Possible futures: using frameworks of knowledge to help Year 9 connect past, present and future

How can we help pupils integrate history into coherent ‘Big Pictures' or mental frameworks? Building on traditions of classroom research and theorising reported in earlier editions of Teaching History, Dan Nuttall reports how his department set out to help Year 9 build a coherent big picture of twentiethcentury history that would enhance their historical thinking and consolidate their learning. Using a diagrammatic storyboard representing a twentieth-century, bigpicture framework, students were encouraged to explore interrelationships between key questions over the course of the century and to fit individual topics that they were studying into this framework. Nuttall explores the impact on students' causal reasoning, their understandings of the discipline of history, their use of knowledge and their ability to make connections between past, present and future...