Contexts and challenges

WSU is a large regional/metropolitan university spread across eleven campuses in Richmond, Bankstown, Penrith, Campbelltown and Parramatta.¹ This area, covering half of Sydney’s population, is the motor of New South Wales’s economic growth and home to a socially diverse community, including many recent migrants and traditionally working-class or deprived areas. Uniquely among Australian universities, WSU has a regional focus and mission written into its founding charter. This has given the university a mandate for socially focused research, a stance which contributed to its first-in-world position in the Times Higher Impact Rankings 2022 and again in 2023.²

By enrolments, WSU is Australia’s second largest university, with around 50,000 students who speak almost 200 birth languages. Disproportionately large numbers of WSU students are first-in-family to attend university. In addition, a significant number of BA students are teacher trainees, so the HPT specialism needs to cater for their needs. This includes ensuring accreditation as modern history teachers by the New South Wales Board of Studies, Teaching & Educational Standards and, since 1 January 2017, its replacement, the New South Wales Education Standards Authority.

The HPT specialism arises from the Australian custom of having combined history and politics departments, though by 2014 the programme’s emphasis was on modern history and the history of political thought. At the time that BABB was taught, the HPT major contained four compulsory units, including first-year survey units on ‘Modern European History and Politics’ and ‘Global History’; a second-year thematic unit on the secularisation of political thought; and a third-year unit on ‘Theories and Methods in History’. Nowhere in the HPT major was there a requirement to produce a sustained piece of primary source research. This is standard for Australian BA History programmes, though it has not always been the case. Research opportunities at WSU were reserved for an optional fourth-year honours dissertation. However, by the mid-2010s honours was being phased out in favour of a two-year Master of Research, based on the Bologna model. BABB was designed precisely to fill this gap: to allow students a taste of research and an opportunity to develop transferable, higher-level skills. Motives for this were intellectual, pragmatic and personal.

On an intellectual level, the unit’s instructor Simon was convinced that WSU history graduates, particularly those who intended to pursue a teaching career, needed hands-on experience to understand the generation of historical knowledge. This would also align with official expectations – set out in the Australian History Threshold Learning Outcomes – that history graduates should be able to ‘interpret a wide range of … primary materials’ and ‘examine historical issues by undertaking research according to the methodological and ethical conventions of the discipline’, as well as more explicit statements around primary source-based research in comparable international benchmark statements.³

On a more practical level, the unit aspired to give WSU graduates an edge in a competitive employment market. Higher-level skills associated with historical study are highly valued by employers. These skills include formulating a research question; designing a systematic inquiry; gathering, recording and processing large amounts of information; data analysis; and presentation of findings. Indeed, the local business lobby has since recognised the critical importance and scarcity of humanities-trained graduates.⁴ For these reasons, the BABB unit focused on helping students become aware of and able to articulate the transferable skills they were honing or acquiring. This is an area where the historical profession traditionally has a poor track record. In 2008–9, a survey of 1,445 first- and third-year history students at eleven Australian universities found few students associated historical thinking with skills and primary evidence, but instead emphasised research via books and articles.⁵

Finally, on a personal level BABB would allow the instructor to continue supervising undergraduate research projects. This had been a particularly rewarding aspect of his previous time at the University of Leeds (UK) where undergraduates in single honours history were required to undertake a 12,000-word dissertation, usually aligning it with their two-paper third-year ‘Special Subject’. Having worked intensively with around a dozen third-year dissertation students annually between 2000 and 2012, Simon was excited at the possibilities for developing a scaled-down version for Australian students. It was also hoped such a unit would help recruit students into higher-degree study. As WSU does not offer European languages, prospects for recruiting students via his flagship ‘Enlightenment and [French] Revolution’ unit were poor.

The pedagogical philosophy of BABB was based on research suggesting that students engage better with historical methodology and research skills when ‘embedded in the curriculum’.⁶ This approach involves ‘learning by doing’ rather than attempting to teach skills in a more abstract manner, which many students find harder to understand. BABB included a set of skills podcasts, each recommended for watching at the appropriate week, to offer students targeted support with planning, research, analysis and writing processes (see Table 2.1). This ensured students had asynchronous access to training materials and, it was envisaged, would enable an experimental online-only delivery option. For technical reasons, online-only delivery was abandoned in favour of face-to-face classes (see below), but the podcasts were retained.

Table 2.1: List of research method podcasts

While BABB was therefore designed to allow students to engage with primary source materials, there was a simultaneous effort to expose students to (some of) the impressive digitised historical resources that are now available. Simon believed that an awareness of these resources and capacity to use them effectively were vital skills for both the future historians and history teachers who were undertaking the unit.

This ambition was well suited to the unit’s thematic focus. As Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe observed in 2020, the eighteenth century has been perhaps uniquely well served among historical eras for richness and comprehensiveness of digital materials.⁷ BABB capitalised on this by drawing particularly on three resources available to WSU students: Old Bailey Online and two remarkable research collections published by Gale, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) and the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Burney Collection of Newspapers (henceforth the ‘Burney Collection’).⁸ These sources gave students access to several centuries of records from London’s central criminal court, the majority of books and pamphlets published in Britain or the English-speaking world across the eighteenth century, and a large sample of mostly London newspapers covering 150 years of British history.

