Using historical scholarship

There is a long tradition of history teachers using historical scholarship whether to shape their enquiry questions using real questions that academic historians pursued, to gain new knowledge for enriching lessons or simply to keep inspiring the passion that fired their first love of history so that they can display it to pupils in the classroom itself.   A tradition within this is the curriculum component ‘Interpretations’ - a sustained fixture of England’s national curriculum for history since 1991 which has spawned its own tradition of shared practice, research and debate.  If you want to find out specifically about ‘Interpretations of history’, where there will be much reference to historical scholarship, go to InterpretationsRead more

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  • Film: What's the wisdom on... Evidence and sources

    Article

    We’ve been talking to our secondary school members and we know how difficult life is for teachers in the current circumstances, so we wanted to lend a helping hand. 'What’s the wisdom on…' is a new and already popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a...

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  • Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Interpretations

    Article

    We’ve been talking to our secondary school members and we know how difficult life is for teachers in the current circumstances, so we wanted to lend a helping hand. 'What’s the wisdom on…' is a new and already popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a...

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  • Getting medieval (and global) at Key Stage 3

    Article

    Taking new historical research into the classroom: getting medieval (and global) at Key Stage 3 Although history teachers frequently work with academic historical writing, direct face-to-face encounters with academic historians are rare in secondary history classrooms. This article reports a collaboration between an academic historian and a history teacher that...

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  • Helping Year 9 explore the cultural legacies of WW1

    Article

    A world turned molten: helping Year 9 to explore the cultural legacies of the First World War Rachel Foster shows how her own study of cultural history led to a new dimension in her planning. She wanted to show her students not only that historians are interested in many different...

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  • Historical scholarship and feedback

    Article

    In her introduction to this piece, Carolyn Massey describes history teachers as professionals who pride themselves on ‘a sophisticated understanding of change and continuity’. How often, though, do we bemoan change when it comes, as it so often has recently? Massey’s article provides an example of how to embrace change,...

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  • Historical scholarship, archaeology and evidence in Year 7

    Article

    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...

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  • How do you construct an historical claim?

    Article

    While preparing her Year 12 students for an International Baccalaureate paper on early Islam, Kirstie Murray became concerned that students' weaknesses in making claims would be particularly exposed by the challenging complexity of this topic's source record and its contested historiography. Drawing on the practice of other history teachers, especially...

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  • How introducing cultural and intellectual history improves critical analysis in the classroom

    Article

    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...

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  • How my interest in what I don't teach has informed my teaching and enriched my students' learning

    Article

    How my interest in what I don't teach has informed my teaching and  enriched my students' learning Flora Wilson argues here for the importance of maintaining a fascination with history as an academic subject for experienced, practising history teachers. Just as medical professionals keep their knowledge up to date by...

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  • How ‘good’ are Key Stage 3 textbooks in supporting the teaching of the Holocaust?

    Article

    Convinced of the value of a good textbook as a teaching and learning resource, Alex Diamond set out to understand teachers’ thinking about Holocaust textbooks and what it would be for a textbook to represent Holocaust history adequately. As Diamond’s discussion shows, this is a multi-faceted issue. Evaluating textbook representation involves reflecting...

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  • 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...

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  • Is it time to forget Remembrance?

    Article

    Remembering those who have fallen in active service is an annual event in most schools and communities; the collective memory and respect that Remembrance engenders can enhance a sense of identity and belonging. Acts of Remembrance can be seen as an aspect of citizenship, but how often are they viewed...

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  • Making reading routine

    Article

    Inspired by the growing number of history teachers who have sought to introduce younger pupils to academic historical scholarship in the classroom, Tim Jenner wanted to bring about his own reading revolution at Key Stage 3. But rather than simply develop one-off lessons or enquiries based on scholarship his goal...

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  • Making sense of the eighteenth century

    Article

    Making sense of the eighteenth century Pressures on curriculum time force us all to make difficult choices about curriculum content, but the eighteenth century seems to have suffered particular neglect. Inspired by the tercentenary of the accession of the first Georgian king and the interest in the Acts of Union prompted...

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  • Marr: magpie or marsh harrier?

    Article

    The quest for the common characteristics of the genus ‘historian' with 16- to 19-year-olds Diana Laffin writes about historical language and explores how understanding different historians' use of language can help sixth form students refine and deepen both their understanding of the discipline of history and their abilities to practise...

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  • Meeting the historian through the text

    Article

    Edna Shoham and Neomi Shiloah describe a process by which they taught their 15-year-old students to read historians’ accounts for sub-text, meaning and assumptions. In its emphasis on ‘meeting the historian’, their work overlaps with much of the thinking about teaching pupils about historical ‘interpretations’ as specifically required by the...

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  • Modelling the discipline

    Article

    David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students to consider...

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  • Move Me On 162: Reading

    Article

    This issue’s problem: James Connolly is finding it difficult to judge how much or what kind of reading he should expect of his students. James Connolly, an eager and knowledgeable historian, has frequently struggled to pitch things appropriately for students. This applies particularly to his expectations of their reading, but also...

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  • Move Me On 182: thinks that substantive knowledge is all that matters

    Article

    Lina Power has interpreted an emphasis on knowledge organisers and factual knowledge tests to mean that substantive knowledge is all that matters. Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical...

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  • Narrative: the under-rated skill

    Article

    ‘Mere narrative’, ‘lapses into narrative’, ‘a narrative answer that fails to answer the question set’. These phrases flow in the blood of history teachers, from public examination criteria to regular classroom discourse. Whilst most of us use narrative in our teaching methods, we have demonised narrative in pupils’ written answers....

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