Arts and Humanities in

Higher Education
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The Internationalization of History Teaching through the Scholarship of

Teaching and Learning Creating institutions to unite the efforts of a
discipline
David Pace
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 2007; 6; 329
DOI: 10.1177/1474022207080852
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://ahh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/3/329

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A&H
The Internationalization of History
Teaching through the Scholarship of
Teaching and Learning
Creating institutions to unite the efforts
of a discipline
dav i d pac e
Indiana University, USA
a b s t rac t
Over the past decade historians and educational researchers in the UK, Australia,
the USA and Canada have been devoting ever increasing energy to the systematic
exploration of the learning of history at the college level. Now members of the
discipline have come together to nurture and to disseminate this new scholarship
of teaching and learning history. They have created an international society, a
website, and an electronic newsletter that should be of interest to those in other
disciplines who are concerned with bringing some of the rigor they honor in
traditional research to the problems they face in the classroom.

keyword s

disciplines, history, pedagogy, SoTL, teaching

Th r o u g h t h e 19 9 0 s the teaching of history, like that of most other disciplines, remained primarily a cottage industry, learned by example and practiced
in isolation. Academic historians generally knew nothing about the teaching
of their colleagues in the next office, to say nothing of that of their counterparts in other nations. The entire endeavor was seen as a practical matter, in
which knowledge of the historical period under consideration constituted the
only theory and personal charisma the primary qualification. New instructors
began their careers with little or no access to the creative responses to the challenges of teaching history developed by their predecessors and no easy means
Arts & Humanities in Higher Education
Copyright 20 07, sage publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore ISSN 1474-0222
vol 6(3) 329335 doi: 10.1177/147402220708 0852

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Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 6(3)

for coming to understand the complex processes involved in the learning of
history.
There are abundant signs that this situation has begun to change. For many
historians teaching is no longer a solitary virtue. Publications in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) now allow them to participate in the
construction of a shared understanding of the pedagogy of history and to
bring some of the systematic rigor, assumed in traditional research, to the
realm of teaching. A new international society, website, and electronic
newsletter are making this literature available to current and future history
professors and are supporting the work of those who wish to contribute to
it. In the process, new possibilities have emerged for thinking about the
process of teaching history and its role in higher education that will be of
interest to those in other disciplines as well.
The term increasingly used to describe this kind of activity the scholarship of teaching and learning has its roots in Scholarship Reconsidered:
Priorities of the Professoriate, a work published in the USA in 1990 by Ernest
Boyer and his associates at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Education. But the new concern with pedagogical knowledge has had, from
its inception, a truly international flavor, with work in the field emerging
independently in the 1990s in the UK, Australia, and Canada as well as
the USA.
The foundations for these new concerns in each country were laid in
earlier decades by individual historians who struggled against the prevailing
configurations of academia to generate discipline-specific knowledge about
teaching and learning. But in the 1990s such efforts received new institutional
support. In the UK, government initiatives brought historians together in a
series of endeavors that resulted in the creation of the Subject Centre for
History, Classics, and Archaeology; and the annual History in Higher
Education conferences, run by Paul Hyland and Alan Booth, provided a vital
occasion for creating networks of historians concerned about these issues
(Booth, 2007). Paul Hyland, Alan Booth and Geoff Timmins published
important works that laid the foundations for a systematic exploration of
history instruction in British universities (Booth and Hyland, 1996, 2000;
Booth, 2003, 2004; Timmins et al., 2005). In Australia the creation of the
government supported Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher
Education has made funds available to scholars interested in scholarly activities involving teaching, and some historians, notably Sean Brawley, have begun
systematic exploration of the field (Brawley, 2007). And in Canada the work
of Peter Seixas was making an important contribution to our understanding
of how popular notions of the past shaped the understanding of history
(Seixas, 2004).
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Pace:The Internationalization of History Teaching through SoTL

In the USA, external support for the effort came primarily from private
foundations rather than government. The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) provided cohorts of historians with
a crash course in the emerging field, generated new scholarly networks and
the production of programmatic works calling for the emergence of SoTL
as a major field within the history profession (Calder et al., 2002; Pace, 2004;
Pace, 2007). Concerns about the relationship of scholarship and history
teaching were also stimulated by the development of Preparing Future
Faculty Programs, which redefined the preparation of PhD students to
include instruction in pedagogy (Rayson et al., 1999); by the exploration of
new means of sharing scholarly teaching through the course portfolio
(Appleby, 1997; Cutler, 1998; Kelly, 2001; Bernstein et al., 2006; Burnett,
2007); and by other programs designed to investigate teaching and learning
history, such as the Visible Knowledge Project (2002; Coventry et al., 2006;
Coventry 2007), the Center for History and the New Media at George Mason
University (19962006), and the History Learning Project at Indiana
University. At the same time, the impressive work of Sam Wineburg
(Wineburg, 2001) and other educational researchers was narrowing the gap
between the work done in History Departments and that created in Schools
of Education, and was presenting important insights about the learning of
history in a language that was easily accessible to professional historians.
By its very nature modern scholarship is an inclusive process, whose legitimacy rests in no small part on the linkage of scholars throughout the world
in a common effort to generate knowledge. As thinking about teaching and
learning became increasingly scholarly, it was natural for its practitioners to
think about establishing institutions that would nurture such contacts. Local
networks of historians had already been generated in the UK, USA and
Australia by the initiatives described earlier. The rapid growth of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning from its
inception in 2004 provided encouragement that the time was ripe for
historians to create a new framework within which they could explore issues
specific to their discipline. History caucuses at the ISSOTL meetings in
Bloomington, Indiana in 2004 and Vancouver in 2005 created new links across
national boundaries. It only required a catalyst to realize the potential present
in the situation.
The catalyst appeared in the form of an email sent in the fall of 2005 by
Sean Brawley to a group of historians in the UK, Canada and the USA, calling
for an international society to promote their common work. Existing
networks of contacts brought historians interested in pursuing this possibility
together at the annual History in Higher Education conference at Oxford in
April 2006, and the details for a society were worked out at the ISSOTL
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Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 6(3)

