There can be a  significant disconnect between how we teach History and  what we understand as good historical practice as evident in the work of historians. We often teach History in the tertiary classroom as a collection of facts, or perhaps historical stories, or maybe even a series of arguments, issues and interconnected events. This approach suggests history is easily periodised, knowable, and singularly interpreted.  Yet we know that History is what historians write. It is highly individualised, drawn from embodied experience and intuitive and imaginative interpretation. It is not the same as the past nor is it necessarily the same for any given two people.  What we hope to  emphasise  more consciously is how to help history students to recognise and engage with their own ontological positioning.  

Teaching  positioning and knowledge-making processes in tertiary History classrooms promises to raise awareness not only of the role of diversity in the understanding and reading of History, but perhaps more importantly, in the construction and communication of innovative and ground-breaking History as well. As a dynamic discipline, History relies on different perspectives and new approaches to move it forward and to push its boundaries.

This paper examines how the teaching of good History as a challenging, constantly re-worked and revitalised exercise relies on teachers understanding the importance of recognising the impact of diversity in the History discipline. We ask: How might the  introduction of  post-qualitative approaches and new materialism  to the teaching of History provide a diversification of the contemporary tertiary History classroom? Moreover, we explore a number of ways in which diversity can be accessed by students who may struggle with recognising their own ontological positioning and how that might influence, and should influence, how they write History. By considering how to employ a number of post-qualitative  and new materialist strategies in the classroom, we argue that teachers can help students to identify themselves within the History-making process and understand what impact that self-knowledge has on the subjects they explore, the sources they access, the methods they employ, the questions they ask and the conclusions they draw.

Our work is theoretically informed by post-qualitative theories of affect (Taylor & Fullegar, 2022),  and new materialism (Barad, 2012, Fox & Aldred, 2017). Post-qualitative theory offers us ways for thinking differently about data and the traditional conventions of research. It offers a new degree of flexibility and responsiveness to doing research (Adams St Pierre, 2014, p3).  Infusing questions of affect and matter into history allows for new questions  of historical imagination, locatedness and knowledge making. 

Affect and affective entanglements offer an entry point into historical thinking, how historical knowledge can be constructed and can evolve. Affect can be thought of as a type of sensation, or relational and transpersonal  becoming (Taylor & Fullegar, 2022, p.8-9). Affect might be spotted out of the corner of an eye, through a hunch, an uneasy feeling or realisation. It is intensely personal and embodied and may emanate between the corporeal and the material. Using a pedagogical focus on affective flows and entanglements between body and material, we argue there is a wealth of opportunity for new approaches to teaching History. 

New materialism provides alternative  theoretical insights for thinking about history and matter. It speaks to the liveliness of matter. Bennett reminds us that matter has intrinsic vitality, it can be disruptive, affective, effervescent (2010, p. 112). It can be encountered in assemblages or be boundered or isolated. New materialism supports a relational ontology; one that questions how students of history encounter matter, consider the human and nonhuman relations, think about locatedness and the ethics of knowledge making. 

In a practice-based project we explored how this approach to History might work by focusing on ontologically informed process methodologies (Mazzei, 2021). As Mazzei states ‘It is not a method with a script, but is that which emerges as a process methodology’ (2021, p. 198). This approach brings together place based research, walking methodologies, materiality and theoretical immersion. Walking methodologies and immersion in place-based research allows for listening to the rhythm of our researcher bodies (Springgay & Truman, 2019). This focus on embodied ontology allows us to think more deeply about knowledge making by ‘plugging in’ and ‘thinking with’ post-qualitative theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023). We used this onto-practice focused inquiry as an entry point into a place based and new materialist study of European foundling homes as a test case. In doing so we highlighted the fluid positionality of the researcher/learner. Using that subject matter we analysed how the theoretical applications allowed us to position ourselves to engage with the historical content. This generative transdisciplinary practice builds on traditional historical methods by bringing to light the intriguing affective entanglements, the vibrancy of matter and the importance of the embodied researcher/learner. For the purpose of this presentation, the subject matter of the foundling homes serves as a focus of attention for exploring those theories and methods which, when employed, deliver a different kind of History experience. During our study we concluded that the utilisation of post qualitative techniques opened ourselves fearlessly to the potential of History and it is this level of experience that we wanted to bring to new History teaching. We hope that such a pedagogy would encourage students to develop a greater freedom to explore new ways of doing History, to look more generously on cross disciplinary opportunities and to understand the fundamental, though often unrecognised, importance of positioning for an historian. We hope that the History classroom using this pedagogy will be challenging but also liberating and that such a pedagogy will nurture young historians willing to take risks with the discipline because therein lies the opportunities for innovation.

The intention of this paper is to promote a disciplinary conversation about how we can use post-qualitative methods to move towards a more conscious teaching of positioning within History classrooms so that students are better able to read History in more nuanced ways and to write their own histories in ways that better reflect their own unique contributions to historical practice. If we are successful in encouraging teachers to recognise student diversity and individuality as an asset then we suggest that this better reflects the History profession at its best. This presentation is derived from our edited 2021 volume Teaching History for the Contemporary World and especially chapter 9 ‘Positioning: Making use of post-qualitative research practices’. It is also the basis of a new article intended as a provocation to History teachers to consider a new pedagogy that recognises and includes the value of diversity in the experience of History education. History teachers in schools and universities have always placed value in place-based research and the ethical intersections of the body, imagination and feelings (Russell, 2004). Expanding that work by introducing a post-qualitative and new materialist lens allows for a new transdisciplinary diversification in the classroom.

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