History Now: Teaching History: The future of history education in NSW

In this conversation led by two leading history educators, we will examine the challenges and complexities of history teaching in the 21st century and explore the important role history teachers play in engaging, informing and shaping the future of history and history adjacent fields. 

How can we help nurture the next generation of historians? Two leading history educators, Jonathon Dallimore (HTANSW and University of New South Wales) and Professor Tim Allender (University of Sydney), will take us through some of the current issues in contemporary history education.

This presentation is part of the History Council of New South Wales’ 2025 History Now series, and presented by the History Council of New South Wales, the Chau Chak Wing Museum, and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre at the University of Sydney.

The History Council of New South Wales has been supported by the NSW Government through a grant from Create NSW.

Chapters

• 0:02 Welcome & Acknowledgement Of Country - Craig Barker & Catherine Shirley
• 8:02 Introduction to Jonathon Dallimore and Tim Allender
• 10:13 Jonathon Dallimore's presentation
• 33:52 Professor Tim Allender's presentation
• 54:50 Q&A - Craig Barker, Tim Allender and Jonathon Dallimore
• 1:17:47 Closer by Craig Barker & Catherine Shirley

Transcript

Catherine Shirley: 0:02

Welcome to the History Now 2025 podcast series, brought to you by the History Council of New South Wales in partnership with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Charles Centre at the University of Sydney. In this episode, we're joined by two leading history educators, Jonathan Dalamore from the History Teachers Association of New South Wales, and the University of New South Wales, and Professor Tim Allender from the University of Sydney, who take us through some of the current issues in contemporary history education. They will also discuss the challenges and complexities of history teaching in the 21st century and explore the important role that history teachers play in engaging, informing, and shaping the future of history and history-adjacent fields, and how they help nurture the next generation of historians.

Dr Craig Barker: 0:56

Good evening, everybody. And hello to those of you joining us via the uh the live stream on Zoom and those of you who will be listening to the podcast at a later stage. Welcome to the Chow Chak Wing Museum. To our guests in the room, thank you for coming out in what has not been one of Sydney's finest days in terms of the weather. So uh well done for braving the rain. Um, but I can assure you it will have been worth the effort. Um, before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that we meet tonight on Gadigal Lands and to pay our respect to the traditional custodians of these lands, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and to acknowledge and pay respect to the tens of thousands of years of care for land and of culture that developed in this space over that time. This is unceded Gadigal Land, and it always is and always has been Aboriginal land. My name is Craig Barker. I am the Head of Public Engagement for the Chow Chak Wing Museum. I'm an archaeologist and I'm an educator, and I have the great honor of convening the History Now series for 2025. History Now is a series of talks presented on behalf of the History Council of New South Wales. And in 2025, it's presented in collaboration with the Chow Chak Wing Museum and with the Vere Gordon Child Centre for Historical Investigation here at the University of Sydney. The series is possible because of the support of Create New South Wales. I'd like at this moment to invite to the lectern Dr. Jesse Adams Stein, who will say a few words on behalf of the History Council of New South Wales and about the History Now series. And indeed, there's no one more qualified to talk about History Now than Jesse because Jesse convened the series in 2024 and whose massive shoes I'm doing my very best to fill. But thank you so much for being with us tonight, Jesse. And I will ask you up to the microphone.

Dr Jesse Adams Stein: 3:03

Thanks very much, Craig. And as you can see, I have massive shoes. I'm here in my capacity as a member of the General Council of the History Council of New South Wales. And I'm delighted that History Now is in the hands that it is this year in 2025. In this fabulous auditorium at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, and also recorded as a podcast. I just wanted to say a few words about the history of history now, those historians, it's really hard to get them to not give you a little bit of background history when you get up there. So it's a long-running series, but it's one of these things that's been handed around. It's not owned by one particular organization or person, but it's been handed around over 10 years. It was started in 2015 when Hannah Forsyth and Anna Clark and Melissa Valanta got together and they took over the Australian Studies Seminar Series. So they renamed it History Now and really were interested in fostering public interest in what was really the most compelling work being done in the history sector, not just academically, but also publicly in many different fields, trying to really bring that work to a general audience, but doing so in such a way that doesn't insult that audience as well. So setting that tone. And that crucial act of public translation might be something that our speakers speak about today in relation to history education. As Craig said in 2024, I convened History Now, and at that point it was representing both the History Council of New South Wales and the UTS Australian Centre for Public History. And over the years we've seen audiences grow. I think some years had about eight people in a room, and some years we have this wonderful number that we have now. And of course, in 2024, we went digital. So with the initiative and commitment shown by the History Council's Executive Officer, Catherine Shirley, last year we began to record History Now. Initially, we were just clipping a microphone onto the mic at the lecture, and we had a little road mic. And Catherine really spearheaded that and turned it into what is now a podcast. And so if you're looking, looking up other History Now podcasts, you can look up HCNSW History Talks, and there's a whole lot available on various history of various podcast platforms. So on behalf of the History Council of New South Wales, I'd like to thank Craig Barker and the Chau Chack Wing Museum for making History Now 2025 happen. Also just recognising the History Council's cultural partners, in particular, our major funder, Create New South Wales, New South Wales government. Thanks very much.

Dr Craig Barker: 5:37

Thank you, Jesse. Now the theme of tonight's History Now discussion is teaching history, the future of history education in New South Wales, and by definition, broader Australian conversations as well. I've recently had the great privilege of conducting interviews with staff and former staff, students and alumni of the Department of Archaeology here at the University of Sydney for what will eventually be a history of the discipline in Australia, I hope. One consistent comment in those scores of interviews that I've done, regardless of age, gender, country of origin, interest of the person that I've been speaking to, is that they all said that their interest in archaeology or history was sparked by a dynamic teacher at school. And I suspect that the same applies to everyone sitting in this room tonight. But we live in a period of crisis within the teaching profession. So what we would like to explore tonight is the need of or the needs rather of current and future history teachers, the challenges they face, and some of the support networks that we, practicing historians, both professional and community, both academic and local, may be able to provide teachers to enthusiastically engage with students and to help craft that same passion for history amongst contemporary Australian students that we all felt. Teaching history in the 21st century is a challenge. With a packed curriculum, competing interests, cultural wars, and the challenges of misinformation and false narratives compounded by the shrinking of Australian university history departments. How, pardon me, how can we expect history students of the future and their teachers to develop the skills of historical understanding and historical literacy? But as you're here tonight too, there are also extraordinary opportunities to engage students in ways that were unimaginable previously. To lead the conversation, it's my great pleasure to introduce two leading figures in history education in this state, and both of whom are also practicing historians themselves. Both will speak for about 20 minutes and then we'll have a discussion afterwards. And I will invite questions from the floor if anyone would like to contribute to the conversation. But I'd like to begin by welcoming both Jonathon and Tim with one introduction and then they all go one after the other. Jonathon Dallimore is the Executive Officer, Professional Services, for the History Teachers Association of New South Wales, after leaving a permanent secondary teaching role in the New South Wales Department of Education. Jonathon also teaches history methods education classes at the University of New South Wales and at the University of Wollongong. He gained his MA research thesis in history through the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society at UNSW, Canberra, and with a thesis examining the life of a New South Wales school teacher who, after serving in the second AIF in Malaya and in Thailand, returned to participate in some of the most important educational developments of the post-war era. He's contributed to a number of books and educational resources, including co-authoring Teaching Secondary History in 2021. And Jonathon's book, Teaching History, A Practical Guide for Secondary School Teachers, was released earlier this year and is a must-read for anyone engaged with the profession. Professor Tim Allender is Professor, sorry, Professor, History of Education and History Curriculum with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences here at the University of Sydney, where I've had the great privilege of working with Tim for a number of years now on a number of projects. In his more than three decades of research, he has primarily worked on Indian education and empire studies using multidisciplinary approaches, particularly focused on gender and feminism. Tim's research on teaching and learning has had a particular focus on teacher education and on professional learning. Tim's authored and edited many books, including Historical Thinking for History Teachers in 2019 and Empire Religious Osity in 2024. He is the co-author of a forthcoming book on visual literacy and history. And Tim was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain last year. Thank you both for sharing your knowledge with us. Can I introduce Jonathon to the lectern?

