Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

The Tuning educational project for history has its supporters and its detractors. This overview of the articles contained in this special issue of the journal reflects on some of the complexities of implementing such an ambitious global project and the local and national priorities that have made the process both stimulating and challenging for those involved. And it argues that while lists of competences constitute valuable reference points for discussion of the arts and humanities curriculum in an international context, they should be seen as the starting point for a more detailed and broad-ranging set of global conversations about how we (should) teach our subjects and why this matters for students in today’s world.

Tuning's progress in the discipline of history in the United States since 2009 illustrates the project's continuing capacity to develop “educational structures and programmes on the basis of diversity and autonomy”, maintaining the initiative's original European Union commitment in a markedly different academic environment across the Atlantic. Struggling initially against a backdrop of confusion, hesitancy, and resistance among US faculty, Tuning has been adopted by a steadily expanding number of educators in individual institutions, state systems, and the history discipline's premier professional society. Though operating, at times, in an uneven, imprecise, or pro forma manner, Tuning in the US manages to address several important goals: bringing a more coherent frame of reference to scattered conversations about higher education; framing a more meaningful discussion about the knowledge, skills, and non-monetized “value” developed through higher education; focusing on the central role of faculty discipline experts in the work of assessment, accreditation, and accountability; and engaging professional scholarly societies on questions of teaching and learning.

This article analyses the development and achievements of the area of History in the Tuning-Latin America Project from its launch in 2004 to its completion in 2013. Through two phases and nine general meetings, academics from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru, along with academics from Spain, Portugal and Italy, discussed the professional formation of future generations of historians. The debate centred on the concept of “competences” as the axis of training, a concept which generated innovative thinking and understanding but also friction due to specific historiographic traditions and regions. The Tuning-Latin America Project generated a significant body of documentation on the new challenges implicit in training historians in a globalized world. However, it has not received sufficient analysis from the Latin-American perspective. This article contributes to this by providing insight on the Tuning Project’s successes and limitations in Latin America, as well as evaluating its progress more than a decade after it was introduced.

The paper shows that Tuning Project has generated indifference more than resistance within the French academic community. It proposes an analysis of the reasons of this situation: difficulties arising from Tuning itself, the resistance of the French academic tradition, the institutional inhibitors and facilitators. The impact of Tuning on French teaching history has not perhaps been as profound as it might have been. On the one hand, the national competence framework for the first cycle studies has been designed from the Tuning model based on both subject specific and generic competences and is a success, due in part to the perseverance of the French Bologna experts. On the other hand, the fact that today very few French academic programs are described in terms of learning outcomes signals the continued reluctance to embrace student-centred teaching and learning.

While research has long been recognized as a high impact practice in undergraduate education, much of the scholarship on undergraduate research has focused on students in the final years of their degree. This article describes a study of the ability of first year students to undertake historical research in an introductory level course at a small liberal arts college. It discusses the challenges that first year student’s face in interpreting primary sources, working with multiple sources and crafting arguments based narratives about their findings. It also documents how a research paper assignment advances students’ historical thinking skills and contribute to the development of what the American Historical Association has termed the “core competencies” in the discipline.

The text places Tuning History in the context of the rapidly developing international collaboration among historians which began in Europe in 1989, with the ECTS Pilot project, and continued, from 2000 on, with the European History Networks (for research and for curriculum development) working in parallel and in collaboration with Tuning, in Europe and other continents. The History ‘Subject Area Group’ has often taken the role of pilot discipline, representing the Humanities in key European and other projects. The text points out the connection of this key role with the great diversity in History learning and teaching worldwide: historical narratives and debates are very different in different countries, and this very difference makes international collaboration a powerful heuristic tool. History training forms valuable competences for many professional and societal roles, and in student-centred higher education systems, learning outcomes can be defined with reference to competences rather than to specific subject matter.

History as a subject area is facing increasing demands from the society to be more profitable and, sometimes, more conformist. The Tuning methodology, developed in cooperation with a large number of Universities worldwide, could offer a viable and sustainable way to take societal needs into account without compromising academic soundness.

The Tuning Movement and the scholarship of teaching and learning have each had a significant impact on teaching history in higher education in the United States. But the isolation of these initiatives from each other has lessened their potential impact. Interactions between the two might bring together the intellectual exploration of scholarship of teaching and learning and the activist engagement with practical challenges present in the U.S. Tuning Movement. The work of groups, such as the History Learning Project, could facilitate such interactions.