“Real world” projects; forging links between students and the wider community.

Student-centred learning: students "choose their own adventures" allowing each student to pursue individual interests and to draw upon his or her unique and diverse collection of skills and creative talents acquired over a lifetime, thus accelerating the process of self-actualisation.

Multimodal projects; requiring students to develop and demonstrate not just textual literacy but oral, aural, and visual literacy, as well as the “new literacies” born out of the technological innovations of our rapidly changing modern world.

These are the features of the utopian classrooms I heard some particularly inspiring and passionate lecturers, such as Sue Cass, wax lyrical about a couple of years ago when I suspended my doctoral studies to gain a secondary teaching qualification. The learning environments those lecturers championed were, by all accounts, most conducive to learning (for people of all ages) and potentially nothing short of life changing for students, teachers, and the wider community alike. I was incredibly excited by this pedagogical approach yet, given the limitations placed upon secondary teachers under pressure to work to a syllabus and meet curriculum requirements etc., I was also aware that learning environments boasting all of these features simultaneously were rare. I consider myself very fortunate, therefore, to have witnessed this ideal learning situation firsthand at the tertiary level in History Beyond the Classroom.

Going into my guest lecture spot in Week 6 of the course, Mike had informed me that the students were still feeling daunted by the free reign he had given them. Towards the end of my lecture, I worked myself into a vaguely ecstatic state, as is my wont, and remember saying that this learning opportunity was going to teach them so much about themselves; who they are, what they are capable of, and very likely even reveal to them potential careers they could pursue at a time when they were quite possibly feeling lost and anxious about their career path (if they were anything like I was as an Arts undergraduate). There was a reason I got “carried away” thus. At their age, I knew I could write a good academic essay but, even as recently as three years ago while a doctoral student, I continually referred to myself as “useless to society” and had spent years “selling myself short,” with some fairly dangerous effects on my overall sense of self and psychological well being. Without a course like History Beyond the Classroom in my undergraduate experience to force me to apply my skills in a practical way, I had to come to the realisation on my own and excruciatingly slowly that the only solution was to find a way “to exist outside the university walls.” Belated real world experiences in, for example, secondary teaching, as a marketing intern at Yelp, via my own subsequent initiatives on social media platforms to raise awareness of heritage sites in Sydney and Parramatta, and a voluntary, collaborative Parramatta heritage project with the Dictionary of Sydney all helped me reconnect with the wider community and showed me I had a place in it after all —that I had value. I realised my academic skills were transferrable in a myriad of ways. But those experiences also forced me to draw on more than my ability to research and write a good essay; they made me reactivate creative parts of myself, which had lain dormant because I had erroneously looked upon them as disembodied from rather than integral to my academic self. Not a moment too soon, at 30 years of age, I finally felt all those once disparate parts of myself fusing together to form a cohesive whole being: self-actualisation. It was like magic. And I knew that was exactly what was about to happen to these students; not when they were 30 years old and should have already been established in a career and had complete confidence in themselves. No. It was going to happen right when it needed to for them: NOW. So at the end of my lecture I declared, without a shadow of a doubt in my mind whilst gazing at a sea of disbelieving, stunned, and hopeful faces,

“You’re going to be great.”

Behold, herein, the fulfilment of the prophecy! You will undoubtedly agree, the quality of the work I have had the pleasure and honour of marking and showcasing on this website is, indeed, “great,” to say the very least. These projects are innovative, professional, thought provoking, purposeful, passionate, at times even deeply personal and, having gotten to know a number of these students, I can say the work also captures the individuality of those who have invested so much of themselves throughout this creative process. I got an inkling of how invested the students became when one student, Michael Rees, informed me he planned to go to the Cumberland Psychiatric Hospital before dawn one morning when filming his Female Factory documentary for the Parramatta Female Factory Friends “to capture the sun rising behind Male Ward No. 1”; a glorious sandstone building which dates from the Lunatic Asylum-era of the historically significant but highly endangered Parramatta Female Factory site. In the end, only inclement weather could prevent Michael Rees from fully executing his vision. (See Katya Pesce’s project, a collaboration with the North Parramatta Residents’ Action Group, too, for further reflections on and photographs of this incredible place).

A really great thing about teaching is how reciprocal it is. Not only have I been extremely inspired by the work these students have produced, I have also learnt from them; one pertinent example of that is the fact that Aidan Beiboer’s website for the Scone Civic Theatre motivated me to try out “Jimdo,” a free website-making platform I had never even heard of before. I used it to make this very website as well as a second one that has already helped to raise community awareness of another underappreciated Parramatta heritage site I love and have deep ancestral connections to; the oldest surviving European cemetery in Australia: St John’s. And I’m curious to learn more about the platforms used by the other "Webmasters" featured here; Joshua Favaloro, Victor Yang, and Claire Ogle who created visually stunning, user-friendly websites for their community partners.

Not surprisingly, I got a bit teary-eyed whilst marking the projects and reading the student survey feedback, which is featured on our "Class of 2015" page. It was such a joy to see these students working to their full potential, “giving it their all,” discovering new things about themselves and, alternatively, indulging in long-term interests (see, for example, Darren Nash’s project “A Nobel Place” and Cassandra Watson’s Callan Park Writers Tour; an interdisciplinary project that struck a delicate balance between history and creative writing activities). I also really loved seeing a couple of the students rediscovering their cultural roots (e.g. Steph Beck’s Jaffa Orange and Tom Walker’s The Club). I didn’t just blubber, though; I laughed, too, particularly over podcaster Adelaide Welling’s jammy scones and black hole-esque teenage pimples as well as “Tom Cornforth,” a quintessential old-school-Aussie character captured on film for a documentary about the Canterbury Cup and presented with some editing by Ryan Cropp that displayed genuine comedic flair. But these are just a few of the fantastic projects you’ll see here; I could easily "wax lyrical" about each and every one of them!

I confess to being a tad “stagemotherish” in the best of ways; showing off and gushing about the students’ beautiful work to my colleagues, friends, close family, and all and sundry on my history-dedicated social media accounts. Oft’ I’ve heard myself saying, “We haven’t heard the last of these students...” (Well, my last prophecy was true, no?) So, in the final class when the students repeatedly said in my presence how much they wished they could see all their fellow students’ completed projects and lamented that they hadn’t thought to be “more connected” with each other by swapping emails or following each other on social media, my natural inclination to show off their work and facilitate those connections between the students led to me putting up my hand to make this website.

My vision was a website that would be a celebration of and repository for the students’ work as well as a valuable teaching and learning resource for Mike and History Beyond the Classroom students to come. But it is my hope that even this website will serve a purpose “beyond the classroom” by being an exemplar for educators beyond the Department of History and, indeed, beyond the University of Sydney—secondary and tertiary alike—who will see here glowing, real-life examples of what multimodal, student-centred, community-engaged learning situations produce.

THANK YOU, Mike, for allowing me to be so involved in this wonderful course and thank you to the Class of 2015 for being so warm and receptive to my ideas! Continue to be creative. Keep collaborating with others in the community. Collaborate with each other (you’ve got everyone’s email addresses and an idea of everyone’s interests and talents now, so there is no excuse not to!) Provide a link to your work here in your C.Vs! And, last but not least, “GO ROGUE" when you have to, to make your vision a reality.

— MICHAELA ANN CAMERON