After almost four years as the education manager at the National Museum of Australia (NMA), it would be fair to say that I'm still working out how to harness the full potential of this Museum to the cause of good history teaching in schools.

The possibilities are seemingly endless. And while I feel that we have made a great start by creating a rich and increasingly varied array of programs, projects and resources for history teachers around Australia, I continually feel like we have just scratched the surface.

In many respects this is a good feeling. It makes me feel fresh and excited and keeps the education team forward-looking, striving to meet new challenges. At the same time there is always that feeling that more can and should be done, and that any number of award-winning resources and innovative programs will never be enough to do justice to the opportunities provided by Australia's foremost social history museum.

Programs to define the museum
Any job worth doing, as the cliché goes, involves pressure. When I first arrived at the Museum, eight months prior to the opening in August 2000, my then manager told me that he would only be satisfied with a number of what he described as 'distinctive' programs for visiting schools. In other words, whatever we offered had to be unlike anything else being offered in any other cultural institution. That rather daunting welcome went hand-in-hand with a building that was still a shell, no physical exhibitions, very limited opportunities to talk to curators and a team of only three educators. In addition, as a national institution, there was our other brief—to satisfy the students who will never be able to visit the Museum. What could and should be done for them?

One thing more than anything else sustained me at that time‹a passion for history and good history teaching in schools and a determination to bring the resources of the National Museum to bear on such a worthy cause. Working in museums was new to me, but the principles of good classroom practice for teaching history were not—especially an almost obsessive adherence to inquiry learning. Working with objects and artefacts as well as documents and photographs only added another level of challenge and possibility.

The first challenge was what to do for the ubiquitous school group museum visit—that experience so many of us had ourselves when we were history students in schools. Creating curriculum-relevant themes was not the main issue here‹we have an abundance of great themes in our galleries, from EDUCATIONAL history to social history, and from Indigenous history to the history of migration to Australia. Rather, it was the universal challenge for all history teachers: how to help the students see the relevance of these histories to their lives and how to do it in a way that engaged them in genuine open-ended inquiry.

Modern technology captures the evidence
The solution we chose (our attempt to be distinctive) was to harness the use of technology in a way that aided the inquiry process. Having set up the inquiry theme through an exploration of education collection objects in our dedicated activity rooms, the students used digital cameras in small groups in the galleries to capture the evidence they required to illustrate their particular hypothesis or interpretation of the theme. Their photographs were printed out by hard-working museum volunteers (who had collected the cameras before the students returned to the activity rooms), allowing the students to begin immediately, once they had returned to rooms, to create their small group poster presentations of the photographic evidence, annotated with appropriate written comments.

The students enjoy using the technology, but from our point of view the technology is simply the means to a much more important end; namely to encourage the students to think about the nature of evidence (in this case museum objects/artefacts) and to construct an interpretation of their own about the historical theme. Either directly or indirectly the exercise promotes the skills of comprehending, analysing, empathising, hypothesising, testing evidence, evaluating, organising and communicating. Importantly, it allows students of different abilities to exercise these skills and to attempt genuine open-ended inquiry.

Since the birth of what we call our 'Race Around' programs (named after the ABC program of several years ago), we have gone on to develop over 15 other active learning experiences at the Museum, including some object-rich Indigenous history programs and a more sophisticated program that explores the idea of the role of museums in the construction of history. The latter addresses an exciting recent development in the history curriculum in some States‹having students investigate how social history museums decide what histories to tell and why.

Catering for all students
85,000 students visit the NMA each year and an increasing number are choosing to do programs which encourage the development of history skills. But what of those students who from the outset couldn't visit the Museum—what could we do for them?

Having spent several years teaching history in schools in Victoria, I drew much inspiration from well crafted, inquiry learning resources. The History Teachers Association of Victoria at that time produced many such materials. From the word go, therefore, we embarked on an ambitious strategy of creating two major history curriculum resources, one for primary schools and the other for secondary schools. The result, two years later, was the birth of Our Voices, which in 2003 was awarded first prize in the primary school print-based category of Australian's Education in Excellence awards; and Australian History Mysteries, which was short-listed for the same awards in the secondary multi-media category. These resources are now being used by many history teachers, and in the case of Our Voices, encouraging primary teachers to embrace the teaching of history at all levels in primary schools.

In addition to these two major resources, the section now has over 20 inquiry learning units of work on its website www.schools.nma.gov.au many of which showcase the museum's galleries and objects, and which cover a wide range of history topics. A second Australian History Mysteries resource is currently being planned with a particular emphasis on twentieth century case studies.

This year we are beginning a long-term project of inviting remote and rural schools to document the life and history of their local communities, principally through photography. We are currently distributing disposable cameras to pilot schools and asking them to complete a unit of work that will generate future materials for a major website and series of mini exhibitions. It's an exciting initiative and one which you will hear more about in the next few years.

Yet despite the successes and the initiatives, there is still so much more that can be done. One of the many reasons why history is such a great subject to teach is because there is never a final word on any topic or theme. New interpretations of history emerge every day, sometimes prompted by new evidence, sometimes by new perspectives. Social history museums such as the National Museum of Australia are one source of new evidence and new perspectives. My goal is to make these available to history teachers in classrooms all over Australia in accessible and exciting ways. We've begun that journey but there is a long way to go.

David Arnold is the manager of education the National Museum of Australia

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EQ Winter 2004 © Curriculum Corporation

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