Evidence

The use of sources within history lessons has consistently been included within the National Curriculum in England and as a specific assessment objective at GCSE and A-level, on the grounds that unless students know how claims about the past are generated and validated within the subject community, they will be poorly equipped to make sense of or to discriminate between conflicting claims about the past. While the use of sources depends on a process of critical evaluation, history teachers and curriculum designers are now very aware of the risks associated with reducing such evaluation to a series of mechanistic formulae in which ‘source work’ is detached from the enquiry process of answering specific and worthwhile questions about the past.  The materials in this section help alert teachers to those risks as well as illuminating important misconceptions that may prevent students from developing a more powerful conception of the nature of historical knowledge The resources here offer a range of practical strategies, rooted in academic and practitioner research, for equipping students to use sources of many different kinds as evidence (rather than merely passing judgment on them). Read more

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  • Cunning Plan 147: Getting students to use classical texts

    Article

    The following plan provides a more detailed practical example of the approaches discussed in the article on using ancient texts. Having puzzled over what ancient texts actually are - carefully constructed interpretations? testimonies? (but testimonies to what?) myths? - I wanted my Ancient History GCSE class to engage in this...

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  • Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking

    Article

    Did Alexander really ask, ‘Do I appear to you to be a bastard?' Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking Beth Baker and Steven Mastin make the case for teaching ancient history in the post-14 curriculum. Pointing out the damaging messages that could be conveyed by assuming that ancient...

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  • Community engagement in local history

    Article

    This article, by Lynda Abbott and Richard Grayson, offers a fascinating example of collaboration between school and university, focused on the development of a community archive. The project - run as an extra-curricular activity - was originally inspired by a concern to preserve the personal stories of those whose lives...

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  • Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action

    Article

    Arthur Chapman presents a task-specific scaffold - a ‘dart' board - designed to teach students how to interrogate sources of information so that these become sources of evidence for particular claims about past actions, beliefs and aims. Chapman also uses his ‘dart' board to foster students' reflection on the degrees of...

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  • Using visual sources to understand the arguments for women's suffrage

    Article

    Visual sources, Jane Card argues, are a powerful resource for historical learning but using them in the classroom requires careful thought and planning. Card here shares how she has used visual source material in order to teach her students about the women's suffrage movement. In particular, Card shows how a...

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  • A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs

    Article

    Holocaust imagery is very familiar, clichéd even. How can we get pupils thinking about it in novel ways and seeing differently? Phillips reports work completed with his PGCE students, proposes a scaffold of questions with which to deconstruct images and applies it to  archive images and to Hollywood representations. Images...

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  • Triumphs Show 141: using family photos to bring the diversity of Jewish lives to life

    Article

    Headteachers, Hungarians and hats: using family photos to bring the diversity of Jewish lives to life It is 9.35am on a wet Tuesday. As the rain falls outside, fingers twitch in a Y ear 9 history classroom. The instruction is given and 28 pairs of hands spring into action, rifling...

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  • Deepening post-16 students' historical engagement with the Holocaust

    Article

    Peter Morgan represents what is best about the reflective practitioner - an experienced teacher of some 15 years' standing, he continues to challenge himself and to seek ways to improve and develop his classroom practice. Deeply influenced by the pedagogy and resources that he encountered on the CPD of the Institute...

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  • Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust

    Article

    Students make sense of new learning on the basis of their prior understandings: we cannot move our students' thinking on unless we understand what they already know. In this article, Edwards and O'Dowd report how they set out to scope a group of Y ear 8  students' prior learning and...

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  • The Holocaust in history and history in the curriculum

    Article

    In this powerfully argued article Paul Salmons focuses directly on the distinctive contribution that a historical approach to the study of the Holocaust makes to young people's education. Not only does he question the adequacy of objectives focused on eliciting purely emotional responses; he issues a strong warning that turning...

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  • Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence

    Article

    No edition of Teaching History devoted to creativity could be complete without returning to the riches that popular songs offer to historians and history teachers alike. The five Bob Dylan songs that Christopher Edwards explores here are chosen not merely for their ‘literary qualities' and ‘emotional charge'; they also provide...

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  • How can students' use of historical evidence be enhanced?

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. What role does knowledge play in the interpretation of documentary materials? How do history students use what they know? What kind of knowledge really ‘makes the difference' and which ways of using knowledge make the...

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  • Information and Evidence In a Nutshell

    Article

    Nutshell, what's the National Curriculum Attainment Target on about when it contrasts "information" and "evidence"? Aren't they the same thing? They aren't really things. The contrast is between ways of thinking about knowledge rather than between things. Pardon me? One way of talking about knowledge involves ‘looking things up': we...

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  • Stepping into the past: using images to travel through time

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Pupils are eternally curious about their teachers. Do they really have lives outside the classroom? Could Miss Jones have once been a child? Does she have parents and grandparents and a past of her own?...

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  • British History Online - Digital Resources

    Article

    British History Online is the digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust, we aim to support academic and personal users around the...

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  • Census of Ireland, Dublin 1911 - National Archives of Ireland

    Article

    The household returns and ancillary records for the censuses of Ireland of 1901 and 1911, which are in the custody of the National Archives of Ireland, represent an extremely valuable part of the Irish national heritage. Click here to go to the site: National Archives of Ireland

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  • Teaching Year 9 about historical theories and methods

    Article

    Kate Hammond sets out a rationale for linking the National Curriculum requirement to study interpretations of history with her pupils’ own evidence handling skills. She makes connections with history-teacher-led debates and innovations in both areas, but particularly the work of Howells (2005). She describes and evaluates a learning sequence that...

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  • Polychronicon 128: The Death of Captain Cook

    Article

    In popular perception, anthropologists and historians cut very different figures. The anthropologist, a hybrid of Indiana Jones and a Kiplingesque colonial official, wears a bush hat or pith helmet and tirelessly trudges up mountains or hacks through jungle in search of lost tribes and ancient, unchanging, folklore. The historian, a...

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  • Picturing place: what you get may be more than what you see

    Article

    Pictures abound in history classrooms and teachers use them in many different ways. They add - often literally - some colour to the past, helping us to imagine what different worlds were like. Pictures can be used quite legitimately in this way to fire imagination and stimulate interest. But we...

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  • 'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?

    Article

    This was an opportunity all good historians dream about. A large box crammed with artefacts about a soldier who fought in the First World War, just begging to be read, studied, sorted and organised. Being faced with such a wealth of uncatalogued primary evidence could have proved daunting enough without...

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