Introduction

Ruth Larsen, Alice Marples and Matthew McCormack

In recent years, the eighteenth century has been a notable growth area in historical studies and related disciplines. This has not always been the case. A generation or two ago, its study was rather neglected, as it was sandwiched between two centuries that dominated scholarly attention because of their constitutional and social upheavals. Historians of the period therefore tended to work with scholars from other disciplines under the banner of ‘eighteenth-century studies’. This led to the creation of a rich field that was often interdisciplinary and theoretically informed. The field today is thriving, and scholars working on the eighteenth century engage with very current topics such as colonialism, material culture, emotions, sexualities and ecology, among many others.¹ In particular, there is now more focus on the global aspects of the century, which are essential to understanding the period and its legacies. Given that the eighteenth century is often regarded as a foundational one for the modern world, much of this research has an overt contemporary relevance.

The eighteenth century is now widely taught in university history departments, but it also presents challenges. Students will typically not have encountered it as part of their school curriculum and they may have preconceptions that are off-putting.² The source material can appear longwinded or, in manuscript form, illegible. Much of this source material is now online, so students require digital skills to evaluate it, which they may not already have. The theoretical nature of some of the critical writings can make it challenging to teach, especially at undergraduate level. And undergraduates schooled in a single discipline (such as they typically are in the UK) can find the interdisciplinary nature of this literature difficult to engage with. Academics who work on the period are keen to convey that this is a fascinating and important period to study, but it can be a tough sell. Eighteenth-century modules have to compete for enrolments with fare that is more familiar from school, such as the Tudors or the Nazis in the English ‘A’ Level curriculum in England. In marketised higher education, where the viability of optional modules relies on students picking them, this can dictate whether a topic survives on the curriculum.

This collection of chapters will therefore reflect on how we teach the history of the long eighteenth century, focusing on pedagogical innovation and current developments in the discipline. Sometimes it can be a challenge to innovate in one’s teaching. Once the considerable effort has been expended on creating a new course, the temptation is to roll it out again in successive years, and pressures on academics’ time often prevent us from reflecting on and enhancing our teaching practice. Doing something new and creative can also face institutional obstacles, since university frameworks and quality assurance mechanisms often require teaching and/or assessment to be delivered in a particular way. Such work is highly necessary, however, so this book has two linked objectives. On the one hand, we want to offer a critical exploration of how eighteenth-century history is taught at university, with reference to developments in the field of learning and teaching. On the other, we want to give some practical examples of innovations in the teaching of history, focusing on particular modules and courses where this has been put into practice. This is intended to provide a guide for educators and to offer some exciting ideas to add to their toolkits. In this aim, it is hoped that this volume will be of interest not only to scholars teaching the eighteenth century but also to those who teach the study of the past more generally. As Alan Booth and Paul Hyland argued in their classic collection The Practice of University History Teaching (2000), there is a value to bringing colleagues together ‘to review, research and innovate in history teaching’ since it helps ‘not only to promote the realisation of good practices and their testing under various conditions, but also to ensure that findings are more widely disseminated and embedded in the work of whole departments and the traditions of the discipline’.³

While research on the eighteenth century is a booming area for academic publication, there are relatively few published works that focus on teaching it at university level. Most pedagogical studies focus on literature⁴ and tend to be within the US higher education context.⁵ History at university level has its own distinctive pedagogies and disciplinary characteristics, so it requires dedicated treatment. But here too, relatively little has been published in comparison with the large literature focusing on the teaching of history in secondary education.⁶ In UK higher education, much of this activity has been under the auspices of the Higher Education Academy and History UK, formerly the History at University Defence Group. This body was instrumental in the development of the subject benchmark for history in 2000, alongside other university disciplines. The history subject benchmark outlined the typical features of a history degree and the skills a student should cultivate while studying it. With periodic updates, the benchmark remains current to this day.

