Trust in what is difficult
This is a 3-4-year process. You are at the beginning of this journey, and you don’t realize how smart you are; how good a reader, a writer, a thinker you will be by the time you graduate.
This will not always be easy; this is also not intended to be easy. You are here to learn how to do things you have never done before or to do them at a higher standard. There will be setbacks, difficulties.
“Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult.”
Letters to a young poet, 1904
This is part of the process. You need to embrace the difficulty. This is no reason to stress, let alone panic. Talk to your tutors and ask for help and further explanation.
De-dramatize assessments: grades matter of course, but assignments are better understood as milestones, as indicators of your progress. They do not constitute a final judgement on your academic abilities, let alone on you as an individual.
Feedback is the critical response you receive from your tutor. A grade is only one type of feedback and not the most useful type at that. Pay close attention to the written feedback; ask for clarification if needed. Oral comments and responses to your seminar contributions also are an important component of the overall feedback you will receive.
A university is a community of scholars and students
A university is a community of scholars and students, committed to the production, dissemination, and exchange of knowledge
What does that mean for you? Our objective is to turn you into intellectuals, not because we live in an isolated, ivory tower – we don’t –, but because we know that the scholarly skills you will learn through your training as a historian will help you thrive personally and professionally, whatever career you eventually choose.
Being an intellectual is not a job, let alone a status. It is an attitude; a commitment to learn and think critically; to analyse problems and to address them on the basis of all available evidence.
A community is defined by what its members do for each other, by practices of solidarity. We work with you, to help you progress and grow. Tutors also work with and for each other: sharing and discussing ideas, reading each other’s work, and providing critical advice. This is also what students can and should do for each other. There is no cap on the number of First Class degrees we award. You are not in competition with each other; it is in your individual and collective interest to work with each other.
A student is not a consumer
Whatever you might have heard, a student is not a consumer. Your relationship to your tutors is not transactional. Here, time is not money. The time we’ll spend with you is not determined or limited by the fees you pay. When you meet with us to discuss your work and get advice, we’ll take the time you need, be that 5 or 30mn. If we need to meet again, we’ll meet again.
An educator is not a consultant
Contact hours are not billable hours and are not limited by policy or choice. We don’t sell a service for profit. We’re not personal trainers. Our job is not to ensure you keep coming back to the gym; our job is to ensure you acquire the skills, knowledge, competences to leave and thrive outside the University.
A student is not a child
A student is not a child, but an adult and we’ll treat you as such. You are in charge, responsible for your learning. Our job is to define and uphold standards; to support you when you need support but also to remind you of your responsibilities when required. Be professional, diligent, and take pride in your work, in your effort
Observation, comprehension, explanation.
History is the science of social change in time. Our discipline and the knowledge it produces rely on the critical analysis of primary sources, of documents. We observe past experiences through the archival record. We are driven by our curiosity and therefore by our ignorance. Ignorance in itself is not an issue; not doing anything about it though IS a problem.
We build on the collective knowledge produced and shared by past and present scholars to make sense of what we observe in the archives. Our first goal is to understand what we observe. Our second goal is to explain it. We work to disseminate what we know and to highlight why it matters. We do this through language, not least in writing, because this is how we communicate our ideas.
Now, what does that mean, in concrete terms, for a first-year undergraduate?
The work is reading
Reading will expand your knowledge of history. It will highlight what you don’t know and where the gaps in our collective knowledge are. Historians work to fill those in.
Reading will sharpen your mind. It will bring you into contact with unfamiliar experiences and ideas.
Reading should not be confined to history. Non-fiction books, newspapers and current affairs magazines will help you understand the world we live in. This will allow you to exercise your rights and fulfil your duties as a citizen. One cannot rely on social media alone. There is another, utilitarian, reason to read newspapers for instance. The events, the concepts, the ideas we discuss today are directly relevant to your course: e.g., war in Ukraine, women’s rights and uprising in Iran, fiscal policies in Britain. These all raise questions that you will also discuss as a history student.
Reading – literature and poetry in particular – will make you a better writer and writing is what you will do a great deal of for a living, whichever career you embrace.
READ! READ! READ!
The work is thinking
The work is thinking, and thinking is a practice.
One cannot learn passively. Listening is necessary but not sufficient. You must always be taking notes: key information, key concepts, things you do not understand. (see document on note-taking on Moodle)
You must be questioning: your tutors, yourself, your fellow students. Do not take anything for granted. Think critically and constructively.
You must be talking: converse, discuss, challenge your tutors’ and fellow students’ ideas.
The work is writing
Preparation for a seminar should always involve some writing: write the answer to the questions asked by the tutor; write up the questions you have for them; the ideas you had and would like to discuss in class. You needn’t write much, but you must make the effort to express your ideas as well as you possibly can: be precise, be concise.
Writing takes tools: dictionaries, thesauri, grammar books. Many of those are readily available through the Library. If I need to use them every day, so do you!
The work is research
See the document on research and reading on Moodle.
Start from first principles and the most basic type of information; then go further and deeper. Encyclopaedia, textbooks, synthesis, scholarly articles, scholarly monographs.
Banging an essay tile into Google does not count as serious research. Rely on trusted sources, not on (online) sources of dubious origins. [Do you know who wrote that Wikipedia entry? If you don’t, then don’t use it!]
The module’s reading list should be your first port of call. Ignore it at your peril.
What is an essay?
See the use the guidance on essay-writing on Moodle.
An essay is a historical argument: a coherent, structured analysis of a historical problem. An argument is always supported by evidence. This is the difference between a mere opinion and an argument.
We are not in the opinion business. There is therefore little sense in seeking an improbable balance, whatever you have been told in secondary schools. While there are political and ethical implications to the writing of history, our job is not to seek a political or ethical balance. You should resist that temptation even when the essay appears to invite it.
Take this question for instance: “To what extent was modern warfare a boost for European economies in the twentieth century?”
There is no “balanced” answer to this question. You cannot argue that war was both good and bad for European economies. Even a quantitative approach would essentially reveal a set of value-judgments, not offer a critical historical analysis.
What you need to do is to highlight the historical problem raised by the question: how should we qualify the nature of the relationship between modern wars and the economies of societies at war? Break this problem down and investigate its different dimensions. Perhaps you might want to think in terms of belligerent economies that – at the same time – contributed to, benefited from, and suffered from war. Each section of your essay addresses a different aspect of the problem. But your essay should not be conceived as a balance-sheet.