It was not compulsory to use these digital resources but almost all students did so, particularly since accessing non-digital materials was impractical. Some students exploited other digital collections, too, including the Reading Experience Database (RED) or, for early Australian connections and newspapers, the Trove repository (a national database of Australiana holding over 6 billion digital objects), as well as holdings in the WSU Library, which aspires to host the best digital collections of any Australian university.⁹ Particularly useful given BABB’s focus on the long eighteenth century were ProQuest’s British Periodicals and Gale’s Nineteenth-Century British Newspapers.¹⁰

Interrogating digitised primary source materials requires specific skill-sets. There is, of course, significant overlap with traditional archival practices (such as critical treatment of sources, ability to synthesise and evaluate information, awareness of preservation processes and discussion of the impact of historical context) but other tasks require quite different competencies. For example, the relevance and scale of results within digital resources depends heavily on effective search techniques, and the comparatively easy access to huge swathes of information changes decisions around scope and sampling. BABB therefore needed to be designed in a way that addressed both types of skills. The development of these research skills – particularly in the context of the previous experience of students upon enrolment in BABB – is addressed in the following sections.

The specific collections featured in BABB – ECCO, the Burney Collection and Old Bailey Online – built on Simon’s extensive experience using them in teaching and research. His Leeds honours dissertation students had been expected to choose topics related to his French Revolution Special Subject, but few felt confident with French-language sources. He therefore guided most students to research topics for which ECCO housed English-language translations of key sources, or to explore British reactions to the Revolution, particularly in the newspaper press via the Burney Collection.

As a specialist press historian, this played to Simon’s strengths.¹¹ In particular, he could advise students how to sample and analyse complex eighteenth-century newspaper sources, and on the application of theoretical models for understanding newspaper materials. For example, some of his Leeds students found Habermas’s conception of the ‘public sphere’ heuristically useful and empowering.¹² Others adapted Herman and Chomsky’s model of filters in Manufacturing Consent to understand what appeared on the printed page, or devised thematic tables and symbological approaches to represent and analyse key themes and trends in a body of texts, drawing on Rolf Reinhardt and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink’s work on the Bastille.¹³ These competencies were employed again in BABB.

Also significant for developing the unit was Simon’s experience of co-developing online research training and support materials at Leeds. These materials took MA and honours students through the various stages of their research process and served as a model and inspiration for the research pods in BABB. Monitoring the resource websites revealed each Leeds cohort, comprising around 220 undergraduates per year, viewed the dissertation support pages over 1,000 times. This proved an important way of supplementing the two hours of one-to-one supervision each student was entitled to receive. External examiners also praised these resources, linking them to discernible improvements in the quality and rigour of both undergraduate and MA dissertations and conference presentations. Several even recommended the Leeds model as best practice to their own institutions. The online training resources may also have contributed to an exponential growth in the Leeds MA history programmes, which grew in a single decade from eleven to sixty enrolments. Nevertheless, the big question remained: could these approaches and materials be adapted effectively to support an Australian undergraduate cohort in a more limited research exercise?

It was clear this adaptation would involve significant challenges. The most obvious was a lack of content knowledge among Australian students, most of whom had not studied British history before. It would thus be necessary to provide them with a crash course on the period at the very moment that they were being asked to choose a research topic. Nor were students likely to come to the unit with the same level of prior historical study that British undergraduates brought to their first experience of sustained research. The Australian education system follows a Scottish model, with students taking a diverse range of subjects at high school and in university humanities degrees. WSU students only need eight papers to complete an HPT major in a twenty-four-paper degree.

Further, what methodology or research skills students might have acquired at university were unevenly spread. The best prepared would have completed the HPT compulsory third-year unit on ‘Theories and Methods in History’, but some had not yet taken it and others were studying the units in parallel. Further, lower-level compulsory units were not built around skills acquisition. Instead, students would have taken a range of specialist historical units, including possible cross-listings from other specialisations, notably International Relations and Asian Studies or Cultural and Social Analysis. Many students also had no experience writing extended essays over 2,000 words or working with historical primary sources. Among those who had, some had only encountered primary sources at high school. However, Higher School Certificate history was not a prerequisite for enrolling in HPT.

Unit design and delivery

Simon was aware of the challenges that his BABB unit would present. During his first year in Australia he therefore consulted widely with colleagues, especially distinguished Australian colonial historian Carol Liston, a foundation member of the HPT team at WSU and an innovative teacher. Together they devised a strategy for supporting students through the research process, to try to ensure no-one was left behind or felt too daunted by the expectations of the unit. Fundamental to these attempts was an assessment philosophy that sought to reward engagement with process, and a week-by-week mapping of activities including face-to-face meetings, online support materials, lectures, tutorials, methods podcasts and assessments. Formal marks would be awarded in the planning stage for a project proposal, in the research phase for a work-in-progress video and during the writing-up stage for preparing source lists, glossaries and appendices, collectively amounting to 50 per cent of their grade. The main text of the extended essay was worth the remaining 50 per cent.

