When writing about the teaching of history in universities, three contexts become apparent. The first is the enormous diversity and sophistication of historical practice and historical thinking. The second is the existence of Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLO) to standardise history teaching. The third is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning which has provided an international intellectual and practical framework within which to discuss discipline teaching. In this chapter, we position this book within those contexts and introduce its purpose.

This chapter considers the importance of leadership in creating an environment in which history teaching can flourish and evolve. It argues that 'enabling leadership' is a way to support individual and collegial endeavour that reinvigorates professional commitment within the context of the managerial revolution.

This book discusses the discipline standards of History in Australian universities in order to help historians understand the Threshold Learning Outcomes and to assist in their practical application. It is divided into two sections: The first offers a scholarly exploration of contemporary issues in history teaching, while the second section discusses each of the Threshold Learning Outcomes and provides real-world examples of quality pedagogical practice. Although the book focuses on the discipline of history in Australia, other subjects and other countries are facing the same dilemmas. As such, it includes chapters that address the international context and bring an international perspective to the engagement with discipline standards. The innovation and leadership of this scholarly community represents a new stage in the transformation and renewal of history teaching.

History is constantly revised and re-envisioned. How should we teach history to take into account the concerns of our own era? Should history be more than just an interpretation of the past? Should it also be a positive force in the present to create understanding that leads to a better future? This chapter asks whether teaching history comes with added responsibilities, opportunities, difficulties, and challenges if we specifically focus on how we teach the discipline for the contemporary world.

Generally speaking, when studying history, students read for information from a position of perceived ignorance. As teachers, we try to instil in them the need to interrogate secondary sources for argument and primary sources for context. We rarely talk with them about the equally important need to understand their own position as historians and what they, as unique individuals, bring to the history construction process. By introducing students to post-qualitative research practices, it is possible to help them recognise the expansive and dynamic nature of the history discipline, the important shaping role of the historian and the way in which the past and the present are intimately linked in embodied historical experiences.

In the current culture of regulation in higher education and, in turn, the history discipline, it is timely to problematize discipline standards in relation to student agency and creativity. This article argues that through the inclusion of a critical orientation and engaged pedagogy, historians have the opportunity to bring a more agentic dimension to the disciplinary conversation. Discipline standards privilege that arrogant historical moment in the higher education sector when certain skills development and knowledge creation becomes a hegemonic discourse. As a result, there is less emphasis on creativity, agency, and individual opportunities for the demonstration of the historical imagination at work. We need to ensure that the insights gained from teaching and learning practice and research are not lost in the rush to meet discipline standards through compliance.

This article discusses the processes and outcomes of inviting a group of undergraduate students to inhabit and then reflect upon peripheral learning spaces in university through a "publishing with students" exercise during an Undergraduate Research Summer School. The students engaged in conversation, discussion, reflection, and writing around their experiences of growing into the realization that they could become researchers. The emergent collegial dialogues crossed and intertwined traditional pathways and signposts for usual academic progression, reaffirming the value of creating alternative and irregular opportunities where transformative learning can occur.

We never would have imagined a world so changed, such an uncertain and precarious future, nor such a watershed as ‘now’ has become. The responsibility of this time weighs heavily on the academy and the disciplines within it by implication. In this chapter we assert that historians are known to embrace interdisciplinary thinking and critical epistemologies, and to stretch boundaries and are therefore well placed to forge ahead into an uncertain future.

This paper discusses the way in which postmodern emergence was used to assist a group of undergraduate students come to new understandings of research practice as they participated in a reflective component of an Undergraduate Research Summer School. Students were encouraged to 'write the (researcher) self' through a collaborative writing group based on the theoretical and pedagogical work of Somerville. Postmodern emergence highlights three stages of learning; firstly, assigning time for wondering, then a liminal space for becoming and finally an opportunity for generating new knowledge. This article is both the tangible product of this emergence reflective writing process and a recommendation about the capacity of undergraduate students to engage with their own professionalisation and meaning-making.