In this post, Laura Harrison describes her recent project at the University of the West of England to introduce History content to undergraduate courses in Information, Communications and Technology (ICT).
As Laura notes, historians think long and hard about the benefits of teaching their subject to History undergraduates. But what about the educational experiences of the wider student population; what value might History hold for them?
The UWE project demonstrates the practice and rewards of adopting an interdisciplinary approach, and the common ground between teaching in the Humanities and STEM subjects such as ICT.
Laura, and her project partners, were holders of an RHS Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowship for the academic year 2023-24. These fellowships support the development of new teaching practices in History in Higher Education. Recipients of Fellowships for 2024-25 will be announced this autumn.
As History teachers and researchers, one of the fundamental questions we face is: what do we want our students to gain from the study of History? Most of the students sitting in our classrooms will not become professional historians. However, they—and the communities they live and work in—will be well-served if we can help them to think like historians; developing a sense of critical enquiry and curiosity about the world that may be applied to the past, present and future. This is certainly true when teaching students enrolled in History degree programmes, but what about the educational experiences of the wider student population; what value might History hold for them?
In a new collaboration between historians in the School of Arts and colleagues in the School of Computing and Creative Technologies at the University of the West of England, Bristol (UWE), we have been considering the role that History can play in the teaching of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) for sustainability. What are some of the ways that History and ICT subjects can mutually enrich one another, and how might the goals of History learning and teaching interact with sustainable computing, technology and business education? As the History QAA subject benchmark statement notes:
History prepares students to meet sustainability needs and challenges through its inherent attention to issues of change, continuity and causation; its demand for multi-perspectivity and multi-factorial understanding of events, issues and problems; its appreciation of the relationships between economic, political, cultural, social and environmental factors and systems; its ability to observe processes taking place in more than one place and more than one time; and its acknowledgement that there are rarely simple answers to problems.
Clearly, these are attributes that would be beneficial for computing students learning about ICT for sustainable development.
Over a series of initial discussions, Ian Brooks (Senior Lecturer in Sustainable IT), Laura Harrison (Associate Professor in Modern History), Mark Reeves (Senior Lecturer in History), Martin Simpson (Senior Lecturer in Modern European History) and Rose Wallis (Associate Professor of Social History) considered how and why ICT students might engage with, and benefit from, the expertise of historians and a brief introduction to historical content, methods and approaches to support their existing learning.
This collaboration comes at a time of rapid change and many challenges for History teaching in UK Higher Education, and the team were delighted to be awarded a Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowship from the Royal Historical Society to put this collaboration into practice.
We decided to focus our attention on integrating History into an existing programme of study, and our collaboration concentrated on two modules: Sustainable Business and Computing, a mandatory module for third-year undergraduate students on the BSc Business Computing programme, and Information, Networks and Society, an optional module for third-year undergraduate students on a range of programmes, including Information Technology Management for Business; Information Technology; Software Engineering for Business; Cyber Security and Digital Forensics; and Software Engineering for Business. Both modules make extensive use of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framing of sustainability.
This kind of collaborative work is not always easy for students or staff. Focusing on the incorporation of historical material into an existing programme allowed us to implement the new teaching relatively quickly, and circumvent some of the logistical hurdles—not least student and staff timetabling, workload, and other institutional structures which can work against cross-disciplinary collaboration and co-teaching.
Our purpose was therefore to give (ICT) students an opportunity to interact with historians and History in order to enrich their educational experience, increase their confidence, and support new thinking about their own discipline, and their future lives and careers.
In an educational landscape where students are increasingly focused on assessment, and a wider environment where humanities and STEM subjects are frequently pitted against one another, we wanted the computing students to encounter History in a way that would be useful and relevant to their learning, and their future careers, without placing any additional burdens or unnecessary pressure on them.
We are teaching a generation of students whose educational development has been disrupted, with students who recently graduated finishing their schooling during national lockdowns, and more students than ever before are undertaking paid work necessary to support themselves during the current cost of living crisis. Our purpose was therefore to give students an opportunity to interact with historians and History in order to enrich their educational experience, increase their confidence, and support new thinking about their own discipline, and their future lives and careers.
With these factors in mind, the team collaborated on the design of a History strand to accompany the existing module teaching. Our approach was to ‘map’ weekly content onto each module topic, providing broader historical context to the themes students were studying, and introduce a range of historical methods, ideas, and approaches. One potential limitation of supplementing existing teaching is that there is not much time or space within modules to fully explore historical contexts.
However, our historical material was not about imparting specific disciplinary content, but rather focusing on supporting students to develop creative and critical thinking, and to promote historical engagement and problem-solving, making resonant connections between the past, present, and future. We hoped by engaging with the materials, students would develop their knowledge and understanding of History, and that we could help them to recognise and deconstruct narratives about the past—narratives with which they will undoubtedly come into contact personally and professionally.
We began our teaching with a short introductory session. It was important for the team to introduce the collaboration and our motivations to students at the start of each module, with an opportunity to gauge previous engagement with History, and discuss how relevant students felt History was to their own learning and future plans. This in-person session also let students see History and ICT colleagues interacting, modelling how peers from different disciplines might work together.
Students were asked to consider what makes for a good business … the accompanying ‘history byte’ drew students’ attention to the longer history of corporations, including entanglement with the history of colonialism in South Asia.