The project proposal was a formulaic planning document. It required students to provide an essay title (approved in advance by the tutor); a short description outlining the topic, its significance and how students would go about the research; a list of three to five questions they intended to ask of their sources; and an annotated list of primary and secondary sources. Detailed instructions were provided in the Unit Learning Guide (Course Outline) and students were provided with a worked example. A detailed assessment grid set out the expectations for each part of the document (see Table 2.2). This tick-box approach proved a double-edged sword. Despite a high level of guidance and support, some students struggled to score points against the rubric. For an exercise that was intended to reward student engagement with academic research processes, some students achieved grades significantly below the pass mark.

Table 2.2: Assessment grid for project proposal exercise

To track student progress, offer variety in assessment and provide preliminary feedback on methods and findings, the second assignment was a work-in-progress video. The aim of this exercise was to show the topic was viable from available primary materials and worthy of study, and to give students feedback on their approaches and ideas. The resultant videos (mostly filmed on mobile phones) were a highlight of the unit and played to local student strengths. Most WSU students are verbally articulate and confident at presenting when compared with British peers. This is partly because of the prevalence of teacher trainees among the WSU student cohort, but also because public speaking has a more central role in Australian schooling. Students also reported the ability to record themselves made this less daunting than a traditional presentation. Recordings were also more equitable, since they could be reviewed more than once.

Finally, to further build student confidence and certainty, source lists, glossaries and appendices could be submitted in advance of the essay and awarded a provisional baseline mark. Students could make improvements to those materials before they submitted their final essay in order to raise their grade. As marks were awarded against relatively objective criteria, students who had engaged effectively with process could approach the essay secure in the knowledge that they would probably pass the unit even if they underachieved in the written component.

Using the activity map, Simon devised a timeline for activities with corresponding reminders (see Table 2.3). This was important because students only had a notional 150 study hours. By way of comparison, Leeds honours dissertation students had a notional 800 hours, comprising 400 hours of study in the ‘Special Subject’ and a further 400 hours to research and write their dissertations. Weekly reminders advised BABB students of impending deadlines, classes and opportunities to meet with him. Generally, the reminders suggested students run activities over several weeks. In the first week they might be told to ‘start’ or ‘plan’ an activity, in the second and third weeks to ‘continue’, and in the fourth week to ‘finish’. This allowed students to track progress against key tasks but also allowed leeway for slippage.

The activity map also helped Simon to plot instalments of the unit’s most distinctive feature: the fable of ‘Lazy Toad and Stressed Bunny’. The protagonists in this allegorical tale are BABB students. Stressed Bunny, like many WSU students, is a hard-working, time-poor single mum who aspires to good grades. Lazy Toad is a carefree, slightly sleazy, chilled-out dude, who believes, in local parlance, that ‘P’s [“Pass” grades] make degrees’. He uses every trick in the book to minimise workload.

Table 2.3: Weekly reminder, week 9

Week by week, Bunny and Toad confront the twin challenges of life and study. They compare notes and tips, highlight the tutor’s key messages and verbally spar as Bunny graciously knocks back Toad’s invitations to chill by his pool. Prominent in their banter, however, are ways for students to work more efficiently, save time and hone research. Pride of place goes to Toad’s triumphal realisation he can get by with sampling newspaper stories on his topic, London coffee-houses. Whereas Bunny sees sampling as a way to maximise the representative chronological coverage of her essay, Toad sees it as a means to cut his workload by 80 per cent. Nevertheless, the results of Toad’s efforts surprise him. His methodological rigour in sampling earns him a distinction, but the thinness of his material prevents him from achieving his first ever high distinction. Thus the fable of Bunny and Toad addressed student anxieties in a light-hearted way, sharing study tips and reinforcing the messaging in the weekly reminders.

A key challenge of the unit was to ensure students got face-to-face supervision time. This had been an issue in the Leeds dissertation model, where, as noted above, staff supervision was rationed. In the context of WSU’s thirteen-week teaching semesters, there was no way to give each student two hours of individual time. However, the structure of teaching at WSU provided useful ways to maximise supervision for students who attended regularly. Australian universities have relatively high drop-out rates from individual units, as students can re-sit or take alternative units. Class attendance is not compulsory, and work, assignments and family considerations, as well as, with increasing frequency, environmental factors (especially bushfires and floods), impact attendance. So, although twenty-five students could theoretically be accommodated in each hour-long tutorial, weekly classes averaged eight to ten students, allowing for more individualised supervision. Students were also encouraged to seek out the instructor during his weekly office hours.

Once they had chosen a topic, students were divided into groups of three to six students organised around their chosen subjects or sources. For example, in 2016, at the Bankstown campus, there were groups on ‘Crime’, ‘Social Life’ and ‘Politics and the Press’. Each group was asked to attend a session each fortnight instead of a weekly class. These sessions combined intensive supervision with peer-to-peer discussion of ideas, challenges, approaches and use of digital resources. Across the unit, students who attended these sessions received greater supervisor assistance, and more peer support, when compared to individual students at Leeds.

