Using government documents in undergraduate teaching: A student success case study from the University of Dundee, UK

By Nick Jackson, Senior Editor, AM Archives Direct.

Dr. Matt Graham uses the AM Archives Direct database Apartheid South Africa, 1948-1994 as the basis for an assignment in an undergraduate module at the University of Dundee. The purpose is to equip students for success with the skills and experience needed to get a taste of being real historians through the use of primary sources and their own research.

A significant appeal of using AM Archives Direct as a basis for this task is the equity of access it gives to documents held at the National Archives in London, with Dundee about six hours away. The digitisation of these materials through AM’s Apartheid South Africa resource provides a level of access to the documents that would not otherwise be readily available to these students.

As one student commented: “The access to the online information was fantastic, because I’d not have been able to get hold of it otherwise. This set the basis for my dissertation project next semester.”

What is AM Archives Direct?

AM Archives Direct, which consists of exclusive sources from the UK government’s official archives, provides crucial insight into modern geopolitics from the perspective of the British state. Spanning 200 years of global history, the materials document the roots of major developments and conflicts that shape our world today and present essential primary source content for students of global politics, international relations and area studies.

The material largely consists of government correspondence between representatives of the British government at both diplomatic and administrative posts all over the world. There are also many reports and statistics, published booklets and other ephemera, formal dispatches and digests, newspaper cuttings and maps.

The Apartheid South Africa: 1948-1994 database

The collection is one of the longest standing resources in AM’s Archives Direct series. It spans forty years of history, from the election of the National Party in 1948 through to the first free elections in 1994, a period in which South Africa faced increasing international resistance, boycotts, internal strikes and violent demonstrations.

In 2024, AM published a new module in this collection consisting of newly released documents from the National Archives spanning the years 1981 to 1988; documents from 1989 to 1994 are due for release in 2025.

Approaching primary sources in class

With the aim of enhancing student success, course leader Matt Graham takes advantage of the Apartheid South Africa collection, pinpointing several pertinent documents to share in class. These materials are pivotal in guiding students through the contextualisation of the course themes and serve as catalysts for discussion and debate.

The introduction of Apartheid South Africa primary source material, drawn from the British state’s official archive, offers these students a robust framework for understanding the nature and purpose of archival materials. This exploration, under Matt’s guidance, prompts critical questions such as why these specific materials were preserved and what narratives they convey. Engaging with these questions, students learn to approach primary sources with an analytical and critical mindset, contemplating the existence and representation of the materials.

Although representative of the British perspective, the Apartheid South Africa collection is also used to highlight stories of resistance and reports on various anti-apartheid movements — a topic Matt wrote about in his essay found within the resource. This dimension enables students to work with broader themes from a compulsory module on historical methodologies, including decolonial practices such as reading against the grain, uncovering silences and discovering marginalised voices in the archival record. This method not only enhances their analytical skills but also deepens their understanding of historical narratives and the complexities of archival research.

Introducing the database

Matt’s class, “Apartheid Liberation and Democracy,” is a final-year undergraduate degree module.

At the beginning of the semester, Matt demonstrates the Apartheid South Africa database to the whole class and provides basic training on the ways in which the collection can be used. The students are then given the opportunity to explore the resources themselves ahead of the assignment.

On the collection’s ease of use, Matt commented: “I just really wanted to reiterate how easy it is to use, which then makes the lives of educators, but also the students, much simpler too. Which I think everyone would agree is a good thing!”

The assignment of “becoming a historian”

The students are asked to create an independent project in which they are tasked with looking at online databases through the lens of a concept or theme they want to research further.

The students must identify at least eight different primary sources, which could be anything from correspondence to minutes, maps to pictures. After identifying, analysing and collating these materials themselves, the students write a 2,500-word analysis of those materials in the context of the existing literature.

The unofficially titled “becoming a historian” assignment comes at the end of the semester, when the students have all the previously taught module themes to consider. They will have attended tutorials throughout the year, discussed the historiography and thought about the debates in tutorials; that learning from across the semester is then put into practice with the assignment.

There is a vast array of topics that can be looked at through the materials in the Apartheid South Africa database. Some examples of students’ previous topics include:

Apartheid legislation and the creation of South Africa’s urban landscape

In an assignment looking at the creation of South Africa’s urban landscape, the student considered the physical apartheid infrastructure that segregated cites and urban spaces. The student identified South African government documents to demonstrate how officials had conceptualised the process and reimagined South Africa, and then triangulated these to other primary sources to investigate and explore the tensions surrounding the forced removal of people from cities to create white-only areas.

The incoherence of “grand apartheid”

Another student focused on “grand apartheid,” the plan of the South African government to segregate all of South Africa into designated “homelands” for each ethnic group identified by the apartheid system. Using maps and official documentation in Apartheid South Africa, the student was able to chart the incoherence in the government’s own thinking. They demonstrated an innovative use of the materials, viewing how the strategy played out as well as the lasting impact and legacies of this policy.

