Disrupted History

HISTORY ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

All Posts

  • On Bubbles and Burners: Teaching for Cognitive Friction in the Age of AI

    We’re entering a moment in education where the learning process itself is up for renegotiation. With generative AI now accessible to every student with a keypad, the temptation is real: skip the hard part, avoid the struggle, bypass the friction. Tools like Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude are fluent, persuasive, and increasingly responsive — so, the Read more

  • Healing History: A Student’s Phrase and the Purpose of Difficult Pasts

    A student’s wisdom from within our class yarning circle “History isn’t just about what happened. It’s about what we do with it.” We talk a lot about AI in education right now – and yes, I use it in my planning, research, and even in drafting reflections like this one. But for all its convenience Read more

  • The Strawman Problem: What the binaries of the EI vs Inquiry Debate Get Wrong

    There’s something brittle about education’s recurrent discourse around Explicit Instruction (EI) and Inquiry. For all the energy it generates, the debate feels stale – locked in false binaries and riddled with misrepresentations. Lately, I’ve been returning to the work of Sweller, Dreyfus, and especially John Dewey, trying to find a more honest, rigorous way forward. Read more

  • History ‘on the run’: How AI is Becoming a Study Companion in Surprising Ways

    Offering interactive Vietnam War mind maps through study guides to personalised audio and video summaries, Google’s NotebookLM is reshaping how my History students study – even on the move. In this post, I reflect on what happened when I introduced it to Year 12 Modern History, and how one Year 9 student showed me how Read more

  • Quick Post: Not Cheating – Learning

    How are students really using AI in the classroom? This thoughtful and candid episode from the AI in Education podcast flips the script – handing the mic to the learners themselves. Featuring a group of articulate and reflective students from my classroom, the episode dives into the grey zones of AI use in schooling – Read more

  • Whose Nation? Whose Story? Using AI to Confront Narrow Narratives in Year 9 History

    If you grew up in Australia and studied history in the 1970s or 80s like I did, you likely encountered a story of nationhood that was neat, triumphant, and sanitised. It was a story of explorers, settlers, and infrastructure — a relentless march towards “progress”. For all its coherence, the cost of such a narrative Read more

© 2025 Vince Wall