Building memory and meaning: Supporting Year 8 in shaping their own big narratives

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

Sarah Gadd attempted to re-think her department's usual approach to the two-year Key Stage 3. Concerned that a thematic approach might not be securing the overview perspective it was designed to achieve, she decided instead to develop the potential of Banham's work on using depth to make overview possible.

Gadd explored intensive use of story as a way of creating better building blocks from which pupils can start to piece together temporal or topic connections, and learn to stand back from isolated events to discern possible processes and trends.

She thus argues for a strong relationship between analytic conceptual work and confidence with substantive content. A central feature of her scheme is the concluding activity where pupils devise their own largescale narratives.

Gadd also illustrates her holistic, reflexive research method, explaining how it improved her ability to understand how her pupils made meaning, and to better assess the quality of their conceptual and substantive understandings.

(Victorian Britain and India are looked at in this article.)