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Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
Teaching History article
Maya Stiasny was faced with difficulties familiar to many of us. Her new Year 12 students were struggling to get to grips with a new period of history. They were not interrogating primary sources with sufficient vigour. Her solution, detailed here, was novel. Working on the rich social history of post-war...
Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
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‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
Teaching History article
Having specialised in the history of material culture during her degree, Gabriella West was struck by the dismissive attitude of her pupils towards the study of material objects from the past. She therefore set out to find the perfect object through which to induct her Year 8 pupils into the history...
‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
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Teaching History 191: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 191
Please note: the print edition of Teaching History 191 will arrive with members in mid-July.
Has the materiality of the past been neglected in secondary school history? Many history teachers might be surprised at the question. After all, enquiries featuring social, economic and cultural realities have...
Teaching History 191: Out now
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Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
Teaching History article
Jane Card’s previous work on the power of images in conveying particular interpretations and her advice about how to use visual material effectively in classrooms will be familiar to readers of Teaching History. In this article she focuses specifically on the capacity of visual representations to convey a compelling message about the...
Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
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Teaching History 190: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 190
As the collection of articles for this issue of Teaching History began to take shape, its title remained rather uncertain. While some of the articles referred explicitly to teaching historical significance, others focused more on teaching students the processes involved in shaping stories about the past....
Teaching History 190: Out now
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Using the concept of place to help Year 9 students to visualise the complexities of the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives,...
Using the concept of place to help Year 9 students to visualise the complexities of the Holocaust
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Move Me On 189: engendering students' curiosity
Teaching History feature
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 help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 189: engendering students' curiosity
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Teaching History 189: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 189: Collaboration
Teaching requires many kinds of knowledge, which has many different sources. One of those sources of knowledge is other professionals. But history teachers are not simply passive receivers of settled bodies of knowledge produced by others. As the pages of Teaching History attest, there is...
Teaching History 189: Out now
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Teaching History 188: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 188: Representing History
History teachers are familiar with the challenges that arise as we try to help our students make historical sense of past worlds. Building historical representations of the past is imaginatively demanding – it requires ‘world-making’ and narrative expertise. The challenges are probative, not merely...
Teaching History 188: Out now
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Teaching History 187: Out now
Article
Read Teaching History 187: Widening the World lens
Those who don’t teach history sometimes ask why it is that the work of history curriculum development is never finished. Why is it that just when a scheme of work seems to be working well, the history teacher starts to question it,...
Teaching History 187: Out now
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Histories of education – and society?
Teaching History feature
It is not emphasised enough that the progress of historiography often proceeds, not by historians arguing and then coming to some resolution, but simply by moving on. Historiography follows fashion, and subjects often exhaust themselves (for the time being)... A related issue is that of siloes. Historiography – academic writing generally...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Histories of education – and society?
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Move Me On 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
Teaching History feature
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 help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
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Teaching History 186: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 186: Removing Barriers
We have in the past two years encountered a series of novel barriers to learning. Are the schools open? Are both students and teachers well enough to be there? How do you monitor learning on a Friday afternoon across a series of patchy network...
Teaching History 186: Out now
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Teaching History 185: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 185: Missing stories
In their prologue to What is History Now? (published earlier this year to mark the 60th anniversary of E.H. Carr’s seminal work), Helen Carr and Susannah Lipscomb both admit to owning a ruler of rulers: a list of monarchs of Britain from the year...
Teaching History 185: Out now
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Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum
Teaching History article
In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department’s efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He...
Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum
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Move Me On 184: struggling to see beyond tightly regimented teaching strategies
Teaching History feature
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 help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 184: struggling to see beyond tightly regimented teaching strategies
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Teaching History 184: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 184: Different lenses
For millennia, human beings have used lenses as tools: to help them see further, to magnify or to correct defects of vision. Yet lenses can distort as well as illuminate the unseen.
Robert Hooke, the seventeenth-century scientist who helped popularise the microscope through his...
Teaching History 184: Out now
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Inventing race? Using primary sources to investigate the origins of racial thinking in the past
Teaching History article
Having been given some additional curriculum time, Kerry Apps and her department made decisions about what had been missing in the previous curriculum diet. Building on an existing enquiry (in TH 176), Apps decided to focus on how and when the idea of race in its modern sense developed in early modern...
Inventing race? Using primary sources to investigate the origins of racial thinking in the past
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Teaching History 183: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 183: Race
Collectively, the articles in this edition say something profound about the joy and privilege of being a history teacher. In our intellectual journeying, none of us can ever stand still. Conversations within and across societies and cultures never stop. Such conversations interact with the work...
Teaching History 183: Out now
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Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
Article
Should we, and how do we, develop in our students a sense of period – or a series of senses of period – in a thematic study spanning a thousand years? This was the problem faced by Matthew Fearns-Davies in preparing for the GCSE ‘Health and the People’ paper. He shows...
Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
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Teaching History 182: Out now
Article
Read Teaching History 182
The editorial in the previous edition of Teaching History began by recognising that 2020 would go down in history as the year of the coronavirus pandemic. The words you are reading now were written in the aftermath of another long period of partial school closure in...
Teaching History 182: Out now
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What’s The Wisdom On... Historical significance
Teaching History feature
The idea of historical significance eludes tidy answers. It doesn’t thrive on the quick fix. Yet we do not need to be confused by it. It just requires some clear thinking about what it distinctively offers. In other words, we need to clarify overall curricular aims, and think big about...
What’s The Wisdom On... Historical significance
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‘What is history?’ Africa and the excitement of sources with Year 7
Teaching History article
Many history departments choose to begin their Year 7 curriculum with an introduction to the nature of history and the processes in which historians engage as they develop, refine and substantiate claims about the past. In this article, Adbul Mohamud and Robin Whitburn report on an such an introductory unit, designed with a specific focus on the history...
‘What is history?’ Africa and the excitement of sources with Year 7
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Teaching History 181: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 181
Editorial: Handling Sources
While 2020 will go down in history as the year of the coronavirus pandemic, those who teach history may also remember this year for the impetus that it gave to calls for curriculum change. Petitions to the UK parliament demanding ‘compulsory teaching of Britain’s colonial past’ and greater inclusion of...
Teaching History 181: Out now
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Polychronicon 128: The Death of Captain Cook
Teaching History feature
In popular perception, anthropologists and historians cut very different figures. The anthropologist, a hybrid of Indiana Jones and a Kiplingesque colonial official, wears a bush hat or pith helmet and tirelessly trudges up mountains or hacks through jungle in search of lost tribes and ancient, unchanging, folklore. The historian, a...
Polychronicon 128: The Death of Captain Cook
