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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  • New, Novice or Nervous? 154: Using historical scholarship in the classroom

    Article

    As another World Book Day goes past, you have been watching the English department wax lyrical about all of the wonderful books that pupils might read. You know that there is a wealth of well-written historical scholarship out there for pupils to dive into, yet you are not sure about...

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  • Passive receivers or constructive readers?

    Article

    Rachel Foster reports here on research that she conducted into how students engage with academic texts. Unhappy with the usual range of texts that students encounter, often truncated and ‘simplified' in the name of accessibility, she designed a scheme of work which sought to find out how her students responded...

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  • Period, place and mental space

    Article

    Period, place and mental space: using historical scholarship to develop Year 7 pupils' sense of period What is a sense of period? And how can pupils' sense of period be developed? Questions such as these have troubled history teachers for many years, often revolving around debates over the role played by...

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  • Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims

    Article

    Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation. It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their ‘signpost sentences'. She found herself showing students how an academic historian anticipates a chunk of argument in a single, well-turned, opening sentence. Foster created an intervention in which students...

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  • Polychronicon 150: Interpreting the French Revolution

    Article

    For most of the last two centuries, historical interpretations of the French Revolution have focused on its place in a grand narrative of modernity. For the most ‘counter-revolutionary' writers, the Revolution showed why modernity was to be resisted - destroying traditional institutions and disrupting all that was valuable in an...

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  • Polychronicon 155: Interpreting the Origins of of the First World War

    Article

    As I write this article I have before me my grandfather's Victory Medal from the First World War. It has inscribed on the reverse side, ‘The Great War for Civilisation 1914-1919'. The absolute certainty of such a justification for Britain's entry into the war seems somewhat hollow as we approach...

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  • Polychronicon 158: Reinterpreting Napoleon

    Article

    On 18 June 2015, the two-hundredth anniversary of the great battle of Waterloo will be commemorated in Britain and on the continent (though not in France). It will represent the climax of the Napoleonic bicentenary, which has been in full flow since the turn of the twenty-first century. Fresh biographies...

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  • Polychronicon 159: Interpreting Magna Carta

    Article

    First some history: the question of how historiographic and public historical representations of Magna Carta have changed over the last 800 years is an important one. The ‘myth' of Magna Carta as a foundational document for modern democracy is still very powerful. That tradition of understanding the legacy and history...

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  • Polychronicon 160: Interpreting 'The Birth of a Nation'

    Article

    Controversial from the first year of its release in 1915, 'The Birth of a Nation' has been hailed as both the greatest film ever made and the most racist. On 8 February 1915, it premiered in Los Angeles as 'The Clansman', the name of the novel and play upon which...

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  • Polychronicon 161: John Lilburne

    Article

    John Lilburne might have been destined for obscurity in less interesting times. He was the second son of a minor gentry family, apprenticed to a London woollen merchant in 1632. It was his master’s connections that drew him into religious opposition to Charles I and the illegal book trade, resulting...

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  • Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France

    Article

    As Kristin Ross has persuasively argued, by the 1980s interpretations of the French events of May 1968 had shrunk to a narrow set of received ideas around student protest, labelled by Chris Reynolds a ‘doxa’. Media discourse is dominated by a narrow range of former participants labelled ‘memory barons’ –...

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  • Polychronicon 163: Europe: the longest debate

    Article

    On 23 June, electors in the United Kingdom will vote on whether they wish to remain part of the European Union. The passionate debate around the question has seen the spectre of Hitler and the example of Churchill invoked, with varying  plausibility, by both sides. It has also drawn on the...

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  • Polychronicon 164: The End of the Cold War

    Article

    A quarter-century on from 1989-91, with a large amount of archive and media material available, these epic years are ripe for historical analysis. Yet their proximity to our time also throws up challenging questions about the practice of ‘contemporary history’, and the complexity of events raises larger issues about how...

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  • Polychronicon 170: The Becket Dispute

    Article

    ‘The Becket Dispute’ (or ‘Controversy’) refers to the quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, which dominated English ecclesiastical politics in the 1160s. It was a conflict with multiple dimensions: a clash of Church and State; a prolonged struggle between two prominent individuals; a close friendship turned...

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  • Polychronicon 177: The New Deal in American history

    Article

    Over 50 years ago I read my first serious book on American history. I can still remember the excitement of reading William E. Leuchtenburg’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. His description of FDR and American politics in the 1930s seemed so much more colourful and dramatic than...

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  • Promoting rigorous historical scholarship

    Article

    The history department at Cottenham Village College has one more member than you might expect. Ruth Brown is a teaching assistant (TA) and one of the longest-standing members of the department, and this article is about how her work has an impact on specific pupils, whole classes and teachers. The key...

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  • Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13

    Article

    Historical enquiry is blooming at Key Stage 3. Thanks to a rich array of source materials available on the web and in textbooks, superb history-specific training courses and genuinely innovative practice in schools, pupils can increasingly be found wrestling with demanding and often lengthy sources. They do this in order...

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  • Reading? What reading?

    Article

    Discussions with sixth-form students about reading led Carolyn Massey and Paul Wiggin to start a sixth-formreading group. They describe here the series of themed sessions that they planned, and the student discussion and reflections that resulted. Listening to their students discuss their reading led Massey and  Wiggin to reflect on what is meant by ‘reading around’ the subject, and its role in students’ intellectual...

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  • 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....

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  • Shaping macro-analysis from micro-history

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Many history teachers are inspired by the work of historians and want to share their stories and arguments with students in school. Hywel Jones found Malcolm Gaskill's Witchfinders ‘gripping and intriguing'. He decided to use...

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