Jonathon Dallimore: 10:15

Thank you, Craig, and thanks everyone for coming out, especially given the weather and uh all the other things that are going on. It's really nice to be here. Um, it's really important, too, I think, for a lot of us who are in history education to be here to talk about the challenges and the prospects of teaching history uh at the present time. I imagine many of us are here because we feel the sense of that importance. So um uh it is a it is a huge undertaking, and one of the real challenges of actually getting some thoughts together for this is actually where to begin, um, because there are so many things that I think we want to talk about. Um, I want to start just quickly by thanking my own history teachers. Uh, Craig mentioned that at the beginning. This is uh Fiona and Liz. Um they were my uh senior high school history teachers uh at Shellhaven High School down on the South Coast. Um they were wonderful, they were not heroic in any sense. Um they were really uh friendly, nice people who took no crap. Um, made us, you know. I remember writing with the chalk notes on the board and we'd copy down into our book and that kind of thing. But they were very open-minded, very friendly, very supportive for a room full of 15, you know, South Coast students. Um, and I I credit uh a lot of where I ended up just to their support and their enthusiasm for the subject. Um I say they weren't heroes in that sense, they weren't doing anything dramatic. I just think they were wonderful teachers and good people. Um, and I suspect that's true for a lot of people. Um, and I think it also speaks, I guess, to my own experience, which is that I am, I consider myself very much a history teacher still. Um, I write books and I'm now working for the History Teachers Association, but I feel like my instincts and my kind of center of gravity still uh lies very much in thinking about what it means to teach in front of young people. Um so uh my comments are going to be limited by that. I'm also, uh I think it's important to say, a 41-year-old man, and that makes a big difference. Makes a big difference in a context where things like, you know, Andrew Tate have become fairly influential in high schools, and there's lots of research now pointing out the real challenges that young women have, particularly in some contexts in terms of teaching in general, but also teaching things that I think relate to history. So, you know, I have a different experience to a lot of other people in this context, and uh it's one of the real challenges that I think um is is complex complex here, is that you know, we're all coming at this with slightly different kinds of perspectives, slightly different experiences and things that we might feel are a little closer or further away, depending on where we are and how we are. So uh I'm not speaking from the perspective at all of you know uh some kind of profit on education. I don't uh I don't like to talk about education pretty much beyond history teaching, because that's the the thing that I like to concentrate on. So my comments are going to be limited. Um, and I'm gonna start by asking the question really I mean, how do we even begin to pose questions about what is challenging to teaching history now? Because I don't know where the boundaries sort of begin and end. Um, the reality is, I think, to begin with, that there are enormous challenges for education in general. Um, in schools, there are teacher shortages, in universities, there are sort of, I would call it an attack on humanities departments. There are all sorts of challenges that are really general in nature that ultimately find their way back to the teaching of history in our particular context, but that are also really difficult. One concrete example of this is when you have a teacher shortage, you're more likely to have people in a school teaching the subject who don't have a background in the subject. Well, what does that mean uh for the practice of teaching in in an everyday school? I think it's a deep, deep uh kind of question that we haven't really resolved yet. We also have, and this is a sample, I like to collect these things just to point out that we're never living in uh you know, Craig called it a time of crisis, which I think is true, but there's this is not new. A lot of this is not new. These are all covers of the Bulletin magazine from the 1970s and 1980s, absolutely aggressively in tone attacking the role of teachers in society. Um, you know, the idea that we're spending all this money and we're pumping out dunces that hasn't gone away. Um, and that's really demoralizing as a teacher to wake up in the morning. You know, NapLeon results were released yesterday, to wake up in the morning and to have the media talk about education in this sort of way when you're trying to work hard and you're getting it, you know, uh there's pressures on you from all different kinds of angles. It's a really difficult kind of position to be in as a teacher. Um, so those general challenges work their way towards teaching history. Um, but there are also sort of particular challenges, I think, and that's what I want to concentrate on in terms of thinking about um teaching history. Um, some of these are not new either. I'm gonna read to you something here. You now you're actually gonna be my year nine class. Nobody reads anymore, so I'm reading to you. Okay, that's what happens now. Um, and this is reasonably lengthy, but I want you to kind of feel the guy's energy here. This is, I'm not gonna name him for various reasons. Uh, but this was written in 1977 in the Journal of the Australian Uh History Teachers Association. Uh, the journal no longer exists, but this was 1977, responding to the keynote speech at the History Teachers of Association uh National Conference from 1974, in which uh Professor John Ward stood up and delivered a really interesting lecture in which he said history had triumphed over all of its challenges. Uh, and this person responded with an article, and here I quote Today, would one not have to admit rather sorrowfully that history has not met and overcome these challenges? In our schools, history uh has too often succumbed to the unrelenting pressures and has limped from the center of the field to the ignominy of the sidelines where it lies battered and forlorn. Again, too often, those upon whom we have relied for the defense and the integrity of history in our schools have rushed and sold themselves out to become besiegers, even before it actually the besieging began, and invariably for personal gain. So this is a fairly heated response. History is still very much under attack, 1977, and seems to be constantly surrounded by remorseless and implacable enemies, like Phnom Penh before it capitulated, late 70s, Phnom Penh uh capitulating before the Khmer Rouge. Among its more or less effective enemies may be numbered the dreaded memorandum number 21, which was a call to make social sciences the new way to teach history in schools, blend it with geography, blend it with economics, and so on. The bewitching base paper, another call for social sciences, apparently, the murderous moderator of the exams, the internal assessments that we now all have to suffer under, the abolition of other exams for the school certificate, the substitution of the will of the wisp aims and objectives of the course content in the junior years. Um, in senior classes, we now have unit systems, restructured HSE requirements, which have abolished fairness and talent at one malevolent sweep. Approved study courses for seniors are here. Marvelous idea in essence, but one that depletes the history class. English syllabuses, or rather, lack of them. Immigration, the failure of primary education to teach children to read and write English. Behind all these noisy battalions stands the Directorate of Studies with its penchant for direction far more than study, the dictatorship of the ignorant, and which is in reality the camouflaged headquarters of the social science mercenaries, who have infiltrated into our school communities with the serpentine deviousness of the CIA. The loyalty of its followers being regularly assured by preachins and laverish offers offerings of chicken and champers at the taxpayers' expense. In this parade of persecutors, Memorandum 20 to 21 has earned the right to an honored position. Whatever the motives for its introduction, it's assisted in the destruction of history by reducing it in schools. Where once history and geography alone competed for a place in our curriculum, we now share that space with institutionalization of social studies, Asian social studies, and the social science intensified the struggle for the most humble place in the timetable. To eliminate history, to water it down to some equivalent of the dance of the rum rebellion, I love this, the Norfolk Island nudge or the federation fandango is not to help children understand their heritage or become informed citizens. This guy was absolutely furious at what had happened in the curriculum. I get it, I totally get it, like parts of it anyway. It feels like this has been going on for decades, that this is not a new thing. And so one of the challenges figuring out actually, as a historian, what's actually new here in the challenges that we face, what is new and actually what is old. Some of what he's talking about is still new. We still have a crowded curriculum, we still have pressures on our time. New South Wales is one of the only states where we actually have mandatory hours, 200 of them in the junior school, where history is actually carved out, has a space carved out in the curriculum for it. In other states, they don't have that. So schools are actually able to actually, you know, stop teaching history at the end of year eight, the end of year nine. This is happening more frequently. STEM is coming into the mix in a more kind of common way. So history is kind of battling for place in the curriculum. Um, so that's one thing. I think it's difficult to know uh where we're at in terms of, you know, are these new, are these old? Um the curriculum itself is a real challenge. If anyone's ever tried to read the curriculum from start to finish, yes, so the giggling would tell me that you have. Um, and I mean, I actually think a huge portion of my job is justified on the basis that I kind of read curriculums all the time and hopefully can make some sense out of them for people who can't, um, including other teachers half of the time. Um, and I sort of make the joke, but I think it's a real, real important issue is that curriculums are often, they look and feel like insurance policy documents. Um, you know, when when you get into a car accident, you ring up and they say, Didn't you look at clause 14.2 point, you know, part A? And I say, sorry, I didn't. Um, you know, and you're entitled to this, this, and the other thing. This is a bit like reading a history curriculum document. And so no wonder when we get public commentary on the history curriculum in the media and other places, a lot of it is just completely inaccurate because it's hard to read an insurance policy document. And so people latch onto one sentence and think it means X when it actually means Y. So getting a public discussion off the ground around curriculum is really complicated. Uh, and sharing what it means to teach this subject in in schools is actually really complicated because it the curriculum itself is difficult. In addition to that, um, actually getting through the content that we're required to get through is really hard. We teach in in New South Wales, basically from year seven to ten, we teach uh you know, uh the emergence of Homo sapiens 200,000, 250,000 years ago to the present day. Fit that in in 200 hours. I challenge anyone to do justice to that. Throw on top of that that we're supposed to do civics, we're on top of that, we're supposed to do uh historical thinking, on top of that, we're supposed to do literacy, on top of that, we're supposed to do any number of other things. How are we going to do that justice? It's almost begging for us to fail. Um, so one of the unfortunate things I often say to my young uh history teachers who are coming through university is the first item of clothing you need to buy as a history teacher is a hard hat. Because you'll teach it wrong. No matter what you do, you'll be teaching it wrong for somebody. So that's a difficult thing to get your head around as a young emerging teacher. Um, then we have the kind of challenge of the rhetoric and the investment. Um, if you listened to the rhetoric, you'd think that people were pumping money into this scene. Right? You look at the newspapers and they they the the you know, Craig mentioned the culture wars and this idea that history is absolutely crucial to our culture as Australians. And if anyone puts their foot wrong, you'll get smacked on the wrist very quickly as a history teacher. But if you do something right, there are very few people there to reward you. Um, we see uh this when curriculum debates come up. There will be absolute war over a single dot point in the curriculum that misses the entire sort of sweep of what the