The current benchmark statement lists seventeen ‘generic skills’ that a student should have on completing a history degree.⁷ Most of these are common to other subjects too, although this particular combination is characteristic of history. Much of the political discourse around history in British higher education concerns skills. This is also the case in other national academes such as Australia, although in the US there is more of an emphasis on maintaining a healthy democracy. Non-vocational subjects like the humanities are under pressure to demonstrate that they teach ‘transferable skills’ that prepare students for employment, countering charges that they are ‘low value’ in economic terms. John Tosh argues that it would be more effective to argue that disciplines like history teach skills ‘whose value lies precisely in the fact that they are not generic, while still being relevant and useful’.⁸

This raises the question of how far history is a distinctive discipline, and the extent to which it has things in common with its disciplinary neighbours. History acquired a strong self-identity as a discipline relatively late: it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that it became institutionalised as a university subject, with its own epistemology and way of operating. In the eighteenth century, the people who wrote ‘histories’ would not necessarily have seen themselves as historians. They tended to be men of letters (and some notable women) who were recognised for their contributions to other fields, such as literature or philosophy. History was an imaginative activity and was regarded as a branch of the arts, rather than the science that it would try to become in the following century. This is arguably closer to the situation today, where cultural history is the dominant mode within the discipline. History has always been a magpie discipline, so the interdisciplinary world of eighteenth-century studies is a comfortable home for historians, and a good reflection of the century they study. Indeed, cultural history is fast becoming the dominant mode within eighteenth-century studies itself – which only a decade ago was dominated by literary studies – and has become the meeting place for other subjects across the arts and humanities.⁹

On the other hand, history does have distinctive features as a discipline. As well as listing generic skills, the history benchmark statement does a good job of outlining the cluster of attributes associated with studying the subject. For example, it argues that on completing a history degree, a graduate should be able to:

• understand the problems inherent in the historical record itself
• appreciate complexity and diversity of situations, events and mentalities in the past and, by extension, present
• understand how people have existed, acted and thought in the always-different context of the past
• marshal an argument in pursuit of meaningful questions about the past and, by implication, the present and future.¹⁰

Thinking about what is distinctive about historical study is instructive, not least because many of the assumptions students have about their identity as ‘historians’ can be problematic. Some of these are inherited from their experience at school, which is much more focused on gathering ‘facts’ and deploying them for assessment. One of the challenges of teaching first-year undergraduates is getting them to move beyond these assumptions, which can be deeply held. Students often dismiss ‘bias’ in primary sources, whereas perspective can be their most important feature. Students often assume that they should reject presentism, whereas historical writing is inevitably informed by the circumstances of its writing, and should arguably be activist. And students often seek to demonstrate empathy, which can be valuable but also tends to highlight the sameness of the past rather than its radical differences.

Fundamentally, it is important that students are aware of the nature of the discipline they are studying. History – as it is practised in twenty-first-century universities – is not a natural thing to do, and is the product of centuries of development and debate. Arguably students studying joint honours have a more critical perspective on this than their single-honours colleagues in the English higher education system, since they have to step outside of that way of studying to engage with their other subjects. History degrees typically have a component that covers the history and philosophy of the discipline, but students are less confident talking about methodology than in other disciplines where it is more explicit: indeed, historians often self-identify as having a ‘common-sense’ approach, so students can find it uncomfortable to critique this.¹¹ The eighteenth century often features prominently in these courses, since it was a key phase in the development of the discipline, which in its modern form rests upon Enlightenment forms of knowledge. It is perhaps not surprising that there has also, in recent years, been an increased focus on eighteenth-century research, teaching and learning practices and skills acquisition, both inside and outside universities, across a number of areas.¹²

