Anna Clark

What is History Lab Teach?

Do you remember learning Australian history in school? Convicts, explorers and gold every year from Grade 3? Boring huh? 

But Australian history is about more than that! With some decent resources, any teacher can turn their Australian history classroom into a History Lab, where students get to do the nitty gritty of real research, study actual archives, and get down and dirty in historical debates. The History Lab team want to develop teaching and learning materials from their new podcast series to make them accessible and relevant for teachers and students.

History Lab has great stories to tell, but we also want to help teachers introduce students to the process of doing real history – in all its murky, messy complexity.

Here's Tamson Pietsch talking about History Lab:

We have five podcasts in our first season:

Ep 1: (released 30 May) Lindy Chamberlain and the Afterlife of Evidence – What has happened to all the evidence on which Lindy’s trials turned?
Ep 2: (released 13 June) Damages for a broken heart – How did the law get entangled with the failed love lives of working class people?
Ep 3: (released 27 June) When the Titanic sank in the outback – Why is there a memorial to the Titanic in the middle of outback Australia?

Ep 4: (release 11 July) Making of History Lab
Ep 5: (release 25 July) Fishing for answers – Not far from the Sydney Harbour Bridge is Cockle Bay, home to bars and restaurants. But where have all the cockles gone?

We want this series to be more than just a podcast. With a bit of tweaking and resource support, it could be incorporated easily into any classroom to teach historical research and writing skills!

The funds will be used to cover the cost of developing detailed lesson plans and collating supplementary resources for our four 2018 History Lab podcasts. If successful, we’d like to roll this out with all future podcasts as a way of extending impact of this new research platform into our classrooms!

$500  Level 1: Beginners level class resource (suitable for primary schools)

            Research assistant @ $50.00 x 10 hours (2 hours/episode)              

$500  Level 2: Intermediate level class resource (suitable for secondary schools and reading groups/book clubs)
            Research assistant @ $50.00 x 10 hours (2 hours/episode)

$500 Level 3: Advanced level resource (suitable for upper secondary, history extension and beginners undergraduate)
           Research assistant @ $50.00 x 10 hours (2 hours/episode)


Total project request: $1500

Why support us?

Research reveals low levels of historical knowledge among schoolchildren are worrying reminders of young Australians’ apparent lack of interest in their nation’s past. In 1997 a national survey showed that only 18 per cent of those interviewed knew Edmund Barton was Australia’s first prime minister; and in a 2006 report on the state of civics and citizenship only 23 per cent of year 10 students understood the meaning of Australia Day.

It’s unfortunate that boredom and disinterest reign in the history class, rather than actual historical figures and ideas. As Trace, a year 11 student from Brisbane, explained, ‘we just learnt the same thing every year. It wasn’t very interesting.’

What’s needed is new ways to engage students with the past. History Lab Teach is one answer. Drawing on research that shows students don't just want to learn ‘what happened’, but how we DO history, these podcasts promise to turn that class full of bored, uncurious kids into enthusiastic historians by teaching the fun part of history—in all its nuts and bolts and detective dirty work glory.

The (placeholder) UTS credit card number that you need to use for pledges is:

Card number: 4111 1111 1111 1111
Expiry: 12/20
CCV number: 123