It was a confronting experience for us all. We asked students to spend at least ten hours with a community or local organisation doing work of use to them, effectively as “background reading.” Then, students were asked to frame a research question that emerged from that experience, and think about experimenting with the format of the presentation of that work.

Some of the major projects grew directly from that initial engagement and work (for example, Sara Golru’s work with the Redfern Legal Centre), and some of them were inspired by it (see Madeleine Fisher’s play, for example).

We all had to feel our way forward slowly, but the students stunned me with their engagement, the diversity of their projects, and their ultimate enthusiasm for the work. They also pushed me to move “beyond the classroom,” joining the “Twittersphere” (@HstyMattersSyd) and starting a blog, History Matters, which I hope will be embraced more generally by the department in years to come.

In total, thirty-eight students made history together with thirty-four different organisations across Sydney and even in regional areas. You can read about some of their extraordinary work and the valuable lessons learned via their own - often humorous and always insightful - blogposts about their experiences here.

There are so many great posts but a couple of my favourites include:

Sarah Simic, “The Shady Origins of our Suburbs.” 

Aidan Beiber, “Useless Histories.” 

Cassie Watson, “Crying in the Archives.” 

Adelaide Welling, “Willoughby Girls 50 Year Reunion." 

While most students took the opportunity to eschew the traditional research essay and embraced public history as the best way to present their work, the origins of the class in our social inclusion efforts has meant, I think, that engagement has been central to what the students have been doing. In turn, this has meant the students are all doing local or community-engaged history as much as they are doing public history. The two do not necessarily always go together, but the students have convinced me that in combination, community-engaged public history makes for a more grounded, meaningful, and accountable approach to the past, one that challenges the hierarchies of academic history in many different ways - and often in ways that I did not foresee happening.

The blog posts written by students throughout this semester testify to the meaningfulness and transformative effect of doing community-engaged public history. This was only reinforced when we asked students how their work this semester has enriched their sense of history, or made them think differently about the place of history in the world.

Students immediately noted that working with “real people” demonstrated how personal history could be, and how important it is to so many different kinds of people. They could also see how many different ways people use history, and just how different those ways could be from “academic history.” Indeed, many students said they understood now in a more tangible way the different roles of history and how it works in practice (and one or two noted that they could now see history as a career – they could finally answer that question “what will you do with a history degree!).

Some of the students working with organisations that didn’t have a specific historical focus also said they felt they were doing important work documenting these organisations and their activities, and that history could be about this history in the making, not just preserving sources or telling stories about the past. One noted how important it was to do this, because she felt that no one else would do so, and it could be lost. And even while it was frustrating at times, and not always historical in nature, students could see how our historical skills could be useful in non-historical settings, and with non-historical organisations.

The students’ work with different kinds of organisations also seemed to democratise their view of history. “History is everywhere,” they declared, and not just where historians (or archivists) say it is. One student noted that his work made him realise that this was a great opportunity to reclassify what constitutes history – to query what we normally value. Working with community groups helps us “decentralise historical importance and what we should consider important.” Additionally, “local history shows us what is important to generations of residents and how important their history is as well.”

Significantly, some students noted that they realised for different individuals and groups, history could be “therapeutic,” and they could see how people used history to “reshape themselves and their world.” One student said her community-engaged work made her feel like the course was helping her to help other people.

In the end, because they saw how seriously others took history, the students said they learned to take it seriously too. Indeed, many noted they had spent far more time on their work for this class than any others they had ever taken, that they “got involved more,” because they saw just how important their work was to other people – that it “mattered.” This was only reinforced as students realised that other students and non-students were interested in what they were doing, both inside and outside the University, and that unusually, they were also keen to talk about what they were doing in their history class! Suddenly, their work was not just about getting a good mark, “going through the motions” of writing an essay, or even developing skills. There was much more at stake, and several students noted that they came to realise that the history they were doing was about much more than themselves.

In the end, I think it was a successful experiment. Michaela Ann Cameron and I were certainly overwhelmed by the quality of the final projects. In over twenty years of teaching, I have never given out such overwhelming high marks. And I have never given out a 100 for an assessment. Yet in this class alone, we gave five 100s!

But see for yourselves: you can sample the major projects here on this website. But they include photo-essays, podcasts, websites, historic recipe books, public presentations, and even a play!

And all of our “stakeholders” seem to agree, especially the students. Click here for a full report of their feedback on the unit of study and my response. And our community-partners have also begun to weigh-in. For their comments, see here.

Once again, many thanks to all who have made this course so interesting to teach, and a success for just about all concerned. This includes our community partners, our guest lecturers, Michaela Ann Cameron for her wonderful feedback and the amazing website and social media push, and Gabrielle Kemmis for her help setting up the blogsite. But especially to the pioneering students who have put so much into it, and made a meaningful – and now measureable – difference in making history beyond the classroom.

Keep an eye on our blogsite for updates about these projects, and feel free to join in the conversation via the comments feature (just click on the title of individual posts and you’ll see a place to add your opinion and suggestions). You can also follow along on our new community Facebook page.

We’re keen to continue making history together. 

— MICHAEL A. McDONNELL

michael.mcdonnell@sydney.edu.au

 @HstyMattersSyd 

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