Most WSU students had no prior knowledge of British history or the eighteenth century. A well-structured ‘crash course’ was thus essential. It comprised twelve hours of short lecture podcasts grouped into thematic clusters. These were posted online and could be accessed throughout the semester. Students could thus dip into topics that interested them, and if necessary (following Toad’s example) ignore those that looked peripheral to their research. Tying the lecture podcasts together was an overview podcast and a ‘case study’ orientation podcast which sought to relate the material to students’ local knowledge. It focused on a historical figure of local renown, the Reverend Samuel Marsden.

Marsden (1765–1838) was the second Anglican clergyman to arrive in colonial New South Wales.¹⁴ Marsden’s presence is ubiquitous across western Sydney but is also found in Leeds and New Zealand. To pique student curiosity, Simon stressed how Marsden’s life and his own were mostly lived in the same places. Born in Farsley (Leeds), Marsden initially worked in his father’s blacksmith’s shop in Horsforth, where Simon lived from 2006 to 2012.¹⁵ Via a youthful flirtation with Methodism, Marsden attracted attention from Anglican evangelicals, notably William Wilberforce, who paid for him to attend school in Hull and the University of Cambridge (Simon’s hometown), before securing him a position in New South Wales.

In Australia, Marsden is notorious as ‘the flogging parson’ due to his reputation for handing out stiff court sentences to recidivist convicts. Across ‘the Ditch’, he is celebrated for having brought Christianity to Aotearoa-New Zealand. On Christmas Day 1814, he preached the first Christian sermon to Māori. A Christmas carol, Te Harinui, commemorates him and the event. Naturally, Simon sang a few lines and recalled performing it at a carol concert while working at the University of Waikato.

Marsden had a residence at Parramatta, the colony’s one-time seat of government and site of multiple WSU campuses. A major street there carries his name. More than 20 kilometres away, on a 2,000-acre estate, Marsden built a homestead, Mamre House. An arterial road and a local Anglican school are named after it. All three are a short distance from WSU’s Kingswood campus and Simon’s first home in Australia. The charitable trust that runs Mamre House kindly allowed him to film his lecture podcast on Marsden there. Students saw for themselves the pasture where Marsden introduced merino sheep gifted to him by George III to help improve Australian wool yields. Marsden sent his wool back to be milled in Leeds.

Reflecting on Marsden’s life story, Simon was able to link places and stories familiar to WSU students to major themes of British eighteenth-century social, economic, political, cultural and colonial history. The narrative covered religion, crime and justice, agricultural, industrial, and commercial revolutions, imperial expansion, global trade, monarchy, and, via Wilberforce, patronage, the slave trade, abolitionism and party politics. Ideas about race, class and the first peoples of Australia and New Zealand were also interwoven. Finally, the timing of Marsden’s departure from Britain (July 1793) and arrival in Australia (March 1794) provided a jumping-off point to discuss the French Revolutionary Terror, the British patriotic response, and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

The most pressing challenge for students commencing BABB was to identify a research topic by the end of the third week. This was a new exercise for most students. Teaching materials gave them multiple forms of assistance. The Learning Guide included guidance on viable topics and contained a list of five potential thematic areas – consumer goods; fame, celebrity and the media; crime; sports and popular pastimes; and family, sex and marriage – with suggested topics for each. Every content podcast concluded by suggesting four or five potential topics for investigation, and the week 2 research method podcast addressed choosing a topic and preparing a project proposal. With this guidance, almost every student succeeded in submitting a topic for their essay assignment on schedule, or, failing that, a theme, which could then be honed into a topic through consultation with the instructor.

Having chosen a topic, students were supported and their progress monitored by regular small assessments items. The project proposal described above was due in week 6 of the semester; and the work-in-progress video provided an indication of how students were tracking in week 10. Glossary entries were due by week 13, though early submission was encouraged. There were also options for handing in a non-assessed essay plan and to bring bibliographies and appendices for ‘pre-marking’ in face-to-face meetings. The research essay itself was due at the end of week 15 (study week). This model had the disadvantage of imposing a significant number of deadlines but allowed tracking and interventions. Simon’s relatively high research and administration loadings, which allowed him to teach into only one unit per semester, were helpful here. These factors allowed him to concentrate on BABB, facilitating fast feedback turnarounds and support to students.

Outcomes

Despite the time pressure, students came up with innovative topic choices. While some submissions, such as ‘Sport and Leisure in the Georgian Era, 1760–1815’ or ‘Causes of the American War of Independence’, read like undergraduate essay titles and required scaling back and refocusing, others showed ingenuity, imagination and a clear grasp of what might be feasible. The more novel and manageable topics included ‘Marketing of Tobacco’ and a study of ‘Aldersgate General Dispensary and the Politics of Pharmaceuticals’. A significant number of students were inspired to study crime by the availability of Old Bailey Online and newspaper sources, and for some this linked to the convict origins of New South Wales, as in a project on women’s transportation. One particularly imaginative student looked at the treatment and outcomes for Irish defendants at the Old Bailey.

