Although primary source work is a major component of undergraduate history degrees in many countries, the topic of how best to support this work has been relatively unexplored. This article addresses the pedagogical support of primary source work by reviewing relevant literature to identify the challenges undergraduates face in interpreting sources, and examining how in two courses carefully articulated course design and supportive teaching activities assisted students to meet these challenges. This fine-grained examination of the courses is framed within a (...) socio-cultural account of learning. The findings show how a skilful drawing of students into the interpretive/discursive practices of source analysis was associated with an epistemological reframing of historical knowledge and dialogical forms of teaching that helped the students to take forward a dialectical engagement with sources. The benefits of an ‘integrated’ approach to source work that fosters students’ affective and intellectual engagement with historical interpretive practices are highlighted. (shrink)

In the Humanities the notion of scholarship is fundamental to professional identity and prestige. Among historians scholarship is still overwhelmingly identified with research, and research of a particular kind, which has come to dominate ideas of what it means to be a professional historian. The valuing of one aspect of professional practice has diverted attention from pedagogic issues, and relegated teaching and learning to a secondary status within the discipline. This article challenges this prevailing orthodoxy, and explores recent efforts to (...) forge a more flexible conception of disciplinary scholarship that can address and acknowledge teaching and learning in a more serious fashion. It considers and elaborates on the notion of the scholarship of teaching in history, and provides an account of recent developments in practice towards the creation of a disciplinary identity better able to serve the needs of faculty, students and the discipline as a whole in the 21st century. (shrink)