The classic British war film Carve Her Name With Pride was based on the true story of Violette Szabó GC, the 23 year old French speaking single mother who volunteered during WW2 to be an agent for the top secret Special Operations Executive (SOE). Shortly after parachuting into German occupied...

Josh Garry describes his effort to refresh his approach to teaching the British transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on reading, lectures and discussions during an Historical Association Teacher Fellowship programme, Garry built a sequence of lessons designed to contextualise the trade while showing African agency and complexity. The result was a sequence...

Many historical books contain cartoons, but in most cases these are little more than a relief from the text, and do not make any point of substance which is not made elsewhere. Political cartoons should be regarded as much more than that. They are an important historical source which often...

Cunning Plan for using the metaphor of a tree to help students characterise the process of change and engage with a historian’s argument. In this Cunning Plan, Eve Hackett sets out how she used a recent work of history about the Norman Conquest as inspiration for her teaching of Year...

The principles and approaches outlined in our article on Pages 59 to 64 of this edition can be applied to any site, although not necessarily all on the same trip! If you are visiting Berlin, and you want to examine it as a contested space, in what order might you...

Offered five weeks to teach ‘whatever he wanted’ to Year 7, Andrew Slater decided that he wished to tackle the concept of significance head-on early in his students’ time in his school. He chose the expectedly unfamiliar substantive content of the Khmer Empire, challenging his students to justify the significance of...

Joe Smith, Kim Hammond and George Revill share some of the findings of their work examining what digital broadcast archives are available and which could be made available in future.  The BBC’s archives hold over a million hours of programmes, dating back to the 1930s (radio) and 1940s (television). It...

Jonathan White wanted to fill a gap in his students' knowledge of the history of ideas. Despite the appearance of Marx, Smith, Darwin and Malthus in the department's workscheme for Year 9, his Year 13 students appeared to lack any meaningful grasp of these nineteenth-century intellectual reference points. White therefore...

In the centenary year of the BBC, this Virtual Branch talk from Marcus Collins relates the strange tale of how the BBC did and did not broadcast about homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s and what it tells us about sexuality, broadcasting and the origins of permissiveness in mid-twentieth century Britain.  Marcus Collins...

Public attitudes to Henry V are very much influenced by WilliamShakespeare's interpretation. Richard Inverne discusses howShakespeare's version has been translated into cinematic form byLaurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh. Shakespeare indulges himself considerably with his own relatively recent history - Richards II and III, Henrys IV, V and VI, for example....

Historical anniversaries can be a great way to get children and young people interested in a subject or to raise awareness about a particular issue. This resource is free to everyone. For access to hundreds of other high-quality history and education resources along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of...

The stimulus for this article came from two developmental tasks that Barbara Trapani was set during the course of her initial teacher education programme: planning her first historical enquiry and bringing the work of an historian into the classroom. Trapani chose to tackle the two tasks together, using Susan Whitfield’s...

International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017 ISSN: 14472-9474 Abstract This paper is devoted to social uses of history teaching and history textbooks. It analyses, first, how the history of the lands of Belarus, at the crossroads between Europe and Eurasia, was...

In March 2020, when Covid-19’s lockdown restrictions saw schools closed to the majority of children, Carenza Lewis quickly began thinking of ways to help both teachers and parents. Drawing on extensive experience of enabling children and young people to learn from practical engagement in archaeology, she came up with a...

In his article in this journal just over a year ago, Steven Driver set out his vision for a less myopic range of topics in A-level coursework. In this edition, Driver demonstrates how he has built student enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, a topic which he had previously identified as...

Geraint Brown and Matt Stanford share the daunting challenge and intriguing opportunities that are presented by leading a school history trip to a site as complex as Berlin. That the city is a palimpsest, layered with stories and tissued with conflicting identities, experiences and meanings, makes planning a trip extremely...

In 2005, in a Teaching History article entitled, ‘A need to know’, Nicolas Kinloch built an argument for teaching the history of Islamic civilisations to all pupils. Afia Chaudhry returns to this theme, reflecting deeply on the needs of her own students – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – within a...

Inspired by reading the work of Stephen Tuck, Ellie Osborne set out to design a new sequence of lessons that would help her students adopt a longer lens on the American civil rights movement. At the same time, Osborne wanted to put more emphasis on the agency and campaigns of activists,...

Since the late Middle Ages periods in which it was fashionable for men to be clean-shaven have alternated in Europe with periods in which it was fashionable for men to wear beards. In some periods clean-shavenness went together with long hair, at others beards went together with short hair, and...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Rosalind Stirzaker has introduced some fascinating topics at Key Stage 3. Her pupils, living in Dubai, have the opportunity to study the Islamic Empire, the Mughal Empire and Mespotamia as well as many of the...