The gender dimensions of crime and punishment were popular choices, with essay topics including ‘Factory Women and Crime’. On the Kingswood campus, there was sufficient interest in gender issues to justify an entire ‘topic group’ of six students working on everything from domestic spaces to Hannah Snell’s cross-dressing or the depiction of vice in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. There were also groups at both Kingswood and Bankstown focused on politics and/or the press, including studies of newspaper coverage of Methodism and of the 1794 Polish rising. Another group looked at ‘reading, culture and intellectual life’, reflecting Simon’s own interest in book history and student engagement with another WSU unit on ‘Cultural History of Books and Reading’. The co-author of this chapter, Rebekah, was one of the students in this group. Here is how she describes the evolution of her project:

I undertook BABB in 2016 in the third year of my BA. At the outset, the unit sounded simultaneously daunting and fascinating. I was eager to engage with historical methodologies, particularly to use primary sources to study a topic of my choosing. The idea that my entire grade rested upon a single project was unfamiliar, and thus intimidating, but the scaffolding outlined by the instructor was reassuring.

Inspired by a content pod[cast] about the novel in the eighteenth century and a tutorial about the Burney Collection, I wanted to research newspaper coverage of books. This turned out to be an apt choice given Simon’s speciality. Through consultation, I eventually decided to explore the initial reception of Jane Austen’s novels. I had read (and enjoyed) the novels but did not want this to be a literary study.

Secondary research, mostly in journal articles and monographs held in the WSU Library, revealed there was little consensus about Austen’s immediate reception. Studies seemed to reach one of three (contradictory) conclusions: that Austen was initially a critic’s novelist; her novels were not subject to critical commentary until the 1900s; or Austen was scarcely known before 1870. It became clear such contradictions had methodological foundations. Traditional reception studies relied on critical reviews (typically written by men), while other studies (often feminist ones) focused on the so-called forgotten voices of predominately female readers. I hypothesised analysis of the digital collections featured in BABB proposed a solution. These collections, I thought, would make it feasible to simultaneously address various types of reception and thus, hopefully, resolve such contradictions.

My project focused on the years 1811–21, so rather than ECCO or the Burney Collection, I relied on other digital collections. After some initial training (involving watching the pre-recorded pods, alongside specialised assistance from the instructor), I was able – without leaving my remote home on the outskirts of western Sydney – to research what had been written about Austen in Britain some 200 years earlier. I located and examined literary reviews (via British periodicals), everyday reader responses (transcribed in RED), newspaper advertisements for the novels (in Nineteenth-Century British Newspapers), and library holdings and print run information (Cardiff University’s ‘British Fiction, 1800–1829’). Using materials across these various collections allowed me to conclude Austen’s novels were well known and well received by both the British press and general public in the first ten years after publication, revising dominant narratives about one of the world’s most famous novelists.

Not all students could be expected to relish the novelty as much as Rebekah. One enduring concern was that, daunted by the challenges, students might drop out of the unit. At WSU, drop-out rates are measured against enrolments on ‘census day’, which is several weeks into the semester. In the mid-2010s, drop-out rates tended to exceed 10 per cent. Rates of 20 per cent, not uncommon, were considered cause for concern.¹⁶ The first time the unit ran, in 2014, one-third of students (n=17) enrolled at census day did not complete the unit. Of these, six did not submit any work and eleven only submitted the early assignments (see Table 2.4). Some of these students may have withdrawn due to their marks, but six were on passing grades when they withdrew. The high attrition rate was probably partly linked to the perceived challenge. As a result, in 2016 Simon focused on explaining what might reasonably be expected for each exercise. To build confidence, he informed students that there had been a near 100 per cent pass rate for students who completed the unit in 2014.¹⁷ This expectation management seems to have had the desired result. In 2016 the drop-out rate more than halved (15 per cent, n=7).

Measured in terms of grades achieved, student outcomes in BABB were similar to those in the instructor’s other third-year unit, ‘Enlightenment and Revolution’, which ran in 2013 and 2015, and had a drop-out rate between those of BABB in 2014 and 2016 (see Table 2.5).¹⁸ This provides the most appropriate comparator because at undergraduate level in Australia there is no systematic double-marking or moderation via external examiners. Instead, internal exam boards keep a watchful eye on grade distributions to ensure general comparability.

At the top of the grade scale, the project provided an opportunity for students to shine: the rate of high distinctions in BABB was double than that in ‘Enlightenment and Revolution’. The rate of distinctions was comparable. The fail rate among completing students was marginally lower in ‘Enlightenment and Revolution’, but not to a statistically significant degree. The main discrepancy in grades was at the pass/credit level. A relatively higher number of students in BABB scored passes and commensurately fewer scored credits, but this seemed to be due to demographic factors.¹⁹ Thus, in terms of grade outcomes, BABB appears to have been no more challenging than comparable units. Further, despite only having 150 hours to learn the subject background and find and research a topic, with due allowance made for scale, the best essays in BABB compared favourably with good first-class honours dissertations at Leeds. This was an extraordinary finding.

