined and always value-laden. (2002, 1–2)
774 A. Nye et al.

The historicised self is an important part of a developed historical consciousness.

It is organic, highly personal and shaped by both an educational and historical context.
A proportion of students clearly lacked the confidence and sense of personal agency
needed to make the changes they saw as necessary to improve society. In the first
question of the survey – asking for a definition of historical thinking – one student
wrote:

Historical thinking could be associated with historiography and constructs to which

historians write history.

From another first-year student:

Investigating how and why a historian writes the way they write. The social and cultural
and political and personal affects a historian on their writing.

Such responses prompt questions about the degree to which the students see or locate
themselves as historians, and there is a tendency to refer to historians as ‘they’ rather
than a group to which they belonged. Thus, while the students tended to be optimistic
and change oriented, this lack of self-assertion was surprising and warrants further
exploration. In the last task of the questionnaire, only 9% of first-year students and 9%
of later-year students referred to a sense of the contextualised and historicised self in
the questionnaire, as with this response from a later-year student:

Some benefits include, being able to think about one’s own standpoint and the values
upon which it is based and doing the same to the views of others. It encourages deeper
considerations of issues from many points of views and helps you engage in debate.

As students take on the tasks of questioning evidence, challenging homogeneity and

ultimately recasting the narrative, they must have a strong sense of their own agency.
More importantly, they must understand the power, and the significance, that agency
holds. So how are teachers addressing and fostering student agency in the university
classroom?

Pedagogical practices for promoting historical thinking and agency

Lecturers continue to experiment with different approaches to address these issues and
find ways to actively foster student agency. One lecturer starts the process in her first
lecture with ‘daggy’, or homely photographs of the historians they would be referring
to during the semester. She stated that her aim was to give scholars a human face, a
sense of ordinariness and accessibility – ‘somebody you might happen to have conver-
sation with’. Another focused on the student evoking a tangible connection between
content and their own lives. She stated:

I teach Australian history in Australia, I say this is about you, this is about your history,
it is about who you are. It is about the world in which you live. It is heavily informed by
this past. So I try to get them to think about Australian history as being very much a tool
for thinking through the kind of issues that they might be perplexed by in the present.
And for figuring out how they are going to position themselves in the landscape.

The message is getting through to some students, as evident in the following examples
from later-year students:
 Studies in Higher Education 775

It allows you to take ownership of information given to you. Allows you to question
motives and arrive at your own conclusion. Become an active member of society as
opposed to a passive viewer. It develops ideas of social justice.

To enable us to position ourselves within ‘history’ and therefore to communicate effec-

tively with others about how our past resonates today.

The process of history study, as students themselves stated, includes a number of

undertakings, such as comparing, contrasting, analysing and investigating. These are
value-laden activities that require the student to make decisions underpinned by a
‘moral dimension’ (Seixas 2006, 2). Seixas further states, ‘All meaningful historical
accounts involve implicit or explicit moral judgment’ (2006, 11).
Fostering and incorporating agency, in a practical sense, into research and the
production of assignments, is difficult. One lecturer suggested that treating historical
study as a conversation was helpful in avoiding finite answers. She echoed what
many other lecturers were also saying in suggesting that commitment to practice was
vital:

It takes time to develop a confidence to do this, to try and figure out where you sit in
relation to the things that you read. And the more you read the more competently you
will be able to figure out who is persuasive and who isn’t and try and work out why.

A number of lecturers argued that an essential feature for successful progression

was that students had access to courses with a focus on theory, method and prac-
tice. History theory and methodology courses feature in virtually every history
department, usually as a prerequisite for honours or postgraduate studies, and, in
some cases, offered as part of postgraduate studies. Such courses are inherently
transformative by nature (Jenkins 1996, 75; Letourneau and Moisan 2006). They
are vital for exposing students to core epistemological questions, and for fostering
self-orientation and assertive engagement with that knowledge. In Millar and Peel’s
study (2007, 22), lecturers argued that an earlier introduction to these aspects of
history theory was the key to enhancing postgraduate numbers and, more impor-
tantly, successful completion.
Theoretical understanding must be accompanied by practice, and a second
feature raised by lecturers for developing students’ skills was an immersion in well-
supported research-based activities. Examinations are out of favour, presentations
and seminars provoke a mixed response, but the research essay remains a key
assessment feature. Students overwhelmingly described historical thinking as some-
thing one does, yet did not tend to always understand what underpins the doing. By
actively doing research-based work from the earliest stages of their learning,
students will have more opportunities to develop a more sophisticated understand-
ing of the discipline and its practice, and to develop a sense of self-efficacy within
that role.
The early introduction of history theory and of research-based activities meets
some of the criteria discussed in the notions of purposive learning environments
(Anderson and Day 2005) and ontogenetic development (Rüsen 2005), and affirms
Wineburg’s discussion around unfamiliarity and strangeness (2001). Through lived
experience of an immersion, in both theory and practice, students have much to gain.
With a subsequent sense of self-efficacy, agency and self-reflection, the students ulti-
mately take ownership of their historical practice.
776 A. Nye et al.

History thinking and its outcomes: social justice, a ‘critical eye’ and
self-reflection
Historical thinking aids in the development of many of the key components of
education policies and graduate attributes, including an appreciation and under-
standing of social justice, decision making and citizenship (Cooper, Dilek, and
Nichol 2009; Demircioglu 2009; Iacovetta et al. 2008; Murray 2007). Each of these
is shaped by a personally constructed moral gaze (Rüsen 2005, 23; Schonert-Reichl
2001; Seixas 2006). Lecturers interviewed for this study shared these views; for
example:

Unless you have a full historical understanding of the ethical issues you will fall short in
your ethical thinking about the present.

