Tuning history

Since its inception in 2000 as part of the EU Bologna process, the Tuning educational project has spread beyond its initial European confines to become a major point of international discussion about the undergraduate curriculum. It has reached South and North America as well as parts of Asia and Africa and helped connect educators across many cultures and come to influence all the arts and humanities in higher education.

Arguably, Tuning has had a particularly strong influence on history, not least because history was part of the Tuning project from the very beginning both in Europe and in other parts of the world. In other words, history offers a valuable discipline case-study if we want to understand the Tuning process and what its significance is for higher education. After 15 years of Tuning or Tuning-inspired reform work, we now possess explicit public statements of threshold standards across many ‘world regions’ for what history undergraduates should know, understand and be able to do as a result of their studies. These core ‘competences’ have not only generated greater transparency and comparability but also stimulated more student-focused conversation about university history teaching and what it delivers. More broadly, Tuning offers a means to address a key challenge facing history educators everywhere: explaining why the study of the subject matters; what value it has in the contemporary world.

This is not to say that Tuning history has been a smooth process of ‘harmonisation’. To the casual observer the lists of learning outcomes might appear unproblematic: a compendium of statements of student attainment in the discipline. However, in the articles in this volume, we see behind the standard lists of subject-specific and generic competences to a messier picture of standards formation and implementation. Though there is considerable overlap in the core competencies identified, it is plain that there have been in all cases protracted discussions that have never been entirely straightforward. The Tuning discussions have in all ‘regions’ been shaped by strong national and institutional traditions of higher education and curriculum formation. As Nováky (2015) has pointed out, there is no single Tuning history but rather regional variations of it.

Tuning in history is a compromise and differences have been apparent not only in national and institutional responses but also within the discipline itself. It is clear that those historians most closely involved in Tuning history have had to contend with a discipline containing multiple voices. This was also apparent in the UK’s analogous efforts in the late 1990s to establish clear learning outcomes in the introduction of its History Benchmark Statement for undergraduate programmes in 2000, now twice revised (Booth, 2010). In Australia, historians faced similar difficult choices, in the end formulating discipline standards influenced by yet outside of Tuning which reflected both the diversity and commonality of practice in their national discipline community (Brawley et al., 2011). In all efforts to establish discipline-wide standards, there have been disagreements, resistances and the (eventual) forging of consensus.

The articles in this special issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education offer glimpses of fundamental concerns about discipline and professional values and reveal differences of opinion regarding the role (the ethics) of history education in preparing students for employment; the language of competences and skills; government motives; the dangers of standardisation; about the whole thrust of contemporary higher education. They bring to light the politics of curriculum formation as much as the ability of historians to forge consensus.

Three articles tell of the Tuning history process in a specific region or country: McInerney in the United States, Velázquez in Latin America, and Lamboley in France. Interestingly, their stories differ from each-other in important respects and indicate that different academic communities have handled Tuning in very different ways. Still there are striking similarities and suggestions that Tuning has made a real difference. The fourth article, by Belanger, provides a practical classroom-level case-study of implementing a key competence through a research paper assignment to advance students’ historical thinking skills. In addition to the four empirical articles, three shorter, reflective pieces have been added. Two of these, by Isaacs and Nováky, represent the views of historians who have been deeply involved in Tuning in more than one part of the world, whereas the third (Pace) represents an outside view from the history SoTL community.

For some, the Tuning process does not go far enough: it does not consider the history curriculum broadly enough as including the whole learning environment (content, teaching strategies and assessment as well as learning outcomes) and so misses the constructive alignment of all these elements that is necessary for a truly effective history education. It does not address with any clarity how we might transform history education in the light of new or changing needs: align it with the (changing) needs of employment, of the information age, of the future/of how we can enable our students to thrive in the world. Its focus is on the present not on the future nor on innovation. It lacks ambition and imagination. Yet for others it smacks of a dangerous threat to traditional values, to the autonomy of practitioners and history departments, and suggests subservience to an unconvincing language of neo-liberalism. And so in the practical terms of implementation, looking across these contributions, it becomes evident that in many countries, there remains a good deal to do if Tuning is to gain acceptance and traction among those teaching in history departments and the lists of outcomes are to be more than statements of what is supposed to happen for public consumption or the attention of auditors.

Whether we agree or disagree with the lists of competencies produced, the discussions and consultations among historians across the globe have focused attention more acutely upon what history students should know and be able to do – core questions in the formation of any effective history curriculum. The Tuning process raises the bar in discussions about the construction of the history curriculum, an area of history pedagogy that has traditionally been somewhat neglected and taken for granted. Tuning is encouraging serious dialogue about history education and provides a more intentional framework for designing a history curriculum that provokes debate. We hope, however, that such conversation within the discipline will go further. We hope it will take into account how the outcomes identified can best be delivered in each individual context: how students might best be taught these competences; how the history curriculum as a whole can be more effectively aligned; how it should prepare students to thrive in the contemporary world; and how we can better train our history educators. These are big questions and, as David Pace points out, there needs to be greater interaction and closer collaboration between ‘Tuners’ and those involved in the scholarship of teaching and learning in history if they are to be answered in a satisfactory scholarly manner.

In sum, whilst there remain many challenges, the Tuning process provides not only a reference point on learning outcomes but also a platform for rich and broad-ranging discussion about the present and future direction of the university history curriculum in a global context. If historians can rise to this, Tuning will have proved to be of major long-term significance and benefit to efforts to enhance thinking and practice in the teaching and learning of history.