Presentation - Department of History - Oxford Brookes University

Historical Studies
Economic History in Action:
Students Debating the Roots of
Modern Dilemmas
Professor Steven King
Presented to:
‘Promoting Engagement with the Teaching of Economic History’
22 March 2012, Oxford Brookes University
www.le.ac.uk

The challenge
• Folding of an economic and social history
department into a wider unit.
• Gradual loss of economic history staffing.
• The impact of legacy courses, particularly
in formal quantitative methods.

The context for a solution
• Day one year one matters.
• Chimney pots and cuddliness.
• Pathways.
• Career links: How to make £1 million with
a history degree.
• The need for something distinctive.

HS2342: Economic History in Action
• The pensions dilemma
• The future of the National Health Service
• British energy policy
• Personal debt and (over) consumption
• The credit crunch
• British membership of the EU
• The rise of the BRICS
• Immigration
• British trading relationships
• Gordon Brown

HS2342: Economic History in Action
• Group A will argue for the proposition
that ‘The British state pension system has
always contained the seeds of its own
destruction’. Group B will argue for the
proposition that ‘The British state
pension system has been ruined by
political ineptitude and the selfishness of
the 1960s Baby Boomers’.

HS2342: Economic History in Action
• Group A will argue for the proposition
that ‘The British have a long ingrained
tendency to personal debt and overconsumption’.
Group B will argue for the
proposition that ‘Debt and overconsumption
is a product of government
policies of the last thirty years’.

HS2342: Economic History in Action
• Training in how to formulate a case.
• Facebook and Dropbox.
• Dealing with the shy or socially
challenged.
• Recording and circulating debates.
• Dealing with sheer anger – better to have
two moderators than one.

HS2342: Economic History in Action
• Assessment: Two individual debate writeups.
What did both groups argue and,
based upon the two arguments, the
questioning and your subsequent reading,
what are the lessons of history for
responses to the modern economic and
policy dilemmas that we have addressed?

HS2342: Lessons
• Group sizes of 30-32 equate to sub-groups of
15-16. This is the minimum number required to
run the course.
• HS2342 requires substantial independent and
group work outside the confines of the course.
This notwithstanding it is a very popular
vehicle.
• Students with little numerical background
really come to understand ONS and BIS reports
and statistical trends.

HS2342: Lessons
• Mean marks are 20% higher than those in Historical
Studies as a whole and students generally gain 15-30%
higher marks than their GPA going into the course.
• Blackboard and VLE are inconvenient electronic
vehicles. Students tend to use outside solutions.
• External examiners are poorly equipped to deal with
the intent and outcomes of this course.
• Broadly defined economic history dissertations have
reached new peaks in every year since the course was
launched.

HS2342: Lessons
• Students often become highly politicised.
On one occasion I was accused of turning
someone’s son into a ‘raving Tory’.
• Gender does not matter in terms of
contribution or assessment.
• It is better to have Erasmus students as
part of the cohort.

The Future
• Recruiting more staff: The importance of
NSS and careers for economic historians.
• Making the course more interdisciplinary.
• Blogs and public performance.