Where's the other ‘c'? Year 9 examine continuity in the treatment of mental health through time

Helen Murray, Rachel Burney and Andrew Stacey-Chapman show how they strengthened three goals of their practice - secure knowledge, narrative shapes and conceptual analysis - by securing strong connection between them. The curricular focus that drew all this together was ‘historical continuity', a property crucial to narrative, but often underplayed in history teacher writing. Murray, Burney and Stacey-Chapman elaborate the ways in which continuity both enabled students to assimilate new knowledge efficiently and sharpened their thinking. They raise questions, too, about future ways in which a focus on continuity might secure even greater chronological fluency in students. Another theme of the article is departmental leadership through academic teamwork. Key to all this, the authors argue, is history teachers' thirst for reading different types of scholarship, and the use of departmental meeting time to debate it in scholarly ways...