It is vital to understand this since, as David Pace notes, ‘all academic learning is discipline specific’. Learning takes place within disciplines and ‘a discipline such as history represents a unique epistemological and methodological community’.¹³ Not only should students understand the nature of their discipline but teachers’ efforts to enhance learning should be cognisant of it as well. Pace and his colleagues have argued that it is important to ‘decode’ the disciplines. Tutors should start by identifying ‘bottlenecks’ in a course that prevent students from learning. These often arise from unspoken assumptions about the nature of the discipline, so making these explicit can help students to learn about the discipline they are studying while also removing obstacles to learning. They argue that this process can help with student motivation and fosters deeper understanding.¹⁴ While not necessarily following the ‘decoding the disciplines’ model, the chapters in this collection agree that it is vital for students to understand their discipline, both for its own sake and for the benefit of their wider learning.

It is with this in mind that this volume is structured around three key themes. The first of these is digital; one of the great benefits of studying the eighteenth century is the richness of digital materials that can be used by both researchers and students. The availability of resources such as Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) means that research tasks that previously would have taken many days and miles of travel can be undertaken within a classroom setting. As the chapter by Burrows and Ward shows, however, students need to be guided in using these materials in a way that not only helps them with the immediate project but also enables them to develop transferable skills they can use when working with data in both research and business environments in the workplace. These skills are both qualitative and quantitative. Numeracy skills tend to be neglected in history degree programmes, but they are essential when handling ‘big data’. While sources can easily be retrieved from large datasets and analysed qualitatively, this can lead to cherry-picking, whereas to get a sense of their representativeness and significance it is important to think about them quantitatively as well. Therefore, engaging with digital materials can require students to develop new skills.

Students’ technical skills can also be employed to widen access to archival materials that have been digitised. There are growing numbers of projects looking for volunteers to transcribe archival materials so they can be used by the wider public, such as the ‘Voices through Time: The Story of Care’ programme, which is helping the Coram Foundation to digitise parts of the Foundling Hospital Archive.¹⁵ There is a growing trend for students to undertake research projects commissioned by external organisations, in the form of live briefs, as part of their programme of study. This can include digital projects or producing archival guides for future researchers, reflecting the growing emphasis on ‘authentic assessment’ within higher education curricula.¹⁶ The chapter by Burns and Walton shows how important it is to create a community of researchers among our students, and how this can have a positive impact on the wider network of researchers, as it has done with the Georgian Papers programme. This type of project develops both the subject-specific and transferable skills that are required of graduates in the twenty-first century.

These types of projects became especially important in 2020–21 when, because of restrictions following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a shift towards remote learning. Although history is a popular subject among those providing massive open online courses (MOOCs), within the UK there is very little provision of online BA History programmes.¹⁷ While there has been some pedagogic work on teaching the eighteenth century online, the shift to digital teaching and learning meant a significant change in practice for many academics.¹⁸ This led to a period of swift innovation in teaching and History UK captured some of this best practice in their ‘Pandemic Pedagogy Handbook’.¹⁹ This process has meant that academic staff are now incorporating some of the new approaches to teaching that they developed during this period, so thinking critically about both digital learning and digital skills is important in the development of new provision.

Advances in digital learning and teaching has not meant that there has been an abandonment of the classroom, however. It is important to remember that just because an approach is ‘traditional’ in its delivery style, it does not mean that it cannot be innovative. The vast majority of students’ tutor-led learning, as opposed to independent study, is based within a seminar room or lecture theatre. We therefore need to consider both what and how we teach within these settings. Being ‘student centred’ is a key theme that appears throughout this volume as a whole, and is a particular focus of the second part of the collection on learning in the classroom. A student-centred approach can include engaging the students’ senses, whether using smell, sight or their ability to listen and engage, as discussed in the chapters by Tullett and Larsen. Encouraging active learning can help to move students away from being passive recipients of their education and towards becoming co-creators in their educational journey. The concept of the ‘flipped classroom’ has been fashionable in recent years – whereby students prepare beforehand, apply these insights in class in a supported way, then explore further afterwards – but seminar teaching in the humanities has long employed variations of this model. Larsen’s chapter explores how we as educators can best focus on what happens before, after and during the class.

