Launched in 2023, the Royal Historical Society’s Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowships support historians in UK Higher Education who wish to introduce new approaches to their teaching. Fellowships may also support those seeking to undertake a short study of an aspect of History teaching.
As the first cohort of Fellows complete its projects, this post highlights selected initiatives and findings from which we hope others will be able to draw in developing their own teaching.
The 2023-24 Fellows explored, among other topics, relationships between contemporary politics and historical study, and the resources and practices required for this; the value of interdisciplinary and collaborative teaching; and the contribution of History teaching for students’ wellbeing.
The call is now open for RHS Teaching Fellowships for 2024-25, with further details in this post if you would wish to apply before the closing date of 2 September 2024.
In 2023 the Society launched a new programme of research funding: the Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowships.
The Fellowships support historians in UK Higher Education who wish to introduce new approaches and initiatives to their teaching—and for which funding, at one of three levels (£500, £1,000 and £1,250 per award), is required to make this possible.
Fellowships also support those seeking to undertake a short study of an aspect of History teaching in UK Higher Education: for example, within a department or more widely. The Fellowships are named after Dame Jinty Nelson FBA, President of the Royal Historical Society between 2001 and 2005.
In 2023-24 the Society awarded funding to the following seven projects.
- Natalya Chernyshova: for her project ‘Bear Hug: Belarus and Ukraine in the Soviet Union’, to translate 20th-century Ukrainian and Belarusian primary source materials for undergraduate teaching.
- Liesbeth Corens and Jenny Bangham: to develop a ‘Histories of Disability Toolkit’.
- David Geiringer: for his project ‘Placing Migrant Histories Centre Stage’.
- Laura Harrison, Martin Simpson, Rose Wallis, Mark Reeves and Ian Brooks: to develop a new History course to support teaching in computing and sustainability.
- Amy King: for her project ‘The F-Word: Understanding. European Fascism Then and Now’.
- Karen Smyth: to develop her ‘Paston Footprints Heritage Trails’.
- David Stack: for his survey and study ‘Promoting Wellbeing Through History Teaching’.
In January 2024, midway through their term, Fellows met together and with Adam Budd, the Society’s Secretary for Education, to discuss progress and share advice on introducing new approaches to their teaching. Now, with the conclusion of their work, our Fellows have reported on developments in their teaching practice, and how their activities and experience may be picked up and applied by others.
Our first set of Teaching Fellows have undertaken projects encompassing a range of approaches and purposes. These include: the creation of resources for teaching (Natalya Chernyshova and Liesbeth Corens & Jenny Bangham); trialling of original formats and teaching practices (Amy King and Karen Smyth) that break free of established lecture / seminar models; working with specialists in other disciplines (David Geiringer, with theatre professionals, on representing migrant histories in theatre and performance; and Laura Harrison et al. with lecturers in computing and the creative industries); and the review and rethinking of the purposes and potential of History teaching and learning (David Stack).
Several projects in 2023-24 have responded to current international political situations. Natalya Chernyshova’s ‘Bear Hug’, for example, has created a collection of Ukrainian and Belarusian primary sources available to English-speaking students. The project has collated, and is having translated into English, a selection of materials that will support the teaching of the histories of Belarus and Ukraine in the Soviet Union.
As Natalya writes in a recent RHS post on her project:
the past two decades especially have seen a great deal of important new research into non-Russian and multi-ethnic Soviet histories as well as lively debates on the nature of the Soviet Union as an empire.
The current war in Ukraine has done much to propel this development further, as it brings home in a brutal fashion the fact that the decolonisation process in the post-Soviet region is still incomplete and bitterly contested: the war is largely the product of the Kremlin’s rejection, three decades later, of the Soviet republics’ ‘decolonising moment’.
To teach effectively from the perspective of the Ukrainian or Belarusian century requires access to a larger corpus of non-Russian primary sources, covering a broader range of historical events. Currently very few of these are available in English. Collation and translation, leading to creation of a set of teaching resources is enabling Natalya to make analysis of primary sources an integral part of her seminar work on the histories of Ukraine and Belarus within the Soviet empire.
As she continues: ‘Once the collection of primary sources has been translated and tested in my module, I will investigate the possibility of placing it in open access for use by teachers and students at other universities and schools. Many, if not most, History departments in the UK offer courses in Russian and Soviet history and could find such a resource useful in bringing new perspectives to their existing modules.’
Amy King’s ‘F-Word’ project, which has developed new forms of student practice, is similarly motivated by contemporary politics: on this occasion, the recent rise of far-right ideologies and political discourse in the UK and mainland Europe. As she writes on her time as a Fellow, to be ‘a historian of the Italian far right teaching in the UK, it feels remiss to teach in a way that speaks only to the historic past. More than that, it feels explicitly un-antifascist.’ In response Amy’s teaching, trialled at a workshop supported by her Fellowship, adopts a ‘Then and Now’ methodology.
Designed for second-year students taking a BA in History, my module, ‘The F-Word: Understanding Italian Fascism Then and Now’, is structured around a two-hour ‘then’ class, followed by a one-hour ‘now’ class. We consider a weekly theme (for example: hyper-masculinity; propaganda and truth; race and empire; violence; antisemitism), first considering that theme in the context of historic Italian Fascism before approaching it from a global far-right perspective today.
This structure encourages students to consider how the contemporary far right builds on a tradition established more than 100 years ago, equipping them with the knowledge to identify these trends in the world today.
