Call for Papers, deadline – 18 May 2022
This call for papers invites history lecturers, broadly defined, to reflect on how they engage with and use creative methods in the higher education classroom. We know that history is a creative endeavour. Historians are storytellers who not only write history, but also tell a story of the past through the creative curation of archival sources. Yet history is usually seen as something made by the pen or the keyboard rather than the paintbrush, needle, or scissors. When we teach history, we often obscure our creative practices and thinking. Through a series of workshops, this programme of events on ‘Creative History in the Classroom’ invites history lecturers to reflect on how we should use creativity in designing, delivering, and communicating the past to students. Those from all career levels are strongly encouraged to participate.
These questions are prompts for the kinds of papers we wish to receive:
- How are you creative in your teaching (individual sessions, assessments, public history work)?
- How should we define the creative history classroom?
- What does it mean to teach university history creatively?
- What does critical creative play look like?
- How are we creative practitioners of history as lecturers and teachers?
- What is a creative history student?
- How is creativity disrupting the social and cultural privileges of historical learning more broadly? How does creativity enact linguistic and social justice?
- What can History learn from more creative subjects and industries?
- How does creative experiential learning enhance students and lecturers’ engagement with the past?
- How does creativity unsettle history and the historian?
- How do we work with the fear of creative methods?
There will be a series of workshops throughout September to December 2022.. A final workshop in January will invite speakers and participants to a hands-on creative session that will devise a creative teaching manifesto. Spaces will be limited. We will liaise with speakers over dates and times. All events will be online.
The deadline for a 300-word abstract and short biography will be Wednesday 18th May. Panels are welcome. We would also like to encourage practical hands-on sessions too. Please state if you would like to run a practical session. Paper length during these events will be either 10 or 20 minutes. You are asked to indicate your time preference when submitting your abstract. Please submit abstracts to l.m.matthewsjones@ljmu.ac.uk.
There are plans to develop an edited collection from these events with both short and long chapters.
Image details: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shimer_College_art_discussion.jpg – licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License