“Frost still clings to the shadows”: Port Arthur, convict history, pedagogy, and place

The focus question grounding this paper is “How can teachers use a visit to Port Arthur to promote historical and critical thinking and develop the capacity of upper primary children to make meaning from their affective experience at a site of human suffering?” The interpretational qualitative data drawn upon for the paper comes from second year pre-service primary teachers writing about past visits to Port Arthur as part of a unit introducing them to the aims and purposes of humanities and social sciences education, including History. The paper makes use of the education students’ assignments to analyse the potential of Port Arthur to engage the emotions in developing a critical and empathetic approach to the past. The paper advocates for teachers to implement a sophisticated place-based pedagogy that foregrounds affective history and emotional responses to a site of punishment.