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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
What was increasingly apparent last year is that while administrative processes shifted over the pandemic, there have been far greater shifts in the backgrounds of the students who have returned to our class rooms. These extend trends that were already becoming apparent before then. Where, twenty years ago, History was the primary pre-Law degree in Humanities, our first-year regional surveys in Asia and Europe were capped at sixty students each and were filled with History Majors who came on to Mona after studying CAPE History at school. This is no longer the case. Now that Law is an undergraduate program, with a further undergraduate Law program over at the University of Technology, History is no longer a pre- Law major. Our numbers still reflect this transition. Almost all the Department’s members now acknowledge this development and are eager to adjust to engage with its consequences. Not just in identifying the courses that we can fill, but also to take full advantage of the skill-sets that the non-major students who are now a major presence in all our classes can bring to discussions and tutorials. In this adjustment we need to foreground the skills that taking History classes can offer to such students. Not just in stretching their curiosity but, still more, in learning to evaluate the non-standard data that the past has left as its record and then develop arguments from such imperfect evidence. These are skills that should be useful to undergraduates in all the campus’s faculties, whose students can benefit from the practical skills needed in developing arguments from the scrappy evidence that the past has left for us to work with. RESHAPING HISTORY’S & ARCHAEOLOGY’S UNDERGRADUATE COURSES Having recognized the changes among the students enrolling in our classes, in 2022-23 the Department undertook a general recasting of its pre-requisites and grading structures. We shared a conviction that courses in History and Archaeol- ogy have useful skills to offer to non-History majors. Our goal in re-evaluating our current and backstock courses was not only to acknowledge the skill-sets that the non-majors from other Faculties can bring to our classrooms, but also to foreground the skills that we can offer to such non-major students when they take classes in History, Archaeology or Heritage. The success of the History & Journalism program means that in 2022–23 most of the courses required for our Majors have had more History & Journalism students than they have History Majors (as of July 2023 we had three or four History Majors per year against a dozen or so History & Journalism students). The Department’s second joint degree program in History and International Relations is improving its numbers, though annual enrollments still remain in single digits. In both these programs historians teach the classes and undergraduate historians remain a signif- icant cohort. Participating in these programs widens the options for our students.
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