Following this opening session, the History strand consisted of 10 to 15-minute videos, and a smaller number of in-class sessions, a ‘history byte’, to accompany the module content delivered by Ian Brooks. Students were asked to engage with each ‘history byte’ before the connected workshop session. This was a relatively light commitment for the students, and something they could do as part of their usual preparation work. We also provided additional readings, primary materials and digital resources for those students interested in digging a little deeper, with a focus on materials that were accessible and manageable, and designed to further illuminate the questions students were considering that week.
For example, during one seminar on the Sustainable Business and Computing module, students were asked to consider what makes for a good business and explore the pressures on businesses to be ‘dirty’. Mark Reeves’ accompanying ‘history byte’ drew students’ attention to the longer history of corporations, including entanglement with the history of colonialism in South Asia. Many students enrolled on the BSc Business Computing programme will work for corporations in their post-graduate careers. Mark’s session was not to simplistically disparage corporations, but to encourage students to think carefully about how their potential employers engage with the wider world and how the products they create may be used and circulated in the global economy.
In ‘Rage Against the Machine’, part of the Information, Networks and Society module, Rose Wallis talked to the students about the impact of automation on labour, exploring current ‘neo-Luddite’ debates about the impact of AI, and the historic Luddite protests of the early nineteenth century. Rose’s session sought to nuance the ways in which the term ‘Luddite’ is understood—not reactionary, ‘anti-tech’ or anti progress, but derived from a movement of sorts that tried to restore and improve working conditions in the face of technological advances that deskilled labour. This session concluded by asking students to reflect on how this historical example might help us consider the wider impacts of technological advances, and who they benefit.
‘The Leader of the Luddites’, May 1812 by Messrs. Walker and Knight, Sweetings Alley, Royal Exchange, public domain
History as a discipline requires informed advocates. The need to communicate exactly how and why History is valuable, to both individuals and communities, has never felt more necessary.
Our small pilot study will, we hope, stimulate further discussion about interdisciplinary teaching in Higher Education, and the role History teaching can play within this. This experience has supported communication between us as historians and colleagues and students in other fields. Now more than ever we need non-historians who recognise and understand the value of History. History degree programmes are currently facing a number of challenges, especially in Post-92 universities like UWE.
As highlighted in a recent statement by the Royal Historical Society, this includes the closure of programmes, colleagues facing voluntary severance and compulsory redundancy, cuts to courses, the end of optionality, and a loss of disciplinary identity with the creation of catch-all humanities programmes and departments. History as a discipline requires informed advocates. The need to communicate exactly how and why History is valuable, to both individuals and communities, has never felt more necessary.
Feedback from UWE students on the Sustainable Business and Computing module demonstrates that the History content helped them to think more carefully about the motivations behind corporate actions, and to consider which companies they would want to work for in future. This suggests History teaching can further support students to develop their confidence and critical thinking skills, alongside a desire and capacity to apply those skills to their future endeavours.
As one student commented:
Incorporating the History content into ICT education helps us as students to gain a better understanding of the past and the skills to navigate the future. Creating links between ICT and History helps us … to understand the impact of technology on historical events and societal changes, and vice versa.
For the project team, this collaboration has also supported each of us as individual teachers. It’s helped us to think more explicitly about how our own research and teaching addresses the SDGs, and provided a different experience of communicating History to a broader audience. It has highlighted the importance of encountering and engaging with a discipline with different expectations, and thinking about shared issues from a range of viewpoints and perspectives. Sustainability is a field where interdisciplinary working is essential and it has been a valuable experience for the team to work together, learning from one another’s expertise and methods. The whole collaboration has been invigorating for us, and, we hope, our students.
So, what next? This was a small, focused project, that was necessarily constrained by practicalities; collaborative teaching is often difficult within traditional university structures. The History content we developed this year will be available for students on future runs of the two modules, but we are also considering how to extend this approach with a deeper collaboration. We are particularly keen to directly involve students from each discipline working together in joint workshops and seminars.
We will continue to reflect on what has been an ongoing learning process for us and for our students, considering the mutual benefits collaboration can bring to colleagues, students and our wider fields.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Harrison is an Associate Professor in Modern History at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
Laura’s work has primarily focused on histories of youth and youth culture in Britain, exploring the intersections of age, gender, class and race. Her first monograph, Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the young working class, and urban space in Britain, c.1870-1939, traces the beginnings of a distinct youth culture in streets and neighbourhoods across Britain. Laura is one of the editors of Doing Working Class History: Research, Heritage and Engagement, due to be published by Routledge in 2024.
Laura—along with her colleagues Ian Brooks, Mark Reeves, Martin Simpson, and Rose Wallis—was a recipient of an RHS Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowship for 2023-24 which supported the development of new teaching practices.
Insights from the 2023-24 Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellows
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 their projects, we ask recipients to report back on their 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.
- NEW DIRECTIONS FOR HISTORY TEACHING: INSIGHTS FROM THE RHS TEACHING FELLOWSHIPS 2023-24
- TOWARDS A CREATIVE ANTIFASCIST PEDAGOGY: ZINE-MAKING IN THE CLASSROOM, by Amy King
- TEACHING SOVIET HISTORY FROM THE BORDERLANDS: A CASE STUDY OF BELARUS AND UKRAINE, by Natalya Chernyshova
HEADER IMAGE: ‘The Leader of the Luddites’, detail, May 1812 by Messrs. Walker and Knight, Sweetings Alley, Royal Exchange, public domain