Getting the most out of teaching with ‘Wild Swans’

Freya George was wondering how best to integrate more Asian histories into her school’s curriculum when a conversation among history teachers on social media led her to Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: three daughters of China. George then planned two enquiries, one introducing twentieth-century China, and one focusing entirely on Chang’s work. George styles her work as knowledge-rich for three reasons: first, she chose to situate the study of Wild Swans within a broad base of contextual knowledge; second, she sees the book as supplying a richly detailed, human-scale account of the past, rather than a set of high-level facts about Chinese history; and finally, following history teachers such as Byrom and LeCocq, and more recently Massey and Brown, she adopted an evidential approach that allowed pupils to immerse themselves thoroughly in the source and to be constructive about its value as source material...