Youth protests and the rise of black consciousness

Turning from the focus on the apartheid state more broadly in the examples above, other students looked at the impact of white-minority rule through other events, such as the youth protests that emerged in the late-sixties into the 1970s. Projects looked at the ways in which these developments were reported by British officials and newspapers and also by the South African state. The students were able to chart the role of key figures, such as Steve Biko, and how new forms of resistance were reported and reflected in official government documentation.

Resistance and repression in the 1950s

The final example here is a focus on the 1950s, in the initial years after the National Party took power, when there was enormous resistance to the implementation of apartheid. Although white-minority rule had existed in South Africa for hundreds of years prior to this, in the 1950s, there began an outpouring of sustained resistance, for example, in the African National Congress’s Defiance Campaign. The student in question was able to use primary sources to identify these forms of resistance and document a resulting sense of panic within the apartheid government as well as the ways in which resistance was violently suppressed.

Student success

With any assignment, it is important for instructors to consider the pedagogical value and purpose and to assess what results from it for the students and whether those match the intended purpose of the assignment design.

The examples given above are just four final-year research projects for this module which have used a wealth of primary source document types across a variety of topics, all of which were only accessible to these students in digital form through AM Archives Direct.

Prioritising primary sources here allowed students to put into practice many of the skills they had developed across their degree course, from using the module context to generate a research question to understanding and reviewing the existing historical literature. By using databases to identify the primary source materials, students were able to effectively place their chosen topic within the broader academic ecosystem and to develop and hone the skills needed to write the assignment itself and present a coherent argument.

Through the digital access to this resource, the documents look and appear exactly as they would if a student was to view them physically at The National Archives in Kew. The students are also able to experience the well-known joys and frustrations of opening a file and not finding what they want or, alternatively, stumbling across a find which is totally unexpected.

The benefits of this assignment to the students are numerous.

Students gain practical experience of doing the work that historians do and are given the opportunity to take ownership of a project and direct their own research. In Matt’s experience, if students take ownership of a project, they are more likely to get better results out of it because they have chosen their topic themselves and so enjoy personal investment in it. They have the freedom to follow a route to pursue particular themes that stand out or resonate with them within the guiding framework of the module..

As one student reported in their feedback about the assignment: “I loved the freedom that this assignment gave me to research what I was most interested in rather than doing a set essay question or exam.”

The student experience

Dr. Matt Graham has been using AM’s Apartheid South Africa database in class for five years as the underpinning of this assignment. Initially, he assumed that students would have some knowledge of how to approach a database of this type. However, early student-experience feedback highlighted that students required more thorough guidance in using primary sources and navigating databases within the framework of the module. As a result, he has refined his approach over the years to introduce those previously assumed experiences and understandings early on.

The experience of the assignment and the skills students use in it sets them up for success while also providing a starting point for future dissertation research. Students are presented with an opportunity to develop wider transferable skills in research and digital literacy and, through using the Apartheid South Africa database in this assignment, they develop the practical skills required for this advanced level of study, including how digital collections are used and how to navigate them successfully.

Beyond this class, the experience of using digital databases assists not only with the skills needed for academic research, but also with the fundamentals of using search engines in novel and effective ways.

As one student summed up in their feedback: “It made me feel like a real historian.”

Teaching experience

There is an array of benefits to the students through working on these assignments, but educators also gain through reading and reviewing interesting and insightful projects written by passionate and engaged historians-in-training.

The vast majority of those taking Matt’s class have very little existing knowledge of South African history, and the AM collection provides a good deal of contextual support. Prior to the course, students may have heard of Nelson Mandela or the term “apartheid,” but the use of databases such as Apartheid South Africa gets students immersed in the history to show them not only what was happening in South Africa but also how these events were regarded from an outside viewpoint too.

Ultimately, the quality of the work that the students are able to produce using this database and within the scope of this assignment is by and large excellent, with the topics selected representing a superb range and variety of approaches in and to South African history. The assignment has served as a way of providing feedback to Matt, as the course leader, on what students find interesting across the module, as well as providing a more holistic picture of student interest, engagement and successes.

The Archives Direct series

AM Archives Direct provides an unparalleled view for both researchers and for teachers across the UK’s interactions and relations with foreign and colonial governments throughout Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Middle East.

As of September 2024, there are 14 AM Archives Direct collections with more in the pipeline, as well as plans to add new sections to existing resources as material becomes available. As far as possible, AM digitises complete runs of documents in full, with only occasional gaps where documents have either been closed and are not publicly available, or have been retained for use by the government department that has produced them.

AM Archives Direct collections have recently been migrated to AM’s in-house software platform, AM Quartex. The move adds enhanced functionality and smoother and more comprehensive user experience, as well as increased accessibility standards. To assist ease of use across each collection within the series, AM has also implemented a new federated AM Search tool, enabling browsing and searching across all AM Archives Direct collections to which a user has access.

AM continues to work with The National Archives, UK, to identify and publish valuable and insightful material to add to the AM Archives Direct series.

This article was first published in Against the Grain, September 2024.