‘I’m not here to learn, I’m here to get a 2.1!’ was screamed at me by a student in my office a few years ago. The student concerned was a finalist who was sitting on the 2.2/2.1 borderline. It was …read more

‘Enriching History Teaching and Learning: Challenges, Possibilities, Practice’ was published last week. It’s a collection of papers from a conference in Sweden on history teaching and learning in higher education that I attended last May. Attending the conference were historians …read more

In one of our film clips a very experienced historian, Maceo Dailey, talks about the history classroom as a ‘sanctuary’ – a safe space. It feels at first glance like a word deeply out of time. In conditions of mass …read more

How do you teach how to teach? This was the question I faced a fortnight ago whentaking part in the Higher Education Academy’s annual New To Teaching event for historians, held at Loughborough University. I spend a lot of my …read more

In this blog Professor Colin Heywood, University of Nottingham, UK, uses the website to reflect on his final-year undergraduate ‘Special Subject’ teaching. Having listened appreciatively to the various contributions on the ‘Historians on Teaching’ website, and especially to the Approaches …read more

Some historians are great advocates of lectures as a mode of teaching; others dislike them. A number of historians we filmed vividly recall memorable lecturers who inspired them with their erudition and/or performance skills. These teachers told compelling stories, put …read more

When we’re postgraduates many of us welcome the opportunity to teach. It breaks the isolation of our research and can help us feel part of our department and the community of educators. It helps us to feel we’re making practical …read more

This is what many historians say when asked about the best approaches to teaching the subject:  ‘There is no one way’; ‘First and foremost, variety is best’. Some talk about the advantages of teaching a subject with no overarching theoretical …read more