Table 2.4: Student enrolments and completion rates

Table 2.5: Grades in ‘Britain in the Age of Botany Bay, 1760–1815’ (BABB) compared with ‘Enlightenment and Revolution’, 2013/15

So what did students think of this experiment? Student evaluation at WSU takes two forms, a questionnaire on teaching and another on the unit. This division can be helpful in drawing distinctions between teaching quality and issues such as workload, administrational issues and teaching spaces. This proved the case with BABB. It should, however, be borne in mind that return rates for the surveys were low due to logistical issues involved in administering them.²⁰ In addition, Student Feedback on Teaching (SFT) results for 2016 never materialised. The results should therefore be treated with caution. They nevertheless remain some of our best evidence available.

The 2014 SFT survey was unusually positive. On a ten-point scale, and across all categories, BABB averaged 0.7 and 1.1 points above the university average.²¹ These categories spanned Learning/Academic Value; Staff Enthusiasm; Organisation/Clarity; Group Interaction; Individual Rapport; Breadth of Coverage; Examinations/Grading; Assignments/Readings; and Overall Rating.

Given this blanket approval, qualitative responses give a clearer guide as to what the students appreciated. Most mentioned instructor enthusiasm, but quality of feedback and the time spent with students were also commended. One student commented: ‘lecture pod[cast]s are full of valuable and precise information. Great feedback on assignments’. The same student praised ‘one-on-one time spent teaching me ways of finding sources and improving my understanding’. More unusually, another student applauded the way BABB prepared them for further study: ‘Teacher is very enthusiastic and this really made the subject great. It was sufficiently challenging for a 3rd level unit and I would recommend it as a prerequisite for honours or any other postgraduate [course].’

The main negative criticism in the SFT pointed to technical problems experienced in the online-only classes. Strange as it sounds after the experience of COVID-19 lockdowns, in 2014 the technology used at WSU for online classes proved unreliable, and even with a technician sitting with the instructor, students experienced issues of access and participation. After one session, the online classes were abandoned as impracticable. The only other suggestion for improvement in the student surveys was ‘demonstrating the ways in which to use the resources within a class’. Thus in 2016 greater efforts were made to target support and offer resource demonstrations in class time.

In contrast, the 2014 Student Feedback on Unit (SFU) surveys identified some issues for attention (see Table 2.6). In particular, two students ‘strongly disagreed’ with the statement that the workload was reasonable. One student clarified they felt the ‘professional academic standards required’ were unrealistic, and another added ‘not everyone has the time or the wits to research, come up with and answer a unique question that they feel meets the marker’s requirements’. However, of the six other respondents, four agreed the workload was ‘reasonable’ and the remaining two were neutral. Thus the majority of students, perhaps surprisingly, did not experience the workload as being out of kilter with other units. This conclusion was reaffirmed two years later when, of eight respondents, four students strongly agreed the workload was reasonable, two disagreed (but not strongly) and two were neutral. These improved results, if statistically meaningful, might reflect the expectation management measures described above and consequent reduction in student anxiety the second time the unit ran.

Across the 2014 SFU, scores for most questions were pulled down by two negative replies.²² This may reflect the responses of two students at a moment when they felt challenged and insecure about the essay. But some answers hinted at identifiable issues, even paradoxical ones. Two students disagreed with the statement: ‘There were clear guidelines for all assessment tasks in this unit’. This perhaps indicates that an abundance of support materials can overwhelm. A member of the 2016 cohort explained: ‘different assessments were slightly confusing even though they were explained several times’. However, the comment may also have resulted from a specific difficulty some students had distinguishing between ‘historic’ and unfamiliar uses when deciding which words to include in their glossary. The glossary instructions were clarified in 2016.

Table 2.6: Student Feedback on Unit returns for ‘Britain in the Age of Botany Bay, 1760–1815’ (BABB) in 2014 and 2016 compared with average returns for Western Sydney University (WSU) and School of Humanities and Communication Arts (SHCA)

The most positive SFU feedback validated the development of support materials. In 2014 no students disagreed with the propositions that ‘The learning resources provided for this unit helped me to engage in learning’ and ‘This unit helped me develop my skills in critical thinking, analysing, problem solving and communicating’. These were the areas into which Simon had put most work and emphasis. Two years later, the SFU recorded improved scores in both these areas, and across the board.²³ In these areas SFU scores now exceeded WSU norms, indicating the unit was achieving its core aims. Moreover, taken as a whole, the SFU scores were at or above the university average for most questions. Aside from the workload question, student ‘disagreement’ – and hence negativity – had disappeared almost entirely. Among those studying in BABB in 2016 was Rebekah, who describes her experience thus:

Upon enrolment, it was immediately evident that this unit would be different to anything I had previously done in my undergraduate studies. BABB called for a new skill-set: selecting a topic; navigating unfamiliar digital collections; analysing primary sources; and writing a long-form essay. This amounted to a steep learning curve. Yet the curve and workload – which originally seemed unattainable in bald terms – were both manageable if you kept up with the schedule set out by the instructor. In my experience, the early weeks were particularly vital: you had to watch the pods and learn what sources were available as quickly as possible in order to select a viable research question. As Toad reflects in the ‘Guide’, being organised from the start was essential. After that, methods pods explained how specific collections might be used to find relevant materials (if any existed at all) as well as how to meaningfully navigate the immensity of various digital resources and how to critically interrogate primary sources such as, for my project, newspapers, letters and diary entries. Having access to the pods throughout the semester meant it was possible to rewatch them as needed.