To be a citizen of any society you need to know the history of it and constantly be engag-
ing with that history, in fact I mentioned the economic crisis, I mean what better example
than that, to know how and why these things have happened in the past, not necessarily
to illuminate entirely the present, but you know it is not unprecedented in many ways but
it speaks to wider questions.

It was evident that the same ideas are filtering through to students. More than 21% of
students from first and later years cited the promotion of tolerance and appreciation of
difference as a benefit of historical thinking:

Open minded, sensitive to cultural and social (and temporal) differences and [undertak-
ing] analysis and comparisons. (Later-year student)

Historical thinking defines particular narratives which inform community values.

(Later-year student)

Decision-making also featured, with 16% of first years and 12% of later-year students
raising this point. History educators have expressed a desire to encourage students to
be unafraid to challenge and question popular, normative and established perceptions.
Lee has suggested that the role of the history teacher is unique in the way they contrib-
ute to students’ views of the contemporary world (2006, 155). In the interviews lectur-
ers supported this view, as this example shows:

If we let politicians set the agenda for historical debate it is going to turn into propaganda
rather than history – there’s a lot of false information going about.

Lecturers were aware of the tendency for students to idealise the outcomes of
historical thinking. As a result, core parts of their teaching are designed to unsettle
clichéd interpretations and to provide scaffolding for imaginative rethinking. The
following two quotes show how two different lecturers attempt to demonstrate these
issues, and the inherent significance of the student as an observer and constructor of
narrative:

All of us need to understand change in order to cope with a world that is organised
around rapid change. I think there are skills you develop to analyse the forces that shape
individual and collective fates. Not just to understand the past but to understand what is
helping to shape the future. That doesn’t mean we can straight out predict it with confi-
dence but perhaps we might learn, just that fact, that there should be some humility and
some caution in planning that occurs.
 Studies in Higher Education 777

I keep banging on about this, but I think they are immeasurable. The main issue of social
benefits is to remind us continually that there is an immense range of ways in which the
world can operate, and we, in our present time, only operate on a very narrow range,
especially in Australia. But the future is not going to be like that. Whatever we know
about the future, we know that it won’t be the present, and unless we understand the
immense range of possibilities we haven’t a hope of actually coping with the future in
any kind of constructive way.

Another historian suggested the students need also to be aware of the obligation that
comes with the privilege of education: ‘It is like a gift, so they also have some respon-
sibility to give something back to society’. Some students have evidently embraced
this view; as one wrote:

It allows you to take ownership of information given to you. Allows you to question
motives and arrive at your own conclusion. Become an active member of society as
opposed to a passive viewer. It develops ideas of social justice.

These views affirm the assertions on active citizenship in the sector and within the
discipline. The benefits of historical thinking extend well beyond graduation, and it is
important that students are able to contextualise their historian self in the broader
community (Seixas 2006).

Conclusions
This study has found that undergraduate students and university staff agree that one
can expect significant social benefits to emanate from the development of historical
thinking. They do not, however, come easily, and the teaching practices must be self-
reflective. The history graduate should be equipped with a sense of agency and a sense
of self that promotes critical thinking, social justice and active citizenship. In practice,
however, sophisticated historical thinking does not necessarily occur easily or natu-
rally, and lecturers need to incorporate strategic teaching practices to foster its devel-
opment. Headway is being made through conversations around purposive learning
environments (Anderson and Day 2005), and in the examination of the connections
between collective memory and history education (Seixas 2008). But our attention
needs to be maintained and focused on questions of how well we do this, and how
effective we are in tracking the development of agency and confidence, alongside
scholarly rigour, among students.
Without this type of ongoing evaluation and reflection on teaching practices,
history departments face the missed opportunity for change and development. We
need to be vigilant in fostering the incentive and drive to undertake further study.
Maintaining solid numbers, or indeed increasing the number of postgraduates, in
Australia has been somewhat frustrated by a number of logistical and practical
concerns (Millar and Peel 2007).
From an epistemological perspective, these conversations are important because of
the temporal and emergent nature of the discipline. There will always be new ways to
think about evidence, new types of evidence to examine and different positions from
which historians build questions about evidence. The students will be the next gener-
ation of historians, those who will affirm and amend existing disciplinary knowledge,
but will also generate the new.
The history discipline and its students do not stand alone in the higher education
system. As Barnett and Di Napoli suggest, students are likely to be engaged in ‘multiple
778 A. Nye et al.

networks’ and both their voice and identity will reflect this multiplicity (2008, 198).
History students will draw from the insights and skills of other disciplines, just as they
will utilise their history-based skills in other subject areas. This interdisciplinary enrich-
ment is an important part of the degree cycle, and yet it is an area that remains largely
unexplored.
Beyond the university sector in the broader community, history graduates
possess skills that are transferable to a diverse range of workplaces or human organ-
isations. They will have become familiar with the benefits of critically deconstruct-
ing their own role and being self reflective about decisions and their own privilege.
They will be accustomed to the notion of value-laden interpretations and their abil-
ity to impact on society. Alongside this degree of caution, they have also learnt to
be imaginative and to have confidence in their own agency. Yet evidence from this
study shows that students – in placing themselves outside of narratives of change –
may not see themselves as possessing skills and abilities that others value. Such a
lack of self-writing might have an impact on employment outcomes for history
graduates.
In this article we have argued for the importance of understanding and promoting
a sense of agency; the informed and conscious ability to take action. As a snapshot of
Australian universities in 2008, this study has highlighted the way in which the history
discipline is aptly placed to promote agency among students. We have affirmed the
view, of much of the national and international contemporary literature, that historical
thinking has much to offer to the higher education sector and the broader community.
The study also highlights, however, how much work we still have to do in helping
students to see how they can understand and enact human agency with the skills they
acquire in formal study.

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