curriculum is trying to teach. And this will blow up into a huge problem. And so you'd think, okay, great, well, these people obviously value history, these public commentators, the politicians, and so on who comment on this. The answer is they don't. I mean, look at what's happening to history departments across the country at the moment. Uh, in my local town, Wollongong, they've just decimated the history department there. No one's putting their hand up to put money behind that. I think that's reprehensible. Um, so we talk about it in a way that we we value it, but who at the end of the day is actually putting money into it, who's actually carving out time, who's actually sort of uh, you know, investing uh that that time and money into uh the discipline, it's sometimes difficult to know where that comes from. Uh on top of that, I think uh it's not just a money thing, it's an intellectual challenge. I think it's really interesting that sometimes it feels to me, anyway, that education has a remarkably anti-intellectual kind of thread to it. Um, it often comes down to very much, you know, who's got the money and where that's going to be placed. But the fact is, in my experience, anyway, uh becoming a history teacher is deeply challenging in an intellectual sense. It doesn't just take time and it doesn't just take money. It takes a lot of reading, it takes a lot of patience, it takes a lot of trying things out and having them not work in the classroom and sometimes be embarrassed. I mean, I thank my lucky stars that um I became a teacher before, you know, social media and mobile phones and stuff like that were running rampant. I mean, I was able to make mistakes in more or less private, right? Um, it's much harder to do that now. But it does take a lot of time and effort. Um, and again, I ask the question where where is the investment coming from? I think history teachers are working really hard on this, and they have for decades. Um, and sometimes that's not matched uh in other quarters. Um, another big challenge in education uh that we find, I think this is I'm borrowing here from an English uh history teacher, Michael Fordham is his name, and he he works closely with a woman called Christine Counsel who used to teach uh history education at Cambridge. And they have a little expression that I like. It's like night nice and sort of simple to get your head around, um, and that is this notion of educational genericism. And so that one of their kind of criticisms of education is that it's really lost a kind of really a strong sense of disciplinarity. That education has kind of become very much about very generic goals and goals that we would probably generally agree to in some regards. So, for example, they point out one of the common ones now is that you know we need to be teaching critical thinking. Who who wouldn't agree with that? Fantastic. But how do you actually teach critical thinking? It's a very complicated task. Um, so their argument is actually if you if you go and have a look at how history teachers often operate, they teach history very critically. A lot of the time, we're already doing this. But this idea we have to be doing more critical thinking. And often what this ends up becoming is kind of a generic curriculum object that the only real critical thinking is when students are outside the boundaries of a discipline, working in an interdisciplinary way, working on a project where their science teaches there and their English teachers there and their history teachers there, and they're doing this, you know, breaking new ground as a 12-year-old kid. Um, and the argument them they make is that actually uh this does all sort, this generic goals does all sorts of damage to the the subjects that we teach because they take up so it these goals take up so much additional time. Literacy becomes a you know an additional thing that we've got to teach as a generic goal, right? No one disagrees that we shouldn't be teaching literacy. That's obviously uh something that we should be prioritizing. But again, we're already doing it in history. So we're getting all of these external things that we've got to teach in addition to the subject, in addition to the content, that makes the job really, really challenging. Um, and one of the ways this shows up, I mean, I've seen this at universities. Um so you know, I can I can say in some universities, the amount of hours that are allocated in initial teacher education programs to subject-specific time and subject-specific subjects. So, how to teach history if you're at university studying to become a history teacher, the hours for those subjects in some universities have been drastically reduced. What's what what have they, they haven't sort of reduced the number of courses you've got to do to become a teacher. What they've added in is a generic subject on assessment or a generic, you know, uh subject on literacy. Not saying they shouldn't necessarily be there, but we're taking subject time out of a lot of young teachers' uh training to do generic things that don't necessarily always give them a lot of specific tools to work in the subjects they should teach in or will end up teaching in. I think that's shortchanging them. I would say that because I teach the subject specific subjects and I want more hours back, right? Um, so it perhaps you could say that's sort of my bias in this. But I think the uh the argument is at least worth putting the question on the table. Are we serving young teachers well uh by putting too much generic stuff into a curriculum? Of course, uh the other point that these guys would make is that of course we've got to have some generic content in there, you know, and schools do have to have generic content. They're not saying everything should be done within subject boundaries. Um, so given all of that I've said, I'll finish up really quickly. Um, given all that I've said, um you might sort of worry, uh wonder uh in fact, um, why history actually has survived at all in some sense, because the challenges are actually very significant. But in fact, I think relative, uh here's the positive story. I think relative to the challenges, history's actually doing really well in many ways in New South Wales. Um, so here uh you can see, sorry, the the first graphs have covered up a little bit, but this is basically data I've crunched going back to the uh beginning of the HSC in the late 60s. And you can see that the number of history students, uh perhaps easier to see on the right, has been reasonably stable if you kind of look at it across the sort of general trend from the 60s to now. That's the good part of the story. But if you look at the yellow line, that's the absolute number of students who are doing the HSC. So we've kept absolute ground, about 10,000 students doing modern history, sort of thing, but we've lost relative uh relative ground. But the fact is, um, as well, if you look at things, if we look at, say, the humanities, um, modern history is still one of the most popular humanities subjects in the HSC. There's a hundred and something subjects in the HSC. Um, modern history is in the top 10, ancient history is in the top 15. So I'd love that to be bigger, the absolute number to be bigger, but we've held ground in a really interesting way against a proliferation of subjects and other things like that. Um, so uh I think there's a really interesting sort of set of questions around why that's the case. I'd bring it down to a few things. The fact that teachers have remained passionate, that's crucial. Um, at the moment, I think teachers have remained generally well trained in their subject because people like me were able to do a Bachelor of Arts because we had history academics at universities. And then we were able to do uh education on top of that. I found that a really powerful uh mode of learning to teach history. We've had some politicians who've thrown their weight behind it. Special mention to Bob Carr here, who actually sort of put a floor under history in New South Wales by saying 200-hour minimum. Um, we've also had institutions and many people actually in this room. It's really nice to see so many people from museums and libraries and so on who have actually lent their weight again, their institutional weight to history in schools in in all sorts of different ways. Um and I think history actually remains popular amongst the general population. I think that's still the case, actually. Um, despite what the media will tell you that it's all gone to, you know, it's all gone to the dogs and it's all woke and all the rest of it. It's just not the case. Um, it's not the case on the ground. Um the last thing that I want to quickly finish on uh is just my kind of uh big starting point for what the future looks like, because that's part of the the question here. I don't have any sort Sort of really um you know heroic answers to this. And in fact, one of the things I've been kind of thinking about a lot over the last few years is is trying to look away from the waves that are crashing on the surface and to look for something that's a bit deeper, to look for a current that we can find that might take us forward, not two years in the face of AI or to you know in the face of uh declining history departments or whatever it might be, but that might carry us forward over in the next decade or two. Um and this actually comes from an old uh argument that was made um by Stuart McIntyre, the late Stuart McIntyre. He had a debate with uh a very well-known his uh historian of education and former history teacher, Alan Barkin, who was based at Newcastle University. Um, and they had an exchange in a in an Australian Journal of Education in 1997, and they were basically saying, what's gone wrong with history 1997? Crisis is old. Okay. Um and Stuart McIntyre's answer had just resonated with me the moment I read it. He said, We can't control everything, but what's in our control, we can focus on these things. And I think he's absolutely spot on as a starting point. It's not a complete mission here or a vision for what we can do. But he says, I think it would make sense for history teachers wherever they are. Let's play that broadly, in universities, in schools, in cultural institutions, people making podcasts, whatever it is. He says, We should focus on three things as history teachers: knowing history, learning about the facts of the past, learning about the stories that give it coherence, and discussing those. That's important. If I teach a 10-week topic on World War I and my kids can't remember that it broke out in 1914, it's frustrating, but it happens, right? But that's my aim. I want them to know something about World War I at the end of the day. They can't do anything interesting with the subject if they don't know things. The second thing he says, we should introduce them, depending on where they are in their kind of learning, to the doing of history. Learning to read a document, learning to make sense of a document and draw a conclusion from it, learning to, as silly as they might at 13, make an argument. My five-year-old son's just got into cricket, he's terrible. I don't I don't poke fun at him. I go, well done, mate, great hit. And I'm throwing the ball slowly because he's not Steve Smith on the cricket pitch. I play to his strengths. So at where they are in in their learning, doing history and beginning to build those skills up over time. And I love the last one. He's borrowing Greg Denning's idea here of performing history. Ultimately, teaching history to my mind is a performance. That doesn't cheapen it. I think it actually makes it really even more valuable. Um, standing in front of the class and telling them a story that hopefully gets their attention, reading a document with them that again gets their arrests their attention, a diary entry from the First World War or whatever it might be that you're talking about. Um, in in cultural institutions, showing artifacts and teasing out the stories that people are so good at in their own way. And, you know, I think there's there's ways to do this that are, I said here, popular. Let's put schooling in that in that classic uh in that classification. We're not talking about people who have got a PhD or want to have one necessarily, they're they're being forced to sit in my history class. And so I've got to do that in a tailored way to that audience, knowing, doing, and performing. But I can kind of do the same thing when I teach history at university, and they are aspiring to be a history uh teacher. In fact, Greg Denning did this in wonderful ways. I never met him and never saw it in action. But he used to actually get students to his master's degree program and he'd say, You've got half an hour to go away and come back and perform to me something about history that brings this life to life for you. And on the spot, they would have to do something on the spot in a really creative way. And he says, If you can't do this to me, how are you going to do it to the general public? So it's a really interesting challenge for us, I think. Um, and hopefully we can pick up some uh more of this in the questions. Thank you very much.