This general content was supported by specialised assistance from the instructor during ‘topic group’ sessions, including advice for improving searches in the digital collections and analysing primary source materials. We also discussed the use of quantitative analysis in history, including the potential limitations, the effectiveness of sampling techniques and the importance of clearly explaining your methodology.

Challenges aside, the research process was remarkable. I was astonished by the ready availability of primary sources in the digital collections, particularly my capacity to access materials created 200 years ago on the other side of the world. And I was enthralled by the stories that could be told using those sources, particularly by drawing together records from distinct, but related, collections. Ultimately, the unit was the catalyst for me to undertake postgraduate historical research at WSU, first in a Master of Research and currently in a PhD, with the BABB instructor as my primary supervisor. Both projects have incorporated the analysis of book reviews (in this case from the archives of an Australian publisher) and have relied on skills I developed in BABB relating to dual digital-archival methodologies.²⁴

Conclusions

Rebekah’s experience, Simon’s observations and available SFT and SFU evidence all concur that on many levels the BABB experiment was successful. Despite the time pressure and lack of familiarity with background material, historical methods and, in some cases, primary source materials, most students rose to the challenge of conceiving, planning, researching and writing a research essay within the space of a 150-hour unit. In the process, they extended and documented their transferrable skills and, in a few cases, produced studies of near publishable standard. Even the less successful students, by a series of carefully scaffolded exercises building up to the final essay, could demonstrate awareness of basic research skills and an ability to apply them. There were thus benefits to all students in a very mixed-ability teaching environment.

The experiment’s success depended on careful planning, a well-conceived learning and assessment strategy, prior experience in teaching research methodologies, the ready availability of digital resources, and a support strategy that was generous with the instructor’s time. He also found it necessary to review communication strategies around what was expected of students to build their confidence and reduce drop-out rates.

Worries remain that some students found the essay too daunting, perceived or experienced the workload as too high or considered the unit’s demands too incessant. Some found the requirement to choose their own topic challenging, particularly as they were unfamiliar with British history and the period. Equally, student feedback suggests the unit’s success depended heavily on the instructor’s experience, engagement and teaching skills. In other words, personal factors may be important to the success of the pedagogical model described.

These observations point to ways to develop the model. Although a huge amount of thought went into planning the unit, from a student experience point of view an even tighter structure would have been helpful. The research essay could, for example, be further reimagined as a portfolio of assignments, in which students progressively write up research background, methods and findings, as well as appendices and source lists, particularly if topic and source choice were to be constricted. Giving students a more narrowly circumscribed set of topics and a ‘paint-by-numbers’ walkthrough of resources could streamline their experience and help reduce student anxiety. It would also enhance the utility of the ‘topic group’.

Finally, WSU students might benefit from introducing changes to the HPT programme, notably by introducing a compulsory second-year unit addressing methodologies and sources. In combination, these developments point us towards relaunching and rebranding the unit under the more generic umbrella of ‘digital history’. This would open up new opportunities for other WSU colleagues to teach into the unit on topics with which they are familiar across a broader spectrum of time periods, branches of history, digital resources and theoretical/methodological approaches. Equally, the co-authors of this chapter could leverage their own growing familiarity with digital resources for Australian history, notably Trove (particularly the newspaper collections) and the Digital Panopticon project (which brings together Old Bailey Online records with Australian convict archives). If these proposals can be navigated imaginatively, the original vision of a capstone research-focused unit might be achieved without leaving any student behind.

Notes

1. 1  Information on WSU can be found on the university website at www.westernsydney.edu.au. Since 2016 the university has added new vertical campuses in Parramatta, Liverpool and Bankstown.

2. 2  See www.timeshighereducation.com/impactrankings#! (accessed 1 August 2023).

3. 3  Australian Threshold Learning Outcomes in History are laid out in Ian Hay et al., Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Project: Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities – History. Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement (Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council, December 2010). This document offers comparisons to the British Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) History Benchmark Statement, available at www.qaa.ac.uk/quality-code/subject-benchmark-statements/history and the Tuning History-Specific Competencies for Europe and Latin America. For comparative evaluation of the various Tuning History-Specific Competencies, see György Nováky, ‘The Same History for All? Tuning History’ in Enriching History Teaching and Learning: Challenges, Possibilities, Practice – Proceedings of the Linköping Conference on History Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, ed. David Ludvigsson and Alan Booth (Linköping: Linköping University Press, 2015), pp. 101–19.

4. 4  ‘Business Doubts on Jobs after Uni Move,’ The Australian, 2020. This article describes the response of the Australian Industry Group and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry to the Morrison government’s university fees reform. Both expressed concerns about the fee structures and particularly charging premium prices for humanities degrees, a move some commentators saw as an ideologically driven continuation of Australia’s ‘culture wars’.

5. 5  Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Jill Roe, Adele Nye et al. Historical Thinking in Higher Education: An ALTC Discipline-Based Initiative (Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2009).

