- Title
- Teaching history as historiography: engaging narrative diversity in the curriculum
- Creator
- Parkes, Robert J.
- Relation
- IJHLTR: International Journal of Historical Learning Teaching and Research Vol. 8, Issue 2, p. 118-132
- Relation
- http://www.history.org.uk/resources/primary_resource_2593.html
- Publisher
- The Historical Association
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2009
- Description
- During the decade of the Howard conservative government in Australia, history curriculum became positioned as a vehicle for social cohesion and cultural reproduction. Rejecting the ‘postmodern’ and ‘relativist’ history curriculum reforms of the early 1990s, the conservatives proclaimed that Australia’s past had been rewritten during the decade prior to their own government in the service of a partisan political cause. Regularly collapsing important distinctions between multiculturalism, political correctness, and postmodernism, these conservative politicians and their allied social commentators read all forms of contemporary social theory as ideologically-loaded, while their own historical narratives are proposed as ‘common-sense’. In this paper, drawing upon recent work in historiography, I rethink the ‘problem’ of narrative diversity in the curriculum. Proposing a historiographic approach to the teaching of history, I argue that relativism is not the inevitable conclusion of teaching rival historical narratives. Rather, I argue that through teaching history as historiography, a space is opened within the curriculum for a ‘critical pluralism’ that pedagogically engages with narrative diversity.
- Subject
- Australian history; constructivism; master narrative; new history; pluralism; political correctness; postmodernism; relativism; representation; social history; whiteness; women’s history; curriculum reform; deconstruction; historiography; history curriculum; history from below; multiculturalism; narrative; narrative—grand
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/807052
- Identifier
- uon:7284
- Identifier
- ISSN:1472-9466
- Language
- eng
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