History, huh? How our disciplinary research can shape what we do in PedRes

A historian by training, I’m used to working with people who were alive 500 years ago. I’m comfortable handling very old fragile documents that spend most of their time in museum vaults or glass display cases. I enjoy re-reading these sources that have survived for centuries to uncover hidden stories or lesser-known perspectives, to get to know their authors and subjects as well as I can. In this context, the thought of research involving people who are alive right now gave me a cold sweat (truly).

Still, for better or worse, this is what I did during my first pedagogic research project – a commissioned LITE Fellowship on approaches to digital assessment. I’ll be forever grateful to my mentor, Prof Samantha Pugh, as I made what felt like a huge transition from historical research. There were new methods to grasp (because I could actually talk to people now), ethical reviews to attain (again, actual alive people), and brand-new risks and issues to contend with. Pedagogic research really did feel like a whole new world.

Now that I’ve finished my fellowship, though, I’m not convinced it’s as different as I first thought it was. Reflecting on how I conducted this research, I can see that many of the same values and questions of interest that drove my work as a historian also underpinned my approach to pedagogic scholarship. I’d previously imagined the historian version of me to exist as a completely separate self to who I am as an educator, and as a teaching and learning scholar, but I’m slowly coming to recognise how it’s shaped and influenced the work I’m doing now (or #historianera to #educatorera, for any Swifties out there).

My historical research focused on first meetings between strangers in the ‘New World’ (like the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II and Hernando Cortés in 1519), taking what’s known as a microhistorical approach. This approach reduces the scale of observation down to the level of personal interactions and individual experiences, concentrating on these ‘smaller’ stories (Levi, 1991). When I unpicked smaller stories in records of first meetings in Mexico, for example, one person who I focused on was Malintzin – an indigenous woman who is most famously known as a powerful mediator, negotiator and translator between indigenous and Christian groups.

I took a deep dive into indigenous-authored painted histories, to see how each altepetl (community) and each manuscript’s tlacuiloque (author) chose to present Malintzin in their story of the conquest. I mined these visual sources for their smaller stories – what certain gestures, body language and positioning, certain behaviours and interactions, certain clothing and belongings, may tell us about her. The (frankly astounding) Lienzo de Tlaxcala bucked the trend, with its tlacuiloque choosing to depict her not only as a cultural intermediary, but as a commanding warrior (and if you want to know why, you could read my article…).  It was the ‘smaller stories’ approach that helped me to surface this largely unrecognised identity of Malintzin as a warrior woman.

Analysing the recordings/transcripts for minute details about colleagues’ experiences to gain nuanced understandings of a broader phenomena felt well within my skillset, albeit in a wildly different context to what I’ve worked with before.

I shouldn’t really have been surprised, then, that I chose methods for my pedagogic study that were underpinned with similar principles to microhistory. Listening Rooms are wonderful ways to gather smaller stories and individual perspectives, and I likely gravitated towards them as the promise of rich, unmediated data excited me. In Listening Rooms methodology, pairs of participants who know each other are asked to have a recorded one-to-one conversation guided by topic prompts (I asked colleagues to chat around prompts on digital assessment) without the researcher (i.e. me) present. Analysing the recordings/transcripts for minute details about colleagues’ experiences to gain nuanced understandings of a broader phenomena felt well within my skillset, albeit in a wildly different context to what I’ve worked with before.

The Listening Rooms method is friendship-based and conversational and may produce more unfocused data than other more structured, researcher-led methods (Heron, 2019), which some may see as a disadvantage. But I was used to working with the unexpected as this is something typical of microhistorical approaches, too. I probably should have expected that I’d have a little dance party at my desk when participants’ conversations diverged or wandered off in unexpected directions, from poll station queuing etiquette to cartoon mascots. Although this data that might not naturally fit into coding about digital assessment, my previous research experience helped me to articulate how these smaller stories could still tell us so much about the values underpinning participants’ work.

And, lastly, although the researcher isn’t present during the Listening Room in order to encourage participants to lead the discussion in ways important to them, I think I also subconsciously favoured this method as it positioned me where I was most comfortable: not actually talking to people (…I’m joking).

What I’m trying to say, is that I think if I was to do another pedagogic research project, I would embrace my historian self very intentionally. As I’m mostly retired from history academia, I think I was particularly quick to dismiss the historical research skills I’d developed – and all the theoretical and conceptual knowledge stuff – as I transitioned to work in student education, and I shut that part of myself away. I won’t be doing that again. Instead, I’ll be ready to draw connections from that past academic experience in helpful and important ways. I feel a bit more ‘whole’ again as a person in recognising that my disciplinary and pedagogical researcher identities are really two sides of the same coin, and that I’m not actually an outrageously different researcher to what I was 3-4 years ago. Which is nice. I’d invite you to think if this might be true for you, in your context, as well.

 

References:

Heron. E. 2019. Friendship as a Method: Reflections on a new approach to understanding student experiences in Higher Education. Journal of Further and Higher Education. 44(3), pp. 393-407.

Levi, G. 1991. On Microhistory. In: Burke, P. ed. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Gateshead: Polity Press, pp. 93-113.

Lienzo de Tlaxcala (c. 1550), Bourne Book Collection - Homenaje á Cristóbal Colón 972 MexH. Contributed to NMDC by the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, NMHM <http://econtent.unm.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/achl/id/1609/rec/36> [accessed 06/02/2025].

Mottershaw, S., et al. 2021. Listening Rooms Toolkit. [Microsoft Sway]. Leeds: University of Leeds.

Rogers, C. J. 2021. Malintzin as a conquistadora and warrior woman in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (c. 1552). The Historical Journal. 64(5), pp. 1173-1197.

Rogers, C.J. 2024. LITE Snapshot: Approaches to Digital Assessment. Leeds: University of Leeds.