Professor Tim Allender: 33:54

Thank you very much for this invitation, Craig, and the others involved in uh the museum and um History Council, that's right. And I'd like to acknowledge um the Gadigal people, past, present, and future uh on land never ceded. Um I'm going to take slightly, I'm working around Jonathan's passion, which is just fantastic, and really we need to hear that, to um embroider some of the academic side perhaps of history as a discipline, but also I'm aware that there's a quite a few of you in the audience that aren't history teachers. So I'm going to spend a couple of first slides very quickly talking a little bit about that craft before um I move on to the other more substantive stuff that I want to talk about. I'm a product of Victoria, and it used to be general studies. I'm really aging myself now. I'd love to be able to show you my teachers, but I don't know if they'd still be alive actually. But I noticed a former student, uh, a school student of mine from many years ago now, and it's lovely to see you. And it's I've had some wonderful conversations with people that are interested in art and other fields that aren't particularly uh opposite to history in the first instance, but it just shows you what a magical discipline it is and how it draws people in. And um I want to talk a little bit about that too, um, in the time that I have. Um, first thing I'd just say for I taught for 12 years in schools. I'm not necessarily someone that's got their head in the clouds, hopefully, as an academic here. And I loved every minute of it, you know, I really, really did. It was just such I'd come out of my master's a lot of solitary work in um archives and that sort of thing. And to be able to be a performer in front of kids, you know, and getting them interested in this in the subject was, you know, you close the gate or the door. Most classes, not all of them. Some of them you think, oh my god, I'm glad that's over. Others, you know, I just think, I don't got paid for that. You know, it's just such an indulgent almost thing to do, to be able to teach passionately. And one of the gifts I think of our discipline is that really uh students bring a lot of it into the classroom in certainly ways that need to be negotiated. But they have some sense of history, most of them, whether it's through their families, grandparents, who are great storytellers, of course, hopefully, if they're still around, if they're lucky, um, popular culture, you know, films, all that sort of thing. And I really love this phrase: all history is a negotiation between familiarity and strangeness. And I think history teachers do the strangeness bit by formularizing history as a craft and initiating students into it as a formal discipline, hopefully if they go on to university, but in other fields too, where they can use a historical lens to understand things better. Uh, Jonathan mentions Bob Carr, you know, and he's a hero for us, history in New South Wales. And when you hear it, hear him talking um on, you know, even recent issues, um, his his narrative is enriched in ways that many other commentators aren't, because he knows his history, you know, it makes a difference, really does, of course. And I'm speaking to the converted, of course, here, but it's a precious subject. Um, okay, what do history teachers do? Well, I I'm not going to, these are the two quick slides, but you know, things like that, you know, they're using their judgment. If they're going to teach feminism, probably going to think, well, that's going to be a senior class concept. I'm not going to teach it per se, because I know my students don't have, like I have, a strong contextual knowledge of historical um place. So it's no point talking about first wave, second wave feminism, and third and fourth wave all in the same breath, because we understand, of course, what those um um conflicts were about because we know the history context, but school kids don't. So they're going to make choices about that, another kind of choice that a skilled, history-tamed teacher knows what to do. Now, this is not a recipe. Teachers teach it in all different ways, and that's the wonderful part of it. But let me just go through some of the others there. Federation, you know, it seems very dry, but then you want a performative teacher to think, well, to say things like, Well, could we do that today? Could we get our states to agree to be in a federation today? What was different compared now, compared to then? Um, you know, Germany between the wars, one of my favorite ones, and I'm really, really pleased it's now the core section of modern history, because it teaches kids so much about the human condition, you know, how a modern industrial state could end up electing the Nazis, you know. What's the conflict there? You know, what's the contest there? And what does that teach us too about the human condition going forward? That's another dimension that a trained history teacher would probably take, or something like that. We all sort of know those things because most of us are trained in history, but it is a very specific form of language and understanding and knowing. We don't realize sometimes that we have it, you know. Um, multiculturalism, you're not going to put that on a mind map and get kids to sort of tell you what it means because kids, if they're worth their salt as adolescents, are going to say to themselves, well, this is a moral lesson coming. I know what all the right answers are, but it's not going to teach me anything. And this is sort of like, you know, valueless. But us, you know, a strategic teacher is going to teach around that by looking, getting kids to look at family history or some other kind of um, you know, podcasts of another kind where where people are talking about their life journeys, or maybe even interviewing, you know, a very old person that's probably a little bit lonely. Get them to talk about their history. And more often than not, there's going to be a multicultural lens in that the kids don't realize that's actually happening. Teachers know how to do that. Good experienced teachers too. Australian history, Jonathan mentioned, you know, uh Stuart McIntyre. Um, you know, um, in the uh shaping document years ago with the beginnings of the national curriculum, he's saying, look, don't treat Australian history as constrained within national geographical borders. Think about the influences from outside, think of the Enlightenment and the whole idea of what formed society, the ideas around that. Think about other national histories that aren't Europe that have shaped Australia as well. Um, and citizenship, you know, you if you look at a very experienced teachers, I had the privilege of being able to do that in Queensland, you know. And they're doing a lot of this is an ancient history classes in particular that I can remember. They're doing a lot of time travel backwards and forwards. What did citizenship mean in the ancient world? What's the same? What's different? The rape of the Sabine women, for example. And of course, the last thing is we've got this wonderful subject that really, you know, that's got fabulous content, you know, that we can really engage kids with. We're so lucky that we have that, you know. Um, despite, of course, as Jonathan so rightly says, all these threats that we have to it to what we can do in a classroom. Now, I'm not going to talk about those, but that's what else teachers taught do, don't they? Uh, you know, in syllabuses, those of you who are in front of me today, you know, politicians don't see that side of things. They argue about usually content constituencies, like why isn't Vietnam in there? You know, or the history wars, you know, this sort of wrong-headed idea earlier on, you know, is it Henry Reynolds' foot paint footnotes that we're really talking about here, or are we actually talking about something entirely different that is the historian's craft? You know, it's not postmodern mishmash to use the phrase of a former prime minister. Uh, it's much, much more than that. We know all of that stuff, so just let me get off that. Uh, Nessa, you know, I think too, when you I think Jonathan touched on this as well. Whenever you're sitting in consultative committees, um, you know, um, trying to fathom how what the next syllabus is going to look like, you know, you're only one stakeholder amongst many. Uh, sometimes it feels a bit like the Tower of Babel where everyone's sort of talking about different things, but you imagine it's the same narrative, you know, and it feels like it's clumsy and not that satisfying. And Jonathan really pointed out beautifully, if I may say so, the reasons for that that I won't go into. His syllabus development generally is a bit slow in incorporating new theorization, but I have to acknowledge and would like to acknowledge Nessa, and particularly with historical thinking concepts, they're actually in the past concept, the previous syllabus as well as the current one. And that's really, really encouraging to see, you know. Okay. Um, we've got this stuff. Jonathan's talked about it already. Um, you know, we just a little bit of history of history, if you like, you know, history extension. Um, McGaugh earlier on, uh, Barry McGraw came up with the idea that we've got a crowded curriculum, you know, yet again that problem. Getting rid of all the three unit subjects as they used to be in all subjects. Um English, maths, um, science. Bob Carr