Active learning can also be an important way of encouraging students to recognise their own responsibilities in the classroom, and outside of it. The theme of citizenship is picked up in the chapter by McCormack, both as a historical topic and as a way of thinking about oneself as a member of a society. This can include discussing complex subjects such as race or engaging in activities, such as singing, which can make students feel a degree of discomfort. As the chapters in this part show, this should not be avoided; rather, strategies should be employed to help students face things they find difficult or awkward. As Cohen has argued, by avoiding the ‘uncomfortable’, scholars can further marginalise historians and ideas that challenge received models of understanding.²⁰ This can be especially important in the discussions relating to the complex histories of the global majority, whose experiences are often ignored or simplified by many traditional narratives of the history of the eighteenth century. Therefore, engaging with the unfamiliar should be a central part of university education, and so providing a space where they can be safely ‘uncomfortable’ is a key consideration when thinking about module and programme design.

One of these uncomfortable but safe places can be the museum. The third theme of this volume is material culture and collections, which considers the ways in which using collections can enable students to develop interdisciplinary methodologies that can help them to explore the past. In recent years there has been a shift towards the ‘material turn’ among historians, and many of those writing about the use of objects in learning and teaching have been eighteenth-century scholars.²¹ As Henry Glassie notes, an artefact-centred approach to the past can help scholars to explore the ‘wordless experience of all people, rich and poor, near or far’.²² Using objects with students can provide an engaging learning experience, and an enjoyably different one if they are accustomed to learning with texts. An encounter with a historical object can take you radically out of the present and provide a sense of connection with the past, which in turn can lead to reflection about what ‘the past’ – and the nature of our ‘connection’ with it – actually is. This again highlights the importance of engaging the senses and the emotions in learning, and of thinking about them historically.

Marples explores how, through the examination of collections, considering both the items and their object biographies, students can reflect on the intellectual, economic and social structures which meant that some things, and not others, came to form part of individual and national museums. The importance of collections for teaching has long been recognised, with many universities forming museums or special collections to support their students’ education in a range of different disciplines.²³ As Kouneni’s chapter considers, thinking about how these collections can be utilised effectively can benefit not only those staff working within institutions that have access to this form of collection but everyone who teaches with objects. Both of these chapters highlight how these collections can also enable students to encounter directly the colonial histories of the eighteenth century, and to think about the associated histories of the institutions and how they are displayed. In this, they speak to broader bodies of critical scholarship and activist practice working to decolonise higher education at every level of operation, highlight and address historical and contemporary links between the histories of education and histories of structural inequality, and advocate for more open dialogues between research, education, creativity and praxis.²⁴ This drive towards decolonised teaching practices exists alongside a strong backlash in the form of an actively hostile journalistic and social media climate that promotes the right-wing notion of a ‘culture war’. Many higher education institutions display extreme operational inconsistency in this context: publicly championing increased diversity when it is advantageous but remaining silent when there is any perceived reputational risk. They also generally fail to address entrenched problems in racist, sexist, ableist and classist hiring and promotional practices, or adequately supporting or protecting those who do the hard, frontline work of improving teaching and research centred on individuals with protected characteristics.

Of course, there are other inequalities in the structures of academic research and teaching. In the UK, despite a proclaimed desire for ‘research-led teaching’, there is a tendency to separate universities into those with ‘Teaching Excellence’ and those with ‘Research Excellence’, according to the governmental frameworks which allocate funding depending on performance. Within departments, too, there can be a large divide between staff who are actively engaged in teaching (often younger scholars who are keen to embed inclusive teaching and service practices but are not necessarily established enough to be able to do so) and those who prioritise funding capture to pursue their own research (often from positions of privileged security with little demand for ‘upskilling’). Other pressures include loss of permanent job status through large-scale departmental closures; difficulties in retaining talent in academic institutions due to precarity and blocked pipelines; and the excessive burdens involved in producing research and teaching materials, whether in addition to doctoral studies or within a particular area of work – for example, the demands often made on scholars of colour for additional research or forms of academic service in support of greater equality, diversity and inclusion, however real or tokenistic that may be. Reflections on teaching innovations can therefore open up further critical examinations of higher education.

