Acknowledgements

We begin by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which Deakin students and staff live, work and study across Australia and pay our respects to Elders past and present, particularly those of the Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands most of the work for this book was undertaken. We recognise the long, rich and enduring histories of First Nations peoples but also acknowledge that history educators have a responsibility to ensure these histories–including the actions and impact of settler colonialism–are engaged with more deeply and critically in history classrooms around Australia.

Historical thinking for senior secondary students: A collection of learning and teaching activities 2022 was inspired by the work of the Deakin Inclusive Education Community of Practice, particularly the presentation on 2012 on publishing student designed resources as Open Educational Resources (OER) by Dr Eseta Tualaulelei, Senior Lecturer University of Southern Queensland. The project was enabled by funding made available by the Deakin OER grant.

A big thank you goes to Angie Williamson, Deakin Library’s Program Coordinator (Open Education), who has very capably supported the work done through the grant and ensured the success of this project. Thanks also goes to CAUL Open Educational Resources Collective for funding of the Pressbooks subscription. Librarians, Amy Sellers and Lisa Grbin, were also wonderful supporters of this project and I thank them for creating an excellent OER for our pre-service teachers to learn about finding, evaluating and creating OER. This interactive guide has also been included as a chapter of the book.

We could not have created this OER without the outstanding support of the Deakin copyright team–Astrid Bovell and Luke Watsford. Huge thanks goes Astrid and Luke for creating resources so we could learn about copyright compliance and for the work they did checking the copyright compliance of the materials created.

Thanks goes to Associate Professor Amanda Mooney, Interim Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning) for seeing the potential of this project and supporting its fruition.

I am very grateful to have secondary school teacher and research assistant/marker, Phillip O’Brien, as co-editor and peer reviewer. Phillip has been instrumental in the development of the project by providing feedback to the students, assisting with the editing of the book and being an enthusiastic proponent of the possibilities of OER for the history education community.

Lastly, thank you so much to the pre-service history teachers who have authored the activities and boldly embarked on creating this inaugural OER for senior secondary history teachers and students.

Dr Rebecca Cairns, October 2022