Editorial: Curriculum Journeys

Read Teaching History 198: Curriculum Journeys 

Reflections on the process of curriculum design in history have prompted many colourful metaphors. While some point to the opportunities for creativity inherent in the task, others leave little doubt about the mental exertion required for effective planning on different scales. Michael Riley offered a vision of both creativity and hard work in the gardening metaphor that he used to frame the Key Stage 3 curriculum.¹ His subsequent experience of co-authoring a textbook on the history of the British Empire saw the tranquillity of gardening replaced by more rigorous intellectual ‘wrestling’ – necessary at each stage of the planning process, from the overarching scheme to individual enquiries and ultimately the design of specific tasks.²

Abdul Mohamud and Robin Whitburn, specifically advocating a more inclusive curriculum that acknowledged the lives and agency of those whose experiences had previously been marginalised, compared the process of designing an enquiry to that of a choreographer.³ But this creative work relied on similar intellectual rigour, with their choreographers depending both on ‘pugilists’, to advance the arguments for appropriate representation of the diversity of the past, and on ‘diggers’, who unearthed the evidence of previously forgotten or suppressed stories.

As editors of Teaching History, we have also offered our own metaphors. A previous edition concerned with thinking across whole key stages and beyond was given the title Curriculum Architecture (TH 147). This recognised the creative processes involved, which might result in very different kinds of edifice but remained reliant on the observation of certain fundamental principles. Our current choice – Curriculum Journeys – hints at the importance of the desired endpoint, with each department’s curriculum serving as their map. But use of the plural ‘journeys’ is more than an acknowledgement that different departments may choose somewhat different destinations and different routes by which to reach them. It also highlights the important distinction, drawn by Ben Arscott in the first article, between the journey undertaken by teachers engaged in the process of ‘curricular theorising’ and the journey as it is mapped out for their students. It is the students’ experience that particularly concerns Arscott, which he illuminates by comparing the notion of a carefully crafted maze with a path hacked by an explorer through a jungle. The contrast brilliantly distils the key qualities of an effective enquiry question, providing sufficient puzzle to stimulate genuine historical thinking, without ever undermining students’ confidence or threatening to overwhelm them.

Alex Benger’s curricular theorising is driven by pressing questions about what his students will do with the knowledge they have gained: what their new understanding means to them and what purposes they believe it will serve as they navigate the challenges of the present – particularly that of the climate crisis. Paula Worth’s Cunning Plan addresses a similar concern to bring environmental history effectively into the curriculum.

In helping students to make connections between past and present, Benger recognised the power of a local story – a realisation also that underpinned Fred Oxby’s transformation of his Key Stage 3 curriculum. His colleagues were inspired by the impact of personal recollections – a staff member’s account of his experiences during the 1984 miners’ strikes – in persuading young people that history is not simply something that happened to other people somewhere else. Starting with the local, and identifying the wider knowledge that students would need to make sense of it, Oxby found new ways of building disciplinary understanding while simultaneously decolonising his department’s history curriculum.

Alistair Dickins’s concern was with the balance of his A-level curriculum, given the apparent lack of attention that his exam board specification paid to the experience of Jews in Russia across the period 1855–1964. Dickins’s account of his curriculum-planning process offers a similarly strong argument for attending to diverse and under-represented narratives. His students not only appreciated this attention to Jewish history (even in going beyond the official specification); they could also see how it supported their understanding of broader Russian and Soviet history, while offering further lessons on antisemitism and society today.

Peter Turner was also thinking about Russian history at A-level. His main concern, however, was the development of students’ literacy skills: their capacity to contextualise their reading and to understand disciplinary differences in the interpretation and use of texts. This took him beyond history to the establishment of a cross-curricular book club – an experience of encouraging students to look beyond familiar academic horizons that he suggests could be replicated within mainstream classes lower down the school.

The title of Elizabeth Carr’s article ‘No more mark schemes!’ will certainly attract teachers’ interest but also betrays the fact that it does not fit neatly within an edition ostensibly devoted to curriculum thinking. Yet the combined range of carefully considered and precisely targeted formative and summative strategies that it presents, nonetheless demonstrate the power of thinking big. It was by looking at students’ journey through the whole curriculum that Carr’s department could identify the kinds of tasks and marking strategies that they needed to be able to provide students (and also parents and senior leaders) with valid, reliable and meaningful judgements of their progress so far.

References

1 Riley, M. (2001) ‘Into the Key Stage 3 history garden: choosing and planting your enquiry questions’ in Teaching History, 99, Curriculum Planning Edition, pp. 8–13.
2 Byrom, J and Riley, M. (2003) ‘Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at Key Stage 3’ in Teaching History, 112, Empire Edition, pp. 6–14. 
3 Mohamud, A. & Whitburn, R. (2016) Doing Justice to History: transforming Black history in secondary schools, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.