says, well, history's got to go in there as well. That's the fourth extension history subject. And that was really strategic because when the national curriculum came along, what are the four subjects that are developed first as the four primary ones? Yeah, history's in there as well. And that's really, really strategic. We've got, um, and as Jonathan rightly says, you know, we have um, you know, we're one of the few states left that has history as a discrete subject, seven to ten. It's there's been a lot of slippage in other countries and other countries and other states, almost feels like other countries when it comes to history. Um, you know, um, and we've got uh the um yeah, history elective as well, and that's sort of really inquiry-based learning, which I really like, actually, you know. So New South Wales is rich on this stuff, you know, and it's doing, you know, we we've got to watch it, haven't we, Jonathan? We've got to watch, we've got to protect this thing because it's really, really precious. Just a couple of things that I'd point out that um I don't know, Carla, if you'd agree with this, but you know, there's a bit of a worry about First Nations when you teach that with contact history and colonialism. It's too early. Yes. Um, you know, it's uh you you think about the complexities of the whole issue of contact history, First Nations and colonialism. Year seven, year eight. You know, this is sort of a recipe for teaching it in a token way yet again. Because kids aren't at the cognitive level to be able to understand its full complexity. It's a lot better than the previous syllabus, though, where it was in stage from memory from stage in the last part of primary school, so stage three. I think I think I'm correct there. We've got this other issue though, that the syllabus is far too Eurocentric, and that's a really hard one to win. I've tried. I've really tried. Um, and it will come in time, but here's just an example of just one group there um of um um of Indian students. I like to use the statistics around language rather than ethnicity, because if if it's language in the home, that probably means there's a very strong cultural referencing in that home rather than you know being of Indian extraction as such. And you know, that's pretty stark. The Chinese dimension would match that. And yet, you know, the Renaissance, the Reformation, what does that mean to an Indian student or a Chinese student? You know, we've got to think about that more. Part of the the I have to say, part of the pullback the other way is of course teachers, experienced teachers have a lot of resources on these areas and are reluctant to give them up. Uh that goes, by the way, for example Germany between the wars. And it was very clever that they made NESA made that the core because it became so hegemonic when it was a an optional subject as a 20th century study. Something like 65% of the state chose it out of eight options. Um it's that's another sort of force that comes from the profession, perhaps working back the other way, but that's a bit of a problem, you know. We have to be able to embrace our multicultural country far better when it comes to the teaching of the subject, in my view. The future. Just a few last slides and and then I'll stop. Um yeah, I mean, there's a lot of money, isn't there? You know, $87 billion is spent on um on uh funding of education generally. That includes building new buildings and recurrent expenditure and all the rest of it. But it's a lot of money, isn't it? You know? What about just a little bit to establish some architectures around teacher-to-teacher across schools mentoring as such? I feel a little bit disabled, quite frankly, when you talk about professional development at universities. I actually think experienced teachers there, the researchers in the field, they know what works in a classroom. They've got a lot to give the rest of the profession, much more than I have, as a teacher educator at uni. And we really need to push that one and recognize it much more. Um, they are researchers in their classroom, even though if you ask them to write down what they're doing, they'd find that really hard to do, probably, many of them. Because it is tricky. I find it tricky when I'm researching in in into classrooms um when I've done that in the past. Um we've got all this stuff around deprofessionalization of teachers, you know. Um, and I, you know, and Jonathan's mentioned the NAT plan thing and all the negatives around that and the need to direct teaching, you know, it sounds so good. Direct teaching, let's control it and make sure that these nasty teachers don't start, you know, waffling on about secondary kind of stuff as such. I think too, I've probably got this on the next slide. I'm not sure, but I'll I'll go to the next slide just, yeah. Um, just a few. Oh, yeah. I'll just one other thing I'd just say about AI. I'm a little bit worried about it. I think it's going to be really exciting, and I'm not resisting it. I don't really know what it is yet. Uh, really don't. Um, there's a lot of um certitude around what's uh secure assessment and what's insecure assessment at university at the moment. But then when you ask um the experts in the field what is AI, they really struggle because it's just changing so quickly, as we know. Um, but I have a terribly sinking feeling that when AI does visit schools and it's already well in there, of course, now ahead of universities, I think too. Is it going to be a force for a kind of a further separation of administrative um decentralization where there's no middle management, particularly for young teachers? Um the Harvard Business School model on steroids, you know, that that worries me a bit about the the organizational implications of um um of AI. The last point I want to make is just about cross-disciplinary approaches. The the really, really good news about history is that it's a strong discipline, you know, and I can reassure you all, if I may, as a teacher that a writer in disciplinary fields, other disciplinary fields, history stays strong. It's quite happy to be, you know, combined with other areas like visual studies, uh citizenship, we know about um museum studies, of course. Um understanding better gender, you know, what what how gender is such a powerful force in understanding others. We don't realize just how powerful that lens is. School kids need to know more about that. But we've got other stuff there like holograms and the Jewish Museum. Um yeah, um, you know, just Holocaust survivors, you know, uh talking and who are no longer with us. But the technology is so fantastic now there that you know you can have two sons or two children of the Holocaust survivor. You can actually ask the person who's got who's no longer with us questions and they'll get answers. It's after about two days of interviews with that person whilst they're still alive. But the technology is extraordinary, and kids really can get into this stuff using new technologies as such. Um just a few last ones. Uh I won't I don't want to dwell on these too much because I I don't want to take up too much more time, but um there's some stuff there like My Heritage Um at Time or AI Time Machine, um which is an extraordinary technology that's AI at the moment that's looking at new new new acronyms for VIPA, all that stuff, which is means to teach kids how to understand and detect forgeries online, going through images and looking at the image itself. That stuff's coming too. I'm pretending here that I'm an expert on AI, but I'm not. But I can just see a little bit of stuff coming that's really exciting for history teachers too. The last ones that I just mentioned are just the um the uh issue about boys. I think we've got a lot more work to do with boys in schools and using history to help them understand their place and give them new voice. We have people like Alan Garner and Julia Gillard and others that have started to talk about this, and Jonathan, you touched on it as well. Um, you know, it's it's it's really, really important that we find new ways of giving them a voice and understanding their history, particularly as the wars thankfully start coming out of the syllabus of the the way they were traditionally taught as such. And that's fine. Thank you. And the last one is just just the whole role of protest and its its place in history, its validity, respectful, peaceful protests, and how social change happens, you know. Um I I'm a bit of a marcher, you know, the the sorry march over the bridge, uh domestic violence marches last year and and Gaza last weekend. You look around and you think why are these people here? What's brought them here? And I like to think it's they're teachers, partly, but I have a sinking feeling that we've got more work to do here because it feels much more like it's culture and family that have brought most of those people to those marches. And I don't really know. I'd like to know more about that, but I think the insurgent history teacher really famous in a schooling setting, aren't they? You know, if you want a dissatisfied dominant staff room, go to the history one, you know, they'll tell you all about the things that are, you know, because they decode things as part of their job as history teachers. I'd like to see a little bit more of that imparted into for the rising generation of students so that we protect our our really vibrant democracy that we're lucky enough to have. Thank you very much.

