How a four-episode podcast is transforming history teaching

A primary school history podcast Hey History! is winning international accolades for its comprehensive, kid-friendly approach to teaching Australian history.  

Produced at UTS Impact Studios the podcast was created by Professor Anna Clark, a historian at the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS.

Over four episodes, Hey History! introduces students aged 8–12 to the people and stories behind some of the most formative moments in Australia’s history.  Two bonus episodes for teachers address the challenges and opportunities of teaching Australian history to young people.  

“What we love about history is how it captures our imagination. It’s our responsibility as educators and historians to instil this love in young people, too,” Professor Clark says.  

Since it was first released in 2024, Hey History! has been downloaded more than 25,000 times, charted #1 in Australia on Apple Podcasts in the Education for Kids category, was a finalist in the 2024 Australian Podcast Awards in the Kids Podcast category, and won a gold medal at the 2025 New York Festivals Radio Awards for Best Children’s Program.

It has also been endorsed by the History Teachers Association of NSW, supported by the National Museum of Australia and La Trobe University, and shared among more than 20,000 teachers via the NSW Department of Education’s online staffroom.

Bringing Australian history to life 

Funded by a UTS Future Fellowship Top-up Grant, Hey History! aims to bridge the gap between teacher training programs and the reality that many primary teachers experience in the classroom.

According to Professor Clark, most teaching students only spend a few weeks on Australian history over the course of their primary education degrees.

“The Australian history curriculum is quite detailed. It looks at really important aspects of Australian history from deep time and First Nations history right up to the present. And that requires a lot of skill to navigate different perspectives and different histories and communicate those complexities to a young audience,” she says.

Hey History! is the first Australian history podcast designed specifically for the classroom that has been mapped to the Australian curriculum for stages 2 and 3, as well as to the curriculum for each state and territory. 

Accompanying learning materials allow students to use the podcast in their history lessons, making it a simple and effective resource that can be easily integrated into primary school classrooms.

Each episode is around 26 minutes’ long, but collectively, they pack a real punch: as well as introducing students to formative moments in Australia’s history, Hey History! also teaches them how to interpret historical sources and events, to grapple with conflicting points of view about Australia’s past, and to build historical empathy and curiosity.

“I think to be a citizen in a multicultural liberal democracy today, we need to understand the events and narratives that have helped shape the present that we live in, and we also need to learn the skills of historical thinking,” Professor Clark says.  

“We want students to be historically literate and understand the processes of doing history, because history is about doing as well as knowing.”

An immersive approach to learning 

Hey History! was produced at UTS Impact Studios, a media production unit at UTS that makes academic research accessible to mainstream audiences. 

With guidance from the Impact Studios team, Professor Clark and fellow historian Professor Clare Wright led the content development alongside audio producers Jane Curtis and Britta Jorgensen. 

The result is a podcast that engages learners through immersive storytelling—and it’s benefitting students and teachers alike. 

“This podcast has broken new ground—it has been produced in a way that can easily bring students, teachers and parents together in conversation about the past. It’s framed in such a way that young people could listen along and learn, but so can adults, and that really is a difficult balance to have found,” says Jonathon Dallimore, Executive Officer at the History Teachers’ Association of NSW. 

The Association has recently funded two professional learning episodes for high school teachers.

Feedback from students, teachers and homeschooling parents have helped guide edits and updates to the first four episodes, and they’ve also enabled Professor Clark and her team start thinking about a second season if funding becomes available. 

There’s certainly an appetite for more, both at home and abroad. In addition to Hey History!’s rapturous reception from Australian audiences, the podcast has also charted at #3 in New Zealand, #52 in Denmark and in the top 200 in China on Apple Podcasts’ Education for Kids category.