conference in Washington, DC in November 2006. Independently of these
initiatives a group in the History Department at Indiana University was
preparing a proposal for a spring 2006 grant from the universitys Dean of
Faculties Office to fund a website and electronic newsletter that would allow
historians to share their work in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
When the proposal was accepted, the Indiana project was immediately folded
into the newly formed organization, History SoTL: An International Society
for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History. The result is a
loosely defined organization, run by a steering committee and centered
largely around the website and electronic newsletter. Membership is free and
open to historians throughout the world. The organization is applying for
official recognition from ISSOTL, and it will meet in conjunction with the
conferences hosted by that organization and by national historical associations.
If resources are available in the future, it will explore other activities, such as
sponsoring its own conferences or creating awards for exemplary contributions to the field (Timmins, 2007).
The central organizing element in the new organization is its website and
electronic newsletter, which will take full advantage of current technology to
link and nurture scholarly activities in this area. Financial support from the
Indiana University Dean of Faculties Office has allowed the society to hire
Keith Erekson, a talented doctoral student in the universitys History Department, to create both the site and the groups first newsletter (History SoTL,
2007). Under his leadership, with some input from the author of this article
and important technical assistance from George Mason Universitys Mills
Kelly, a multifaceted resource has been created that should facilitate the work
of both researchers interested in contributing to the new field and scholarly
teachers interested in using insights from this scholarship in determining their
teaching strategies (Pace and Erekson, 2006).
Many aspects of the website bring to the scholarship of teaching and
learning forms of assistance that are already available to the practitioners of
traditional historical research. An extensive bibliography, offering readers an
alphabetical listing of books and articles relevant to the field, is supplemented
by chronologically arranged collections of works on particular issues, such as
the relevance of the scholarship of teaching and learning to history, studies
of how students think, read or write within the discipline, materials on
designing history courses, textbooks and the use of media, assessment, and the
impact of race, class and gender on learning history. There are also lists of
relevant conferences, and links to related websites and blogs.
Other aspects of the website are specifically designed to nurture an infant
subdiscipline. There are essays that seek to define the field and to situate it
within larger trends in academia. The site makes available examples of syllabi
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Pace:The Internationalization of History Teaching through SoTL

and program descriptions from universities that include courses on the
scholarship of teaching and learning as part of the training they provide to
future history professors. There are links to the websites of faculty working
in the field who are willing to make presentations, lead workshops, or serve
as external evaluators for journals, publishers, or tenure and promotion
committees. And readers can join the society directly on line. The site takes
advantage of recently developed WordPress software to strengthen the links
between historians working in this field. Readers can submit commentaries
on particular items in the bibliography or respond to the comments of others.
There will be descriptions of on-going research projects and a notes and
queries feature that will allow researchers to find bibliographical leads, to
identify potential collaborators, and to answer other questions about the
scholarship of teaching and learning history.
The website is complemented by an electronic newsletter that will be
distributed several times a year. It will be available free to all members of the
society, and it will keep them abreast of developments in the field and of
additions to the website. It will also contain short articles on items of interest
to practitioners in the field. The first issue, for example, includes descriptions
of the development of the field in the UK, Australia and the USA, and of
the creation of the international society, and short articles on the Peer Review
of Teaching Project and the Visible Knowledge Project. Members of the
society are encouraged to submit pieces for inclusion in future issues, and each
newsletter will be archived on the website.
The initial response to the formation of the International Society for the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History and to the creation of the
website and newsletter has been very encouraging. In the two weeks after
the first announcements went out, more than 225 historians joined the society,
including new members from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Japan,
Sweden, Uganda, the UK, and the USA. It is hoped that the organization will
be able to expand from this base into other countries and to increase its representation, particularly in non-English speaking countries.
The very existence of this activity within the discipline of history suggests
new possibilities for the future of academia that were scarcely imaginable a
decade ago. It offers the possibility of a new legitimation of the investment
of academics in the effort to understand teaching and learning in their disciplines. The kinds of network being established may serve to spark new
research, to reshape the training of future professors, and to develop new
strategies for dealing with the increasing demands faced by faculty in the
classroom.And they may even help span the gaps that exist between secondary
and higher education, and between the work of educational researchers and
that of the rest of academia. Hopefully, the example of history will be of use
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Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 6(3)

to other disciplines involved in this broader endeavor, and their efforts will,
in turn, provide those of us in history with new strategies for making the
scholarship of teaching and learning an integral part of our discipline.
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b i o g ra p h i ca l n o t e
dav i d pac e is a professor of European History at Indiana University, Bloomington, and co-director of the Freshman Learning Project. He is a fellow in the
Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and the Mack
Center for Inquiry on Teaching and Learning, the co-author of Decoding the
Disciplines and Studying for History, and the author of numerous articles on teaching
and learning. He has received the American Historical Associations Eugene Asher
Distinguished Teaching Award and Indiana Universitys Frederic Bachman Lieber
Award in Recognition of Distinguished Teaching. Address: History Department,
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN., 47405, USA. [email: dpace@indiana.edu]

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