Concern for, and interest in, students’ emotional health and happiness underlies David Stack’s project to consider the closer integration of wellbeing into the teaching of History. In David’s recent work, this integration takes several forms: the extent of wellbeing provision in UK History departments and their teaching; the promotion of wellbeing through the teaching and learning strategies of historians; the potential of an understanding of the past to affect (positively or negatively) students’ wellbeing; and the historization of the concept of wellbeing itself.
As David argues in an article based on his Fellowship study—forthcoming in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society—historians would do well to allay their doubts over wellbeing. In turn, he sets out ways to ‘teach with wellbeing’ and tp refashion modules to better address routes to enhanced wellbeing via several pathways. These include: encouraging and enabling students to have greater connectedness with historical subjects; learning forms that incorporate physical activity (an approach advocated by another of this year’s Fellows, Karen Smyth with her ‘Paston Footprints’ project); and relating the study of History to current events and experiences (an aim and prompt—albeit concerned with deeply troubling topics—in the work of Natalya Chernyshova and Amy King, and in contemporary practice in David Geiringer’s ‘Placing Migrant Histories Centre Stage’).
It has been a great pleasure to work with this year’s RHS Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellows and to get to know their projects and follow their development.
Innovative, creative and meaningful teaching is at the heart of successful History undergraduate programmes in UK Higher Education. And in their different subject areas and approaches, each our 2023-24 Fellowship projects is furthering the appeal and demonstrating the potential and value of History as a degree choice for current and future students.
Such concerns are central to the work of the Royal Historical Society and I’m delighted our first cohort of Fellows has provided us with examples, and lessons, from which we may draw in developing our own teaching.
After this successful start to the Society’s new Teaching Fellowships programme, we welcome applications for the second cohort of Fellows for 2024-25. If you have a proposal for developing your teaching in ways you think others–teachers and students alike–would benefit, please do submit an application.
Dr Adam Budd, Secretary for Education, Royal Historical Society, and Senior Lecturer in Cultural History, University of Edinburgh
At a time when the Humanities and STEM subjects are often pitted against one another in false dichotomies, it’s refreshing to highlight one last Fellowship project in which these boundaries are exposed and traversed. At the University of the West of England, the project of Laura Harrison and colleagues brought together historians and members of the School of Arts with staff from Computing and Creative Industries.
Participants piloted a new History strand to support and enrich teaching in education for sustainable development in business, computing and information technology courses. The project addressed two key questions: how might a set of seemingly distinctive undergraduate courses—History, Business, Computing and IT—mutually enrich one another; and how might the learning objective of Business, Computing and IT courses be supported by infusing History into the curriculum (and vice versa)?
The UWE project took one compulsory third-year module on the BSc Computer Science degree and one optional final-year module offered on courses in Information Technology, Software Engineering, and Cyber Security and Digital Forensics, and mapped History content to address weekly subjects areas.
This History strand offered weekly content in the form of an additional lecture or 10-15 minute video talks. In this way, historians on the project introduced undergraduates in STEM to historical contexts and practices, as well as historically-informed questions, providing a range of methods, ideas, and approaches that would not otherwise be available without this interdisciplinary approach. Weekly content was designed to encourage students to examine and appreciate issues of, for example, sustainability in computer science and the creative industries—with a focus on how topics under study are both historically and culturally situated.
As Laura comments, the return from this collaborative approach were beneficial to students as well as staff.
For the historians, this collaboration has helped us think more explicitly about how our work addresses sustainable development goals, and the contribution of our discipline for UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). We have thought a lot about how the goals of ESD can be supported by incorporating History—one key next step might be to explore the reverse.
The project has also provided an additional experience of communicating history to a broader audience, and highlighted the importance of encountering and engaging with an industry with different expectations.
Appointing a second cohort of Fellows for 2024-25
The Society now seeks to appoint a second cohort of Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellows for the academic year 2024-25. Fellowships may be used to support a range of initiatives to develop a recipient’s teaching. These may include (but are not limited to):
- travel for UK students and teachers as part of a course;
- attendance at historical sites with students;
- funding to bring external specialists together for the purpose of discussion or training in an aspect of study / communication;
- honoraria for guest speakers, including those working outside UK Higher Education;
- online or print publications / communications to support innovations in historical teaching;
- defined training for historians to support innovation in teaching;
- funding for students to undertake a defined project as part of the course.
Fellowships may equally support a short study relating to History teaching in UK Higher Education, within a department or more widely, and of interest to the wider profession. Approaches may include (but are not limited to):
- study relating to the development of teaching on a particular historical theme, topic, region or chronology; the scope and/or content of teaching in a subject area or UK region; or to student participation: for example, course selection;
- surveys of the profession on subjects relating to History teaching in UK Higher Education;
- promotion of the value of History teaching, and/or identification of high-quality and transferable teaching practices;
- an event to consider and promote aspects of teaching practice;
- initiatives to support History HE teachers at mid or later-career.
Applications are now invited from historians seeking to become a Fellow for 2024-25. Please note applicants must be current Fellows or Members of the Royal Historical Society. Fellowships are available to those:
- at any career stage;
- working in or outside history departments, where the major component of a course is historical (including, for example, the history of ideas or history of science);
- responsible for at least one course at a higher education institution that they would create, redesign or develop, and for which Fellowship funding is required;
- teaching on undergraduate or Masters’ programmes;
- able to undertake the course format, with RHS financial support, no later than 31 July 2025;
- willing to to provide a short report on the success (or otherwise) of the project, in a format that can be appropriated and re-used in the teaching of other historians.
- collaborative and cross disciplinary applications are welcome.
If you would like to apply, please see here for further information on this year’s call and how to submit your application before the closing date of Monday 2 September 2024.
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