Positioning: Making Use of Post-qualitative Research Practices

Abstract

Generally speaking, when studying history, students read for information from a position of perceived ignorance. As teachers, we try to instil in them the need to interrogate secondary sources for argument and primary sources for context. We rarely talk with them about the equally important need to understand their own position as historians and what they, as unique individuals, bring to the history construction process. By introducing students to post-qualitative research practices, it is possible to help them recognise the expansive and dynamic nature of the history discipline, the important shaping role of the historian and the way in which the past and the present are intimately linked in embodied historical experiences.