Interpretations

The fact that both the National Curriculum in England and the national assessment objectives that frame public examinations at GCSE and A-level include a focus on ‘historical interpretations’ (plural) as well as referring separately to students’ own use of evidence – makes it very clear that there is an important distinction between the disciplinary concepts of ‘evidence’ and ‘interpretations’. While the former is concerned with students’ use of sources to develop their own interpretation of events; the latter is concerned with students’ exploration and explanation of how and why interpretations developed by historians differ from one another.  (Both have a critical role to plan in students’ historical learning – and both need to be carefully planned!) Giving students the confidence and the knowledge to handle competing interpretations is undoubtedly challenging, but the materials in this section show how careful planning within and across the key stages (including Key Stage 3) can help students of all ages to engage effectively with interpretations examining the relationship between historians’ accounts (in books and on television) and the particular questions that they have chosen to answer, as well as the sources on which they claim to have drawn.  Read more

Sort by: Date (Newest first) | Title A-Z
Show: All | Articles | Podcasts | Multipage Articles
  • Emotional response or objective enquiry? Using shared stories and a sense of place

    Article

    In this article, Andrew Wrenn explores some issues that teachers might consider when supporting 14 and 15 year olds in their study of war memorials as historical interpretations. Tony McAleavy has argued that ‘popular' and ‘personal' interpretations and representations are just as worthy of study at Key Stage 3 as...

    Click to view
  • 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...

    Click to view
  • Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.

    Article

    Michael Riley, member of the HA Secondary Committee and History PGCE Tutor at Bath Spa University. In recent years, teaching about different interpretations of history has been one of the most exciting and challenging aspects of Key Stage 3 history. Interpretations-focused enquiries allow pupils to see that argument and debate are...

    Click to view
  • Polychronicon 127: The Crusades

    Article

    Modern research on the crusades has concentrated on three basic questions. What were they? How were they justified? What motivated the crusaders? The first of these questions became controversial twenty-five years ago, when historians with a traditional approach to the subject, who took into consideration only those expeditions launched to...

    Click to view
  • Top Tip: Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.

    Article

    Top Tip: Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.

    Click to view
  • Putting life into history: how pupils can use oral history to become critical historians

    Article

    However imaginative and enquiring classroom history may be, the history itself is usually constructed by a historian, a textbook author or a teacher. It is rare that pupils gain the opportunity to construct original histories of their own. Oral history can offer this opportunity. Yet as a methodology, oral history...

    Click to view
  • Rethinking progression in historical interpretations through the British Empire

    Article

    Let’s stop saying sorry for the Empire! Thus Mastin and Wallace introduce one of their lessons on interpretations of the British Empire. They develop Gary Howells’s ideas from the previous edition of Teaching History to demonstrate exactly what we might get our students to do with interpretations of the past....

    Click to view
  • Polychronicon 122: The Gunpowder Plot

    Article

    Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' focuses on interpretations of the Gunpowder Plot.

    Click to view
  • Interpretations and history teaching

    Article

    Gary Howells offers us a challenge: are we sure that we are teaching the study of interpretations correctly? It is much criticised at GCSE, but do we really engage our students in the process of writing history, and in understanding how history works, from 11-14? Or do we use reductive...

    Click to view
  • Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII

    Article

    Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' explores the historical...

    Click to view
  • Seeing double: how one period visualises another

    Article

    When pupils study interpretations or representations of the past which are neither from their own period nor from the period being interpreted/represented, they are having to employ sophisticated knowledge and skill. Jane Card describes this as ‘double vision’: the pupils must think about the period depicted (in this case the...

    Click to view
  • The wrong beach? Interpretation, location and film

    Article

    In this article Paul Sutton examines the concerns associated with place in films. He points out the problems that this poses for our students - problems mainly, but not only, associated with a common lack of geographical authenticity. But this, he suggests, can be turned to our advantage. For what...

    Click to view
  • Using fictional characters to explore the relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary attitude

    Article

    Helping students to understand how and why people in the present interpret the past differently is a challenge. It is also vital if we are to develop an understanding of why the meanings we ascribe to the past are not fixed, but rather are subject to our own prejudices or...

    Click to view
  • Polychronicon 114: interpretations of Oliver Cromwell

    Article

    Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' investigates the differing...

    Click to view
  • 'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'

    Article

    How can the Holocaust be represented? In this article, Andrew Wrenn takes as his example the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He helps teachers encourage pupils to get beneath the surface, and look analytically at the Museum itself as an interpretation of the Holocaust. Such an investigation provides pupils and...

    Click to view
  • Substantial sculptures or sad little plaques? Making 'interpretations' matter to Year 9

    Article

    Andrew Wrenn builds upon current, popular and practical work on ‘interpretations of history' analysed in recent editions. Using the public's responses to the temporary exhibition on the slave trade housed at Bristol City Museum, he offers a range of fascinating practical activities for Year 9 pupils. Many of these could...

    Click to view
  • History and the perils of multiculturalism in 1990s Britain

    Article

    Ian Grosvenor's article points both to dangers and to positive potential in the National Curriculum for history. Critical of the published proposals for history in the current curriculum review, he points not only at the continuing narrowness of the perspectives enshrined by the proposed curriculum but at the reasons why...

    Click to view
  • Interpretations of History: Issues for Teachers in the Development of Pupils' Understanding

    Article

    This article is based on collaborative work between staff at a University department of educational studies and a comprehensive school. Ian Davies and Rob Williams reviews the status and meaning of interpretations in history education and draws from work undertaken with students following an initial teacher education course in History,...

    Click to view
  • Emotional response or objective enquiry? Using shared stories and a sense of place in the study of interpretations for GCSE

    Article

    In this article, Andrew Wrenn explores some issues that teachers might consider when supporting 14 and 15 year olds in their study of war memorials as historical interpretations. Tony McAleavy has argued that ‘popular' and ‘personal' interpretations and representations are just as worthy of study at Key Stage 3 as...

    Click to view
  • What is Bias?

    Article

    There is a nice story about how Calvin Coolidge went to hear a clergyman preach on sin. "What did he say?" he was asked. 'He said he was against it', Coolidge replied. The history teacher or student, well used by now to the normal form of questions at GCSE, might...

    Click to view