Dr Craig Barker: 54:51

Thank you, Tim. I'll ask both you and Jonathan to join me up on the stools. Um, and uh uh I will shortly uh open the uh floor for questions as well too. So start formulating some of my thank you both very much. Um you've covered a lot of ground in your respective 20 minutes, so thank you. But um I'd I'd I want to start upon, and I love your your both of you commenting about the passion of history teachers and the performative aspect as well, that we might come back and revisit as well. But I want to jump on what you said, Tim, that uh teacher teachers being researchers in their classroom and teachers knowing what works in the classroom. So starting with a positive response, in terms of the conversations you have with teachers and seeing students, what's working currently? What are what are school students responding to in history classes that they're not necessarily doing so in English, maths, science, and other academic or other curricular disciplines?

Professor Tim Allender: 55:50

Thank you, Craig. Um, I think the one thing I want to say is I get away from ideas like best practice or recipes about how to teach because it's such a a veritable field. Um, I think what works for teachers though is when they're really, really interested, and experienced teachers do this really well, and they'll they'll talk to you about reflecting on practice uh, you know, for hours if you if you let them, you know. They're really, really interested in trying new ways of doing things and keeping themselves refreshed by teaching things in different ways as such. Um I think they know their students. Um, and I think um no one year would be the same if I went back to that class and looked at the students being taught again by that same teacher, even that same topic, I would find it quite different. So it's the adaptability of the teacher to be able to reach their students and tap into what might really grab them as such, and it's different each year, really, as such. That's an unsatisfactory answer, I think, because I'd love to be able to sort of stratify it more than that, Craig, but I'm really reluctant to do that. Um, but this is part of the magic of the historian's craft in a classroom. It's highly specialized stuff. That's what I'm trying to get across. So it's important to take Jonathan's point up, you know, with universities having history departments, formal training of history teachers as such. Um, I think the federal government's getting away from uh starting to look at the Morrison government about um changing the the hike in fees for art subjects. And I'm really looking forward to that because it all chimes into the same issue.

Dr Craig Barker: 57:47

Certainly the uh certainly the current campaign from the Australian Historical Association launched earlier this week. Um so if you're not at a chance to uh to sign, um please do so. But uh Jonathan, would you like to add?

Jonathon Dallimore: 58:00

Oh, just quickly, I mean, I think I echo all that. Um and I mean I I do think history is one of those subjects where it does, I know this is necessarily popular to say, um, but you know, the idea that that teaching is very relational um is is unpopular in some circles. It's like there's this more technical approach that we can have and it's this is effective. But I I I can't get away from the fact that history is deeply relational in the sense that if a student, a group of students don't really know and trust me, it makes it very difficult to have a con conversation with them, a proper discussion that goes anywhere productive around a thorny issue about migration or you know, a contemporary issue that that is not additional to the curriculum. These a lot of these things are actually in the curriculum, right? Um, so um, and and and I think this is one of the unique things about teaching history is that it it is it is very challenging in that regard. And it takes a lot of time to build up a lot of relationship with these students. I mean, my last school I was at for a while, and so I taught some of the students in year seven all the way through to year 12. And so you could kind of just waltz into a class almost, like, and they kind of know you, and you you're you're 30% down the track. It just makes it so much easier. Um, and they know if I ask this question, Mr. Bellymore's not gone rogue and he's not gonna be, you know, imposing this view on me. He's gonna do that thing where he opens up a discussion and I get to have a say, but there's probably gonna be a difference of opinion. It's really hard to do that when you're new to a school or you know, new teacher, A, but even new to a school as an experienced teacher, that's really hard. So well, I think at the end of the day, like for me, a huge part of it is never gonna be enough. But I think a huge part of being a really good history teacher is being passionate about the subject, and it's just not anywhere in the teaching manual. You know, like the Australian teaching standards, it doesn't say gets enthused about subject, you know, it just doesn't say that. And it should, it should be like 50% of the the the structure, you know. But everybody knows, like you have a a a teacher who's not into it, and you're just probably not going to get into it.

