My name is Leanne & I love history. There I’ve said it. A bit of a strange statement to start a blog with? Maybe, but it’s a big deal to me. You see, it wasn’t always this way. In fact, it was never this way before I began my studies with The Open University. On leaving school, I had no real idea of what I wanted to ‘be’. I knew that I loved the performing world, I loved people and I seemed to have a bit of an affinity with English but I had no idea what all that meant that I should do. Anyway, fast forward a few years (ahem) and a good chat with my mother-in-law (An OU English Literature Graduate) & husband, I knew I was ready to study again. I still didn’t know what, but I knew I was ready for something. I chose to sign up for the BA (Hons) English Literature pathway but had to do a compulsory module first (AA100 The arts past and present). This seemed fairly irrelevant to me due to the small amount of English Literature within the course material. It was a multi-disciplinary course and if I’m honest, that made me nervous. How was I to cope with the likes of history, music and philosophy at university level? I hadn’t studied those subjects at GCSE level, I hadn’t done any A-levels yet here I was about to study at university level. A few months later I was sat having my first OU tutorial for AA100. It became apparent very quickly that I need not worry. The course is an introduction to 8 disciplines within the arts & humanities field and builds you up gradually. It was a complete pleasure to do the course. Challenging at times but also very rewarding. I soon realised why AA100 was compulsory and I began to understand how all the subjects blended together. To understand something of one subject would help with many of the others. Throughout AA100 I surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying the history elements. I had previously disliked history so much that I hadn’t even taken a history GCSE! At school, I found it boring and uninspiring as a subject. I realise now that this was due to poor teaching rather than the subject itself. But for years I believed that history was ‘not for me’. I switched off when anything sounded history related and showed no interest at all. If one thing was certain, it was that I was not a historian. It’s funny then that I married a man who is a historian at heart! He had the opposite experience at school and is full of enthusiasm for the subject. His stories help bring it to life and I would later realise that his spirit would help me find mine. So I found myself studying a course that I would never have chosen to do yet a passion was igniting within me. This rocked me. It was everything that I had always been certain I wasn’t. As AA100 drew to an end I began to panic about my next module choice. I was getting my best marks for the English elements of the course but I was still intrigued and drawn to the history. I didn’t want to stop there. I wanted to see where my passion could go. I wanted to know how differently I might have felt if I hadn’t experienced poor teaching at school. How amazing would it be to turn my dislike of history into my future degree! But I didn’t believe I could do it. I wasn’t a historian, I wasn’t sure what ‘box’ I fit into anymore. The OU does allow some room to switch degree paths during the beginning stages of your degree. So I tried to find a degree which involved both disciplines. My safety blanket of English (which is fascinating itself) and my new exciting passion for history. There are certainly ways of doing this with the OU. They are a wonderful body for allowing people to study the way that works for them. The problem for me was that I didn’t know what my historical interests were or if I needed more experience to study history at what would be level 2 of the degree. I also didn’t realise that I was scared. I spent months mulling it over, talking it through (again & again & indeed again!), and reading up on course details. I just couldn’t decide what to do. I talked it through with my husband, my parents, my in-laws, my sister, the OU & even my children (5, 8 & 16). Whichever pathway I chose, it didn’t sit right. I was trying to do everything I could to avoid A200 – Exploring history: medieval to modern 1400-1900 for I had read that that module was ‘history boot camp’ (check out the reviews). It covered much of the time frame that I studied at school (remember I found that incredibly boring) and was renowned as being one of the toughest modules of all. It was clearly a course for real budding historians, & I didn’t believe that was me. I decided that I wasn’t ready to choose which degree to aim for but I knew that I had always enjoyed writing. I visualised myself writing historical fiction one day and got excited about the historical research I would have to do. So I signed up for Creative Writing A215. At last, a decision. I bought my notebooks and began ‘people watching’ for inspiration to draw on when the module started. As the weeks went by I still had a bit of a heavy heart that I wouldn’t be finding out more about my limits as a history student. I got my results back from the final assignment of AA100 (a heavily history-based piece) & was very surprised to find that I had done quite well (There had been tears and tantrums when writing!). My first thought? ‘Maybe I could have done history after all’ and I missed my studies. We filled our summer with a wonderful family holiday and plenty of family fun with the children. The pressure was off and I didn’t have to worry about anything academic. During a trip to the beach I found myself thinking about the Victorian seaside that I had been learning about. During a trip to the Spinnaker Tower I found myself reading a biography of Nelson in the gift shop. Exactly WHY was he so famous so long after his death? During a trip to the New Forest I found myself reading up on the connections of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ to the area and then thinking about how the forest was used during the war times. I came home and was again surprised. These aren’t things I would normally think about. That’s the thing with education. There are certain doors that you unlock and you can never go back again. You can’t unlearn some things and I had learned to become curious, to realise that these things were there for a reason and that there was a story to be uncovered. I was feeling all the excitement and passion that I had felt when learning about Ireland, the Art of Benin and the history of the seaside on AA100. I realised that without the pressure of ‘having to choose’ my next module and without trying to decide if I was meant to be a writer, a historian or something else entirely, I had started to see my new natural interests. My head began to spin with excitement as I realised that history IS all about people. It is the story of what people have done, why they have done it and how they expressed themselves. It’s digging through the clues left from the past and putting them together to build a story of how the world got to be as it is today, that’s everything that I am actually interested in. It was time to face my nemesis. I may be brand new at this and I’m still not sure exactly where this will lead but I’m not scared of history anymore. I know this will probably be the hardest academic year of my life. I don’t have lots of background knowledge on the subject. I have very little experience in writing an academic history essay but I do have enthusiasm and determination. I’m belting up for the roller coaster ride that I’m about to embark on as I work (hard!) towards my BA (Hons) History. I’ve just signed up for A200, history boot camp.

Share this: Tweet





Email



Like this: Like Loading... Related