Abstract
This chapter addresses the fourth Australian Threshold Learning Outcome (TLO) for university studies of history: ‘identify and interpret a wide variety of secondary and primary sources’. There are equivalents in the European Union Tuning and in the UK Quality Assurance Agency . Notions of primacy in ‘sourcing’ are at stake in this TLO. It is about finding and interpreting evidence . But what is a source ? And what makes one primary, and another secondary? These notions reflect authorial orderings of authority when communicating about history. My key points are that these notions have changed. They have a history. A hypothesis is tested: difficulties encountered by students in relation to ‘sourcing’ echo past thinking about what ‘authority ’ and its associated sense of ‘evident-ness’ might amount to when communicating about history. This chapter places the pedagogical literature on barriers to student learning beside the history of history writing and research , and in the light of studies of the epistemology of history.
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Jones, A. (2018). TLO 4: Identify and Interpret a Wide Variety of Secondary and Primary Sources. In: Clark, J., Nye, A. (eds) Teaching the Discipline of History in an Age of Standards. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0047-9_13
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