Dr Craig Barker: 59:55

Well, I guess that segues quite nicely into the performative aspect as well. That that uh Of you, but in particular, Jonathan, you um spoke about you know, is perhaps drama training part of the process as well as history training. Um, but again, uh given that storytelling aspect of historical investigation as well, are there ways of creatively weaving that creative process into the way that we teach history?

Jonathon Dallimore: 1:00:24

Yeah, yeah. I look, I think absolutely. I and I think you know, performance to me is not, again, I tried to sort of say this, um, but to me, performance is not a kind of a performative, you know, in the in the negative sense, um uh concept. It's it's a it's an affirmative thing about what teachers do. And it means all sorts of different things. I mean, uh when I write, I'm performing. This is Greg Denning's point, is that you know, a performance is um the movie Gladiator, it's it's the the the play Hamilton, it's someone teaching in a class, it's someone making a podcast, it's someone actually writing an essay. That's a performance of a particular kind. It's it's um people from museums here, uh, when you take a student around an exhibit, it's bringing all like this dead object to life for them. And that takes a real skill, I think, you know. Um, so I do think I do think there's a really creative side to that with teachers. Um, and the point of it, I think, is not to just uh, you know, education is not a system of entertainment, but the reality is there has to be some connection, some hook, some entry point into the subject to begin to think about it in increasingly complex ways. So if I go into a class of 14-year-olds who are not academically performing very well, and I say, hey guys, you know, let's read, uh, we were talking about Edward Sayed out there. We're gonna do Orientalism now with the 14-year-olds, they're just gonna glaze over and be like, what is going on? You know? So we show a photograph and we say, What do you what do you see there? And and let's have a talk about this. And, you know, something happened in the playground. You use it as the connection. Um, that's to me what it means to be performing. It's all organic, it's all connected to the students. And the ultimate aim is that we bring them into a space that they may not have thought about before. I mean, I think this is one of the real tensions of teaching history, is it's ultimately you're using these things that are familiar, you're using these things that they might be interested in to take them somewhere they may not have thought about before. That's what I think the ultimate aim is. I mean, I really like Gert Biesta, you know, the philosopher, he's Dutch, I think, philosopher. And he says that there's this whole silly discussion between teacher-centered and student-centered education. And he says, actually, education's about the world. I think that's a brilliant reframing of the discussion, world-centered education, where we're all looking outside ourselves to something a little bit bigger. Some kids it's that much, and some kids you get that much. It's you've got to you've got to be sensitive to that.

Professor Tim Allender: 1:02:44

I I couldn't agree more, and I don't want to say more because I think that's really summed it up um superbly. I'm passionate, you know, you need to be passionate, clearly, it's obvious with school kids, uh, much more than maybe even university students, although you need it there too. Because they do connect with you personally, uh, they want to understand you um as much as you dare share with them. And that can be just a little bit, you know. It's a very personal thing, learning history. But you can unpack stuff down without them realizing. And of course, they don't hear anything about syllabuses or, you know, inquiry-based learning or that's our language, not theirs. But I I do what sticks, what what was a big lesson for me was when I was in one of those curriculum committee meetings, you know, not making much headway. And uh the discussion was around key competencies coming from K right up to year 12. And the discussion was around uh sources. And you know, it's and the and the person was talking about this was talking about it's a continuum from K to 12. And I spoke, I do this sometimes ahead of time, and I shouldn't have. And I said, Well, I don't know about you know, a kindergarten kid learning about sources, and I got sat back on my backside very quickly by a primary school kid, said, Yeah, you know, what about a kid that you brings two photographs to school one of say they're both of his of their mother, I won't gender it. Um one's their mother is a girl, one is a mother now. Can they work, can they understand the difference in source? And of course they can. So I learned something that day, you know, and it's stuck with me since. Um we mustn't forget the K to 12 continuum and how that works through. At least we don't repeat stuff now at secondary school that's been taught in primary school. Um, but we've got a bit more of a way to go to be thinking about those younger years too, and how that learning is progressing when we get them in secondary school as uh as history students.

Dr Craig Barker: 1:04:59

Look, I'll open the floor now. Um, so if anyone does have a question, just raise your hands, but wait till I come across with the microphone. I'll also invite any comments from experiences, either if you've worked as teachers or as a student.

Question 1: 1:05:13

Thanks very much for a very informative conversation. Something that's crossed my mind a lot is comparing World War II to Star Wars. And with Star Wars, it's obviously fictional. We know the we know the movies, but there's this whole genre, you know, of technical manuals, genealogies, maps, histories, timelines, this whole fictionalized background that's been created for Star Wars that some people are really fascinating and they really want to get they want to get the facts right. There's a Star Wars canon, they get very upset if there's you know misalignments and they they try to explain them. Now, on the other side, I find World War II fascinating because it's got all the drama of Star Wars, what actually happened. It's got its own prequels, World War I, it's got the its sequel, which is the Cold War. But my question is, what is it do you think compels people to be more interested in a fictionalized environment like Star Wars neglecting something that actually happened?

Professor Tim Allender: 1:06:13

I um I have there's a distinction for me. I don't like that where facts or content is deliberately consorted, you know, to make it tidy and acceptable to uh an Anglo-Saxon middle class. I'm thinking of films like Enigma, uh where um what was his name? Um Jerry is quietly walking across Trafalgar Square with the pigeons flying up at the end of the film, uh wife in hand and two children. That's to me corrosive because it doesn't tell the real story and I won't bore you with the details. I do though love fiction and history or history-based fiction because it really is a great way of getting children and anyone really to think visually about the past and to think in complex conceptual ways without even realizing you're doing that, you know. Um, I'm not sure about Star Wars and World War II. Uh, I have to think about that one, but it's an interesting parallel that you make there. Yeah.

Jonathon Dallimore: 1:07:31

Just to say that uh yeah, so I mean, this comes down to knowing your class. Like I've taught a class where there was a bunch of boys who were right into that kind of fantasy stuff, and you know, you try to use it to your advantage, but the challenge is that you, you know, the time constraint is so so obvious. And the other side to it for me is that as you said, I think, you know, like a lot of these events when you know them really well, like World War II is as dramatic and interesting as Star Wars will ever be, you know. Um, and I think maybe the reason we like Star Wars is because we know about World War II, actually, not the other way around.

Dr Craig Barker: 1:08:04

Uh there was a hand over this, yep, and then you.

Question 2: 1:08:09

Hi, um, really interesting talk, guys. I just had a question. I'm like a very recently graduated uh high school student who did modern history and history extension. And a big thing that was like a really main concern for me coming out of the curriculum really recently was um the lack of incentive to actually research beyond the curriculum. Like after the HSE exams, I had students that never wanted to read about like World War II or the Cold War ever again. They didn't want to look at it because it just gave them like this flashback of writing essays over and over again. So, what's like your comment on is the curriculum like too saturated? Are we making high school students, especially like older high school students, doing too much, maybe?

