1 Safe Handling of ‘Dangerous Tosh’? by John Staats, PhD Candidate, Western Sydney University. A paper presented at AARE Conference on November 28, 2016 What can the burgeoning living history/historical re-enactment movement teach educators about new ways of teaching and learning history? Can backward mapping the ways that these life-long history learners and enthusiasts choose to do history, post-school, serve to broaden and enrich the pedagogy of history? Or are these ‘haptic’ and somatic modes of doing history just “dangerous tosh”? Backward Mapping: how can the post-school history preferences of the ‘life-long learner’ inform pedagogy? A long-term aim of the history educator is the goal of engendering in our students ‘life-long learning’ and ‘enthusiasm’ for history. However, school-based history pedagogy appears to be out of sync with the popular forms of history that are pursued in post-school settings. Life-long learners express a preference for engaging with experiential forms of history that provide for a sense of ‘connectedness’ (Rosenzweig & Thelen, 1998; Landsberg, 2015); a ‘quest for immediacy, the search for a past which is palpably and visibly present’ (Landsberg 2015:6). This desire for an active, participatory, immediate, unmediated, ‘real’, palpable and personal connection (Samuel, 1996) with history stands in stark contrast to the widespread experience of school-based history as passive, ‘dead, dull and boring’ 1 (Clark, 2008; Curthoys, 2011; Roberts, 2013), where