The yin and yang of Tuning History

Although yinyang thought may prompt us to think of harmony, interconnection, and wholeness, the basis of any yinyang distinction is difference, opposition, and contradiction. […] It is also this difference that enables yinyang as a strategy – to act successfully, we must sometimes be more yin and sometimes more yang, depending on the context. (Wang, 2013: 216)

A while ago, when I left the Japanese university I had been working at, I gave a farewell lecture on the importance of History. I have been thinking about this topic almost my entire professional life. History covers the entire human experience in all its glory and depressive darkness. I have come to believe that the strength and benefit of History is that it can describe and analyse the lives and experiences of kings as well as slaves, of women, men, and children, of the oppressed and the oppressor, the losers and the successful. History is therefore necessary for how we understand ourselves. However, does this make History relevant, productive and profitable?

Today this question is more topical than ever. In the contemporary world of increasing globalisation, commercialisation and commodification, utilitarian voices keep questioning the value of education in soft sciences, among them History. The academic community in humanities has not been slow to react. ‘We live in a world of thoughtlessness’, Professor Richard Wolin (2013) notes. Nor does Professor Nuccio Ordine (2013) spare his words in a fierce and elegant counter attack against the utilitarianism that, he argues, destroys the memory of our history, the humanities, teaching, free research, imagination, the critical mind, as well as our ability for peaceful coexistence. Professor Helene Small (2013) tries systematically to discuss a number of arguments that speak in favour of Humanities, all of which arguments are grounded in the same belief as my own: that History and Humanities really should not need any defence because they have a value in themselves.

With the Bologna process, the European Union (EU) launched a collective effort to improve and synchronise Higher education within the Union. The ambition was to make educations and grades ‘transparent, comparable and transferable’. Tuning Educational Structures in Europe (Tuning EU) was one of the main projects working to create tools for reaching these goals and has today developed into a worldwide educational reform initiative; some of the processes in higher education instigated by Tuning have been analysed in The Tuning Journal for Higher Education. Tuning is significant because it has led to widespread discussions about education on a disciplinary level and thus, in principle, had the potential to transform teaching and learning in individual disciplines. History was one of the initial five subject areas when the project started in 2000. In a way, Tuning also took part in the debate about relevance and value discussed above as one of its aims was to open up the complex world of University education to public scrutiny and convince stakeholders and decision makers that History is relevant and graduates in History are highly employable.

The question is: has Tuning succeeded? Looking back at the process one can suggest that Tuning has provided some good answers but left some questions unanswered.

In many ways, Tuning History has been very effective. The Subject Area Group, which I was a part of, was able to find commonalities for teaching/learning History between a number of different educational systems and pedagogical ideas. We were also able to construct reference points for the subject area, which were accepted and considered valid for higher education in all EHEA-member countries and, in fact, used as a model for Tuning projects in other parts of the world. Transparency, comparability and transferability were attained through the work done in the Tuning project (Nováky, 2015).

However, perhaps the most valuable contribution of Tuning in general has been the Tuning ‘method’: a systematic tool for constructing programmes and degrees based on a set of reference points that take the needs of the society and the views of stakeholders into account (ClioH Guide II, n.d.). If this method is used, the social relevance of History programmes can be more easily demonstrated and not least in relation to the employability of students.

This outward-facing aspect of the Tuning methodology is interesting, but for a subject area like History, it is also problematic. If forces outside academia are allowed undue influence, academic freedom might be compromised. The stakeholders in History and Humanities in general are usually official institutions of various kinds: museums, schools, governmental departments and other institutions that maintain and create collective identities. There is an obvious risk that academic education, particularly in History, is expected to support interpretations that are politically useful but empirically questionable. In the worst case scenario, historians can be asked to create History programs that they do not approve of. Recently, I have been working with Tuning in countries with new governments expressing ambitions to have their histories rewritten to better fit more comfortably into their perceptions of political and social realities. These sorts of ambitions are of course understandable and to some extent valid in that history has to be constantly rewritten according to new findings, new perspectives and new realities. Yet what society or ruling elites consider desirable or necessary, can work against scholarly academic approaches; this problem is well-known to historians of historiography (e.g. Torstendahl, 2000).

On the opposite side, we have a jealously defended academic freedom, which does not allow space for external influence, totally depending on the ability of academe to decide what is important to teach and learn and what is not. Such an attitude does not help to make employers see what makes History education a valuable asset.

This is the yin and yang of Tuning History.

On one hand, if we do not consult stakeholders the legitimacy of our discipline might erode. The utilitarian views discussed above have already started to corner History as an unprofitable and unproductive subject area. On the other, for the sake of academic freedom, we should not uncritically follow the needs and desires of external stakeholders when constructing History programmes. Not least, we must continue to defend the critical ideals of the discipline.

In practice, we do of course constantly navigate between these two opposites. When teaching, we usually have requirements from society; when doing research, we have our funders to keep happy. We are actually well trained to be more yin and sometimes more yang, depending on the context.

Tuning provides a method that helps balance good academic standards and the external demands of stakeholders. During the Tuning process, academics constructed a set of reference points focusing on student-centred learning and learning outcomes. Subject area benchmark statements or reference points describe what gives a discipline its coherence and identity, and define what can be expected of a graduate in terms of the techniques and skills needed to develop understanding in the subject. As professional historians and academic teachers, we decide what knowledge, skills and abilities History programmes should foster. However, through consultations with stakeholders, we can adjust the combination and weight of reference points included, guaranteeing the academic soundness as well as the social relevance of our programs. Systematically used, this method might keep at least some of the utilitarian critics at bay.

There are, nevertheless, some potential weaknesses in the Tuning reference points. They are the result of discussions between historians from many countries and therefore a compromise of a sort. The most central aspects of teaching/learning History are present, but lists of competences ignore potential for innovation and overlook the latest developments in the discipline. The fact that there are no scheduled revisions of the reference points underlines the problem, yet those presented by Tuning Europe are by now almost 15 years old. New ideas and trends therefore have difficulty finding a way into the competencies. Some critics have thus claimed that Tuning represents an out-dated and a ‘frozen’ view on History, badly adjusted to future challenges and the realities that students meet in their upcoming professional lives (Kelly, 2015).

Among the areas of contention are the ability to use digital resources critically, though this capability is included in the Central Asian reference points (Tuning Academy. TuCahea). However, the competence that I personally miss most among Tuning reference points is the ability to understand, detect and analyse uses, misuses and non-uses of History. This is not included in any of the many regional Tuning History reference points. I firmly believe that historians have an ethical and moral commitment to respect and illuminate the memory of humans of the past and to monitor the use of history in the present (De Baets, 2013). The latter might not always be socially desirable, but it is necessary and so, in my view, should be included in History students’ curricula.

In sum, there is a need to take changes in society into account but also a necessity to monitor them critically and adjust the competencies in ongoing proactive ways that reflect these but also shifts in disciplinary practice. This is true for History and should be true also for all other academic disciplines. However, if we consider the Tuning method primarily as a model for creating workable national reference points and use them to construct both academically and socially relevant programs, these weaknesses are manageable. Tuning may not be perfect but it provides a means both to defend and advance our discipline in difficult times.