The Practice
Over the past several academic years, I have taught a Final Year History undergraduate unit drawn directly from my own innovative research into the history of night-time in the modern world. Ranging across British and North American contexts, ‘Dark Pasts’, is the only undergraduate unit anywhere in the world to immerse students in histories of night-time. Beginning around 1800, the unit traces the social, cultural, political and environmental dimensions of night across two centuries. Along the way, students encounter the supernatural, nocturnal animals, lighting technologies, blackouts, gendered violence and the challenges associated with our contemporary separation – in our ultra-lit homes and streets – from the darkness of night.
Typically, I have taught two parallel classes of 18 students each academic year. Given its innovative character, and the newly emergent nature of scholarship of the night, students are active researchers on this unit. As well as critically engaging with the scholarship that does exist, students work with me to explore innovative source materials in the light of brand-new research questions. Over the course of the unit, I developed several specific learning activities, two of which I will describe here:
- Cartooning: I developed this activity for my class on gendered night violence. Focusing on Jack the Ripper and the infamous Whitechapel Murders (1888-9), I split the class in two and asked students to work together – with a class whiteboard – to design a cartoon that represented the stereotypical cultural representation of the figure of Jack the Ripper and the London East End environment in which the infamous killings took place. Once they had completed their cartoon, we then worked together as a whole class to take each cartoon apart, identifying the culturally significant signs and signifiers within each image – from the Ripper’s centrality in the picture, to the ways in which poverty and destitution were visually signified. Most importantly, we looked for the presence of women in the scene not as victims of violence but as real people who led rich lives.
- Exhibition design: ‘Dark Pasts’ is a big, sprawling unit that runs across a long chronology (over 200 years), and which is thematically expansive. When we got to the end of the unit, I wanted to find an inventive way of ‘doing revision’ with my students which allowed them to draw their own conclusions and to use case studies to develop their own historical narratives. To do this, I asked the students to work in groups of three to conceptualise an immersive museum exhibition that could deliver a ‘History of Night’. To do so, they had to choose up-to ten artefacts or sources (e.g. newspapers, photographs) that could be used in combination to engage an audience unfamiliar with the history of night-time. Once they had come up with a concept and a plan, the groups talked the wider group through their plans.
Findings
Activity 1 – cartooning – revealed the cultural power of a particular image of violent nights where women, in particular, tend to be reduced to victims of monstrous predation. What was missing from the image was a sense that these women were far more then just victims: they were daughters, mothers, real women making their way in the world. Designing the cartoon profoundly illustrated to my students that in writing the history of night, we need to consciously find ways of bringing victims of nocturnal violence to life so that we recognise and value them as human beings rather than objects of exploitation.
Activity 2 – museum exhibit design – not only served the purpose of getting students to actively refresh their knowledge and understanding of the unit as a whole, but also encouraged them to draw threads across what is a large and diverse module. Each of the groups came up with a different story to frame their exhibit and used different artefacts and source materials to tell those stories. Importantly, this activity also proved a point that I had laboured across the unit: that there were few ‘right answers’ and that if we think creatively, we can use diverse bodies of evidence to develop our own historical narratives and to bring diverse elements of the past to life.
The Impact
Students loved ‘Dark Pasts’, and six of them nominated me for Bristol Teaching Awards. I was delighted to be awarded both the award for Inspiring and Innovative Teaching (for ALSS), and the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Education. In addition to an appreciation of the research-rich teaching that sat at the heart of ‘Dark Pasts’, and a real sense that – as the only unit on the subject anywhere in the world – students had been learning at the cutting-edge of their discipline, the practices described above were directly referenced in the nominations. Both the cartooning and the exhibition design were recognised as immersive means of engaging with challenging topics, bringing them to life in novel, exciting, and impactful ways.
Next Steps
I’m on research leave this year, so have been unable to immediately build on these practices. However, in 2025-26, ‘Dark Pasts’ will run in an extended form as a year-long 40-credit unit. I’m excited to revisit these practices, testing them in new contexts, and developing new iterations to suit another cohort of final-year students.
Contact
Dr Andy Flack: Andrew.flack@bristol.ac.uk
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