Professor Bruce Scates and Ms Alexandra McCosker
Research School of Social Sciences
School of History
Despite the pandemic, Bruce Scates and Alex McCosker delivered a series of teaching tours, carefully calibrating travel to ensure student safety. Local, global and regional in their reach, these tours took students to the places where history happened, grounding their learning in commemorative landscapes and museums, allowing them to build partnerships with key cultural institutions, while fostering collaborative, experiential learning.
Developing experiential learning experiences for History students
‘Historians’, an ANU Emeritus once remarked, ‘must learn the art of time travel’. Bruce and Alexandra see history as an immersive practice. To better understand the past, they walk the ground where history happened, engage with the keepers and markers of memory, and situate themselves in a world at once real and imagined.
The purpose of such teaching is not simply to convey a ‘set’ body of knowledge. Rather, it is to spark intellectual curiosity and foster a lively and supportive community of learning.
The tours Bruce and Alexandra have developed (and daily adapted) affirmed the value of face-to-face teaching and learning at a time when the student experience is increasingly atomised and isolated, nurtured ‘learning in place’ and strengthened ANU’s engagement with cultural institutions in Australia and abroad.
Believing history is far too important to be bound by a classroom, they promote critical interaction with memorial sites, museums, archives and civic landscapes; we offer students the opportunity to learn from an international network of scholars and foster a sense of global citizenship. Affirmative education should be empowering, engaging and inclusive, and time travellers, like effective teachers, must cross new frontiers of knowledge. So they invite their students to take control of the Tardis and chart their own journey across a challenging and ever-changing universe. They encourage them to work together, affirming (as this team application does) that genuinely transformative education is a collaborative enterprise.
These tours – informed by a raft of ANU audio-visual resources – are in keeping with the University’s mission to deliver research-informed learning across both physical and digital spaces. They helped (re)connect students to the world and each other in a time of chaos and crisis.
Scates and McCosker, working with partner museums and archives, carefully tailor their teaching to individual students, including those with special needs. This is an outstanding team who add great value to the teaching and learning in history at the ANU.
Colleague comment
All the knowledge and passion you have has inspired me every step of the way.
Student comment