Learning outcomes

To successfully complete this unit you will be able to demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes (LO) detailed in the below table.

Each outcome is informed by a number of graduate capabilities (GC) to ensure your work in this, and every unit, is part of a larger goal of graduating from ACU with the attributes of insight, empathy, imagination and impact.

Explore the graduate capabilities.

Content

Topics will include: 

• The emergence of parliamentary constitutional monarchy in England after the English Civil War and the development of self-governing institutions in colonial Virginia and New England
• The context, nature and legacies of John Locke’s theory of government  
• The intellectual sources and legacies of American revolutionary political thinkers (such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton)
• The functioning of 19th century American democracy (as seen in texts such as Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America)
• Connections and distinctives between Francophone and Anglophone democratic thought, including Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolutions in France 
• Early feminist theorising of women’s role in democracy, including Mary Wollsonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Sojourner Truth’s, Narrative of Sojourner Truth 
• Populist definitions and practices of democracy (for example, in the era of Andrew Jackson)
• Australian advocacy for self-rule and extension of the franchise
• Leaders of Federation-era Australian political thought (for example, Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin)
• Constitutional development and change in Australia and the US
• First nations, such as Native American and Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, engagements with democratic ideas, institutions and possibilities in America and Australia
• Campaigns for and achievement of women’s right to vote in Britain, the US and Australia

Learning and teaching strategy and rationale

Taught face-to-face in small groups with a Socratic method of teaching that stresses interaction and lively debate, this unit proceeds by inquiring into the meaning and significance of seminal texts in the history of democracy’s emergence in British, American and political thought.

The close-reading of seminal texts in their original context provides students the opportunity to develop insight into the complexities and foundations of a tradition at once over-familiar and poorly-remembered. Examining distinct thinkers and texts across time and place serves to untangle and disaggregate strands of democratic thought often wrongly rolled together, highlighting often profound differences in philosophical and religious emphases. Such differences were often as fundamental as an understanding of human nature itself. Liberal, republican and populist forms of democratic thought and practice are among the distinctions covered.

A second feature of the learning and teaching strategy that provides students with a high-quality learning experience is the careful approach use of transnational history to encourage students to think carefully about both points of connection and distinctiveness between Britain, America and Australia.

Although focussed on great books and thinkers, the unit also highlights some of the limits of that methodology for understanding the actual historical development and everyday experience of vast constituencies in each of the three countries.

The unit also offers an important opportunity to meet LO4 by focussing on Indigenous engagements with Western democratic thought over time in the USA and Australia. Examples might include the Cherokee nation’s promulgation of a constitution modelled on that of the US, or the 1930s activism of Aboriginal man William Cooper in Australia. 

This is a 10-credit point unit and has been designed to ensure that the time needed to complete the required volume of learning to the requisite standard is approximately 150 hours in total across the semester. To achieve a passing standard in this unit, students will find it helpful to engage in the full range of learning activities and assessments utilised in this unit. The learning and teaching and assessment strategies include a range of approaches to support your learning such as reading, reflection, discussion, webinars, podcasts, video, etc.