The chapters by Marples and Kouneni reflect on the disparities in terms of the types of collections that are available to students at different types of university, since archival and museum collections tend only to be available in older and less accessible institutions. In recent years, though, there has been a growing focus on digital access to collections, which can make objects open to a wider range of learners. This has meant that students can now access objects from home, whether they are from their own institution’s collections or those from museums on the other side of the world.²⁵ However, the importance of sensory engagement with individual objects can be lost when access to them is mediated either through a digital screen or a glass cabinet in a museum setting. Similarly, much early discussion of digitisation among academics and curators centred on the need to preserve and communicate the important material clues for understanding eighteenth-century manuscripts that might otherwise be missed, and this is demonstrated in various ways across different digital archives. This reflects a common theme throughout many of the chapters in this volume that reflexive learning along with gaining a deeper knowledge of the practices of historical research can support students to develop their own understandings of the past.

Throughout the volume, there is a strong focus on student-centred learning, an approach which can be applied to learning beyond modules focused on eighteenth-century history. By encouraging students to engage with their learning, whether it is through objects, in the classroom or digitally, they can be made aware of the endless complexities of the period without being overloaded. In many of these chapters, students are encouraged to think about ‘lived experiences’ – their own and those of the people they come across in the study of history. This means that they are aware of the wide diversity of experiences and peoples in the past, which can help them to ‘foster empathy, and respect for difference’, one of the characteristics associated with history graduates.²⁶ Considering students’ own positionality and processes of learning allows for more responsive teaching. Innovative teaching is often shaped by holistic approaches that meet the students where they are and in terms of their priorities, motivations and personal epistemologies. However, it can also remind them that their ‘place in the world’ is not, and was not, shared by everyone, encouraging them to think about and reflect on the histories and impacts of difference. By giving them the tools to research the past, and to develop their own voices as historians, a history degree can foster the life-long skills that are crucial in a quickly changing world.

As well as being focused on student-centred learning, these chapters also consider the experiences of those teaching the students. All of the chapters share examples of teaching practice, including practical strategies for engaging students, drawn from a range of historians: from early career researchers to senior academics, and including researchers working both within and outside of universities, in the UK and Australia. The chapters demonstrate the value of investing in staff and subjects and embedding connected programmes of learning and development within university departments instead of the current reactive model that often relies on the exploitation of early career scholars on short-term, unstable contracts. In many cases, the examples of practice here seek to overcome or at least mitigate the obstacles created by the increased marketisation of higher education. The diversity of experiences presented here also draw attention to the structures of teaching and learning in the hopes of promoting further conversation and critical examination. The absences also speak volumes. We would have liked to have included a chapter that directly engaged with global histories and/or the histories of race, empire and colonialism, as these are increasingly central to our understandings of the eighteenth century. However, it is pleasing to see how these issues have been explored by a number of the authors in their chapters, showing how they are topics which are increasingly integrated into the teaching of this period.

We therefore hope that this volume encourages readers to consider the positionality of their own practice. Although explicitly focused on teaching the eighteenth century, the ideas presented within these chapters can also be utilised by those teaching other time periods or other related disciplines. While distinctive in its own histories (as all time periods are), there is nothing unique to the age which means that it requires its own exclusive approach. Many of the concerns of the age, such as the mediation of knowledge, constructions of self-identity and the relationship between the individual and the state, can be related to other centuries. Likewise, the focus on digital learning, classroom-based settings and the use of collections can also be applied to a wide range of modules. In bringing these chapters together, we hope to inspire others in developing their own innovative practices.