Jonathon Dallimore: 1:08:51

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if there'll ever be a satisfactory answer to that. Like sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no. It's really tricky. Um, I mean, it I mean, I had the same experience. I gotta be honest. Like, we, you know, when I did the HSC, we did Nazi Germany and everything was Germany. 75% of it was Germany. So when I got to uni, I just did all Russia. Because I was like, I'm done, you know, with that stuff. And it was it was a bit overcooked, you know. Um, so I had the similar experience in the sense that the things that I'd spent all this time on um in school, I kind of wanted to move a bit beyond. Um, and there was also no exam at university, so it felt a little more open in how we actually were able to approach things. Um, and I don't know, I had that reverse experience of um the uh what do you call it, the extraneous, the motivation, the external motivation of the exam seemed to have a negative effect on me. And when they took the exam away, I started to read heaps and do more. You know, I don't know what that was, but it's sort of how it functioned for me. So I I kind of had that experience in that sense. But yeah, look, I think the the curriculum is demanding, there's no doubt about that. Um, there's upsides to that too, in the sense that I think history in the senior years, maybe I have no evidence for this, so this is a total hunch. But one of the things that might be helping keep history a little bit buoyant is that it has a reputation as a strong subject that's solid. It's negative too, because if you you don't like reading and that sort of stuff, it it obviously is a really chat a big challenge. But I think we maybe we're getting a lot of um a bit more academic of the academic students taking modern history, for example, now. I don't know. Um, and more of them are doing that than say that used to do something like economics, because the numbers of economic students has declined rapidly over the you know the last few years. So it might actually be playing out in a in a positive way that we can't really see yet. I don't know. That's a tricky one to answer. It's it's a really it feels like alchemy sometimes curriculum, doesn't it? Because you're like you're calibrating things and then sort of like not knowing exactly how it works, and then it just seems to do its thing, right? Yeah, it's hard.

Professor Tim Allender: 1:10:55

Thank you, Jonathan, and what a great question. Um I think one of the most precious parts of history in New South Wales is history extension, because it gives students uh an entree into what university history looks like, but even more than that, what an honest thesis might look like. Um it's that special. The idea of what I'm what's my question? How am I going to research it? How do I know that I found you know new stuff basically? Marvel's for teachers, because they're usually small classes and there's a tutoring, mentoring thing that's much stronger. Um, but the the structure behind extension history in a much simpler form, I've seen in Bengali schools for little children asking the same questions, you know. What am I what's my question? How am I going to find out about it? And how will I know I've found out about it? You know. Um it's incredible when you look at some of the projects. Um, there was one a few years ago that topped the state, and it was looking at magazines about Jackie O, Jackie O Nassus. And of course, you know, there's a lot of mentoring involved in that. You can't look at all the magazines because you want to run out of time, you want to snapshot it and all the rest of it. And the question, which was formed after the research was sort of done, and you can see this sort of thing developing, was did Jackie O really exist? And they're looking at the different angles of the magazines over three periods. And the clever conclusion was, no, she didn't. And that's a really postmodern highbrow theoretical conclusion to come to without the student necessarily not knowing that, you know, and it it has magic like that, and we're so lucky to have it. And whenever revisions of the curriculum happen in New South Wales, the first thing I look at is are they keeping extension history? Because it is, as Jonathan was saying, it's a very important anchor for history uh claiming its academic credentials.

Question 3: 1:13:04

Yeah.

Question 4: 1:13:10

Hey, um, I am a curriculum lead at an educational publishing company, so have a lot of um similar experiences kind of trying to navigate those curriculums and understand what they mean. Um I'm interested in that history, the new history syllabus that you showed just on screen before. Like, what are some of the um things that you're really excited about with that new curriculum that's coming into implementation soon and things that you're nervous about, things you're concerned about?

Jonathon Dallimore: 1:13:36

Um, great question. I mean, I think there's lots to be excited about. There's a lot of continuity in it. I mean, you know, the the thing that Tim was mentioning before about the skills and concepts, they're sort of familiar to us now. I think we can kind of carry those forward. Um, there's lots of topics that we know are generally popular, you know, going even back to Anna Clark's research about, you know, Australians at war tends to be one of the most popular topics when any research is done on student attitudes. That's not universal, but it seems to be the case that they get into that a bit more than some other things. And that's there in an interesting way. Um the fact that there's, you know, opportunities for schools to select their own topics is in the syllabus as well, still. That was sort of you know defended by history teachers pretty hard because we know that lots of schools like that freedom to design their own topic that sort of fits the students at their school a bit more. Um, so all of those things are really good. Um Nervous, I think the point about uh I've just been working on a collection of resort resources for the um, you know, the Australian Wars film uh that by Rachel Perkins, and and that stuff for year eight is making me nervous because it's I mean, it's in it's incredibly important and powerful content, but you know, I'm reading like 400 page books on it that like excite me. And then I think how do I turn that into something for you 13-year-olds who don't like reading necessarily and don't like history necessarily, and their parents at home are saying, don't worry about history, that's not an important subject, because that happens. Like, I don't really know what to do about that. Um, and I think this goes back to the heart of a lot of the things around history. I think this is not a criticism of the general public saying there's an elite over here, us the history teachers, and everybody else who's ignorant, but it's like anything, you know, it's it's like we are dealing with this on a day-to-day basis. So there's there is institutional knowledge that we do have and is often not listened to, and it's frustrating. But you know, um, in the political debates about a curriculum, they go, we need a dot point on this. And I say, The kid, they're not going to remember it. You can put it in there if you want. And I'll teach that in eight minutes because it's deadly boring and they're 13. I'll I'll teach that in eight minutes and I'll move on to this other bit that will actually do something with 13-year-olds. So, you know, the I think the particularly politicians, let's just do that. Um, politicians think that if we get that in, it'll translate into this whole generation coming out the other side with a complete knowledge of that thing. It just doesn't happen. Um, so I I kind of sometimes in these debates, you're like, go for it, and I'll fix it on the other side, you know. Um, so that's a ch I think that's gonna be a challenge, definitely. And I think my last point, overall, I think the curriculum is still really dense. There's a lot of stuff in it. And for all the talk about decluttering the curriculum, they just didn't do it. So let's be honest.

Professor Tim Allender: 1:16:25

Um, I'm gonna be a bit flippant just to finish up on. I I'm quite excited about Donald Trump because so much rich discourse is coming out of that for school kids to decode and to use the discipline to really understand what's going on there. You know, you're entitled to your opinions, but you're not entitled to alternative facts would be a starting point. Kids love dynamic like that in you know, in active history classes and where there's there's a really vibrant, hopefully, discussion and debate about issues as such. You've got to be careful, of course, because not everyone, let's face it, will share my views on any of that, probably. But um there's dynamic coming from the modern world that really is going to it makes history so much more vital if the teacher, the agency of the teacher, the professionalism of the teacher in the classroom as a trained history teacher is protected. And that's the caution that I think Jonathan really nicely brought out earlier in his talk today. We've got to we've got to watch this, you know. It's not a given that history is going to stay in the curriculum as a dominant subject area. So um that's that's the worry part, yeah.

Dr Craig Barker: 1:17:48

Well, regrettably, we're out of time. And I think um I certainly have a lot more questions, but um, I'd uh just like to uh thank everyone for coming out tonight on the the cold, wet uh evening. Um we hope we thank you for your supportive history now. We hope you can join us for future events. There'll be promotions for the August uh events very, very soon. But sneak peek on the 27th of August, our colleagues in the uh Department of History here at the University of Sydney will be hosting a panel on creative history making, which will be one of the History Now series events as well. So I hope you can join us for that one and the other talks. A big thank you to the wonderful team from the History Council of New South Wales, and thank you, Jesse. But can I ask everyone? Can I ask everyone to please put your hands together for Tim Allender and Jonathan Delymore?

Catherine Shirley: 1:18:42

Thank you for joining us for this podcast. If you'd like to hear more, subscribe to our series via your favourite streaming platform and join us for our next History Now episode, the 2025 Wood Memorial Lecture in History, Creative Histories a Conversation. For a full list of History Council cultural partners, along with a list of other podcasts produced by us, please visit our website, History Councilnsw.org.au forward slash podcasts. I'm Catherine Shirley, thank you.