The Historiographic Gaze as a Curricular Response to the History Wars (Robert Parkes)

I have always been fascinated by competing histories. When I was twenty I went on a pilgrimage to India. I have always joked since that time that I left home a mystic but returned a skeptic. People have asked me what caused that change of heart. In retrospect one might say that through the experience of India I lost my orientalism. I think what I became most aware of, through the various interactions I had with the people I encountered, was that human beings often hold very different perspectives about aspects of the social world that they then assume, incorrectly, to be universally shared. I would later develop the strong sense that our personal views are to some extent shaped by our own cultures and histories, and that no perspective on the past represents the final word. The topographical map, road map, and weather map may all accurately represent the same place, but none gives the complete picture. This metaphor is my analogue for rival histories and the different historiographic traditions that produce them. It’s why I argue that the appropriate response to narrative diversity is not moral relativism, but a critical pluralism.

For the past two decades Australia has experienced a series of ‘history wars’ over rival interpretations of the national past. Conflicts have varied in duration and intensity. The central debate in the 1990s was over the representation of the colonization of Australia. Revisionist accounts that focused on frontier wars and the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples were considered by conservative politicians to offer a ‘black armband’ or excessively ‘mournful’ view of the nation’s past. In 2006, the Prime Minister called for a ‘root and branch’ renewal of the teaching of Australian history in schools. I’ve argued that his call suggested distrust of narrative diversity, and embodied a desire to ‘return’ to a single grand narrative of the nation.

Much of the educational scholarship that has explored the history wars has concerned itself with whose history should be taught. My scholarship, on the other hand, has attempted to theorize curricular and pedagogical responses to the ‘history wars.’ I am currently co-editing a collected volume with Anna Clark from Australia, and Monika Vinterek and Henrik Åström Elmersjö from Sweden, that will explore different approaches to teaching rival histories, offering curricular and pedagogical responses to history wars around the globe. This follows from my book Interrupting History: Rethinking History Curriculum after “The End of History” (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), which took as its starting point the postmodern proliferation of rival histories and the contemporary incredulity towards grand histories. I argued in that book that what has remained uncontested in the struggle for histories has been the representational practices of ‘history’ itself, and that attending to historical representation opens new possibilities for school History as critical pedagogic practice. I argued that rival histories, or narrative diversity, require the adoption of a ‘historiographic gaze’ in which understanding the methodological approach used to produce a historical narrative is just as important when considering the truth claims the historian has made, as is checking their claims against the available evidence. Underpinning this aspect of my scholarship is the idea that nothing should escape the gaze of the historian, not even themselves.

More recently I have formed the HERMES History Education Research Network with colleagues at the University of Newcastle. Together we share interests in historical representation, historical consciousness, historical cultures and history education, and have recently started publishing an open access online journal called Historical Encounters. Many notable scholars sit on our editorial board, including many members of THEN/HiER. We have also commenced a program of research that can be summed up as exploring “Who do we think we are?” Adapting the narrative research methodology of Canadian Professor Jocelyn Létourneau, we are currently analysing the narratives produced by 105 pre-service history teachers in response to the directive: “Tell us the history of Australia in your own words.” Preliminary findings suggest that the history wars have strongly influenced the stories that these future history teachers tell, but that they are just as likely to hold patriotic ‘three cheers’ views of Gallipoli, as they are ‘black armband’ views of the colonial past. In 2015 we are joining forces with Paul Zanazanian (McGill University, Canada), Mark Sheehan (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Monika Vinterek (Dalarna University, Sweden), and Robert Thorp (Umeå University, Sweden) to extend this work into an international comparative study. We’ve also received funding for a project that seeks to capture and disseminate the stories young Australians tell about WWI. Their visions will be presented as short documentary videos, filmed and edited on iPhones or iPads, and celebrated at a public screening, scheduled to commemorate the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign in April 2015. We’ll be examining these videos for what they tell us about aspects of young people’s historical consciousness and, like our other projects, how youth navigate competing narratives of the past.