6. 6  Hannah Barker, Monica McLean and Mark Roseman, ‘Re-Thinking the History Curriculum: Enhancing Students’ Communication and Group-Work Skills’ in The Practice of University History Teaching, ed. Alan Booth and Paul Hyland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 60–69.

7. 7  Simon Burrows and Glenn Roe, ‘Introduction’ in Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Simon Burrows and Glen Roe (Liverpool: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2020), pp. 1–24.

8. 8  For the Old Bailey Online, see www.oldbaileyonline.org (accessed 15 June 2022). ECCO and the Burney Collection are accessed from subscribing libraries’ online catalogues worldwide.

9. 9  See www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/index.html and https://trove.nla.gov.au (both accessed 15 June 2022).

10. 10  These resources are accessed from subscribing libraries’ online catalogues worldwide.

11. 11  For his most sustained treatment of the press, see Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2000).

12. 12  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

13. 13  Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), chapter 1; Rolf Reinhardt and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Tables produced by Reinhardt and Lüsebrink cross-reference date-stamped printed works or addresses with key themes, using page ranges (p. 8) or a range of symbols to depict how themes are portrayed (p. 50).

14. 14  There are a number of studies of Marsden. For a summary outline, see A. T. Yarwood, ‘Marsden, Samuel (1765–1838)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/marsden-samuel-2433 (accessed 17 October 2023).

15. 15  Marsden’s place of birth and his father’s workshop are commemorated by a plaque in Farsley and a discreet brick cross in the ground and notice at the top of Horsforth high street. Marsden is, however, almost entirely unknown in his hometown.

16. 16  Since 2014–16, emphasis on retention has increased at WSU, partly driven by falling enrolments, but especially by the 2020 fee changes mentioned above, which exacerbate the cost of students failing to pass.

17. 17  In 2014, twenty-eight out of twenty-nine students who completed the final essay received clear pass grades and the other was borderline.

18. 18  Twenty-eight out of 131 (21.4 per cent) students enrolled in ‘Enlightenment and Revolution’ on census day did not complete the unit, of whom almost two-thirds handed in at least one piece of work. This was a significantly lower drop-out rate than for BABB in 2014, but higher than in 2016.

19. 19  Specifically, the BABB student cohort in 2016, which was the cause of the discrepancy, drew more of its students from Bankstown campus, which recruits from a relatively socially deprived and ethnically mixed area where English is frequently not the birth language, and other history staff at WSU report students are more likely to find essay writing challenging. ‘Enlightenment and Revolution’ was never taught at Bankstown campus, and BABB was not offered there in 2014.

20. 20  There were only ten responses to the 2014 SFT and eight for the 2014 and 2016 SFUs. In 2016, although the forms were submitted, the results were never returned to the instructor.

21. 21  Aggregate scores for these categories across WSU in 2014 averaged between 7.3 and 7.9.

22. 22  Across the thirteen categories in the 2014 SFU, eight had two negative answers, one had three and one had one. There were no negative responses to the three other questions.

23. 23  Across all thirteen questions in the 2016 SFU, on a five-point scale, BABB scored on average 0.1 points above the university average.

24. 24  Rebekah Ward, ‘Publishing for Children: Angus & Robertson and the Development of Australian Children’s Publishing, 1897–1933’ (Master’s thesis, WSU, 2018), http://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:51862 (accessed 17 October 2023). The doctorate is titled ‘Creatively Curating Culture: Angus & Robertson’s Mass Reviewing Strategy, 1895–1949’.

References

• Barker, Hannah, McLean, Monica and Roseman, Mark, ‘Re-Thinking the History Curriculum: Enhancing Students’ Communication and Group-Work Skills’ in The Practice of University History Teaching, ed. Alan Booth and Paul Hyland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 60–9.
• Burrows, Simon, French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2000).
• Burrows, Simon and Roe, Glenn, ‘Introduction’ in Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. Simon Burrows and Glen Roe (Liverpool: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2020), pp. 1–24.
• ‘Business Doubts on Jobs after Uni Move,’ The Australian, 2020.
• Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
• Hay, Ian et al., Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Project: Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities – History. Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement (Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council, December 2010).
• Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
• Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, Roe, Jill, Nye, Adele et al. Historical Thinking in Higher Education: An ALTC Discipline-Based Initiative (Sydney: Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2009).
• Nováky, György, ‘The Same History for All? Tuning History’ in Enriching History Teaching and Learning: Challenges, Possibilities, Practice – Proceedings of the Linköping Conference on History Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, ed. David Ludvigsson and Alan Booth (Linköping: Linköping University Press, 2015), pp. 101–19.
• Reinhardt, Rolf and Lüsebrink, Hans-Jürgen, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
• Ward, Rebekah, ‘Publishing for Children: Angus & Robertson and the Development of Australian Children’s Publishing, 1897–1933’ (Master’s thesis, WSU, 2018), http://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:51862 (accessed 17 October 2023).
• Yarwood, A. T., ‘Marsden, Samuel (1765–1838)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/marsden-samuel-2433 (accessed 17 October 2023).