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Is any explanation better than none?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What do we know about progression in historical understanding? In Teaching History 113, Lee and Shemilt discussed what progression models can and cannot do to help us think about measuring and developing pupils' understanding and...
Is any explanation better than none?
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Can we educate Year 9 in genocide prevention?
Teaching History article
Patterns of genocide: can we educate Year 9 in genocide prevention?
Alison Stephen, who has wrestled for many years with the challenges of teaching emotional and controversial history within a multiethnic school setting, relished the opportunity to link her school's teaching of the Holocaust with a comparative study of other genocides....
Can we educate Year 9 in genocide prevention?
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Dealing with the consequences
Teaching History journal article
Do GCSE and A-level questions that purport to be about consequences actually reward reasoning about historical consequences at all? Molly-Ann Navey concluded that they do not and that they fail to encourage the kind of argument that academic historians engage in when reaching judgements about consequences. Navey decided that it...
Dealing with the consequences
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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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Marr: magpie or marsh harrier?
Teaching History 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...
Marr: magpie or marsh harrier?
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Being historically rigorous with creativity
Teaching History article
After a Fellowship in Holocaust Education at the Imperial War Museum, Andy Lawrence decided that something was missing in normal approaches to teaching emotive and controversial issues such as genocide, a deficit demonstrated by recent research by the Holocaust Education Development Programme. As part of his fellowship, Lawrence created an...
Being historically rigorous with creativity
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New, Novice or Nervous? 165: Enabling progress - students who need more support
Teaching History feature
Students often find history ‘hard’; senior managers and pastoral managers perceive it as challenging and many, with the best of intentions, steer students away from taking it for GCSE. Indeed, in the most recent HA survey, 49% of respondents reported that some students are actively discouraged or prevented from continuing...
New, Novice or Nervous? 165: Enabling progress - students who need more support
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Year 9 - Connecting past, present and future
Teaching History article
Possible futures: using frameworks of knowledge to help Year 9 connect past, present and future
How can we help pupils integrate history into coherent ‘Big Pictures' or mental frameworks? Building on traditions of classroom research and theorising reported in earlier editions of Teaching History, Dan Nuttall reports how his department set...
Year 9 - Connecting past, present and future
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Recorded webinar: Maya ruler King Pakal II of Palenque
‘A veritable Tutankhamun of the New World’
The discovery in 1952 of the tomb of King Pakal II of Palenque has been called the most important archaeological find in the history of the Americas. Protected by a magnificently sculpted stone sarcophagus depicting Pakal’s descent to the underworld and re-birth as the maize god lay the body of...
Recorded webinar: Maya ruler King Pakal II of Palenque
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Polychronicon 150: Interpreting the French Revolution
Teaching History feature
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...
Polychronicon 150: Interpreting the French Revolution
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Personality & Power: The individual's role in the history of twentieth-century Europe
Article
What role do individuals wielding great power play in determining significant historical change? And how do historians locate human agency in historical change, and explain it? These are the issues I would like to reflect a little upon here. They are not new problems. But they are inescapable ones for...
Personality & Power: The individual's role in the history of twentieth-century Europe
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How does history shape our perceptions of national identity?
History, Perceptions & Identity
A series of podcasts of British students and their peers around the world discussing how a study of history has influenced their perceptions of their national identity and how it has influenced their perceptions of each other. This project has been started by The Mount and Millthorpe Schools in York and Philipp Melanchthon Gymnasium...
How does history shape our perceptions of national identity?
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Using the present to construct a meaningful picture of the medieval past
Teaching History article
In this article, Jessica Phillips returns to a theme explored in the Historical Association’s publication Exploring and Teaching Medieval History in Schools – the challenge of teaching about the medieval past in ways that acknowledge its vibrant complexity and create a genuine sense of resonance rather than condescension or blank...
Using the present to construct a meaningful picture of the medieval past
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Limited lessons from the Holocaust?
Teaching History article
Limited lessons from the Holocaust? Critically considering the ‘anti-racist' and citizenship potential
Previous issues of Teaching History have seen extensive debate about the appropriateness of approaching Holocaust education with explicitly social or moral - as opposed to historical - aims. Rather than taking sides, Alice Pettigrew first acknowledges the range...
Limited lessons from the Holocaust?
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The Norman Conquest: why did it matter?
Annual Conference 2013 Podcast
Keynote Speech from the Historical Association 2013 Annual Conference - Podcast
Dr Marc Morris - Historian, author and television presenter
1066 is the most famous date in English history. Everyone remembers the story, depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, of William the Conqueror's successful invasion, and poor King Harold being felled...
The Norman Conquest: why did it matter?
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From The Holocaust To Recent Mass Murders And Refugees
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 14, Number 2 – Spring/Summer 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
Through studying cases of genocide and mass atrocities, students can come to realize that: democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected; silence and indifference to the...
From The Holocaust To Recent Mass Murders And Refugees
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'...trying to count the stars': using the story of Bergen-Belsen to teach the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Maria Osowiecki's search for the right questions to frame her students' study of the Holocaust was driven initially by the proximity of her school to the site of Bergen-Belsen, and the particular interests and concerns of her students as members of British Forces families. But, as this article richly demonstrates,...
'...trying to count the stars': using the story of Bergen-Belsen to teach the Holocaust
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High achievement in history in a nutshell
Article
History is a discipline that attempts to understand human beings, the civilisations, cultures, nations and communities that they make and that make them. History is about time because everything human has its time and time runs out: it is about change, development, coming into being and passing away and about...
High achievement in history in a nutshell
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Passive receivers or constructive readers?
Teaching History 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...
Passive receivers or constructive readers?
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the British Empire and the age of revolutions in the global South
Teaching History feature
The historiography of the British Empire has taken a long course since the era of decolonisation. Political histories of the late twentieth century considered the mechanisms connecting crises at the ‘periphery’ with metropolitan decision-making. One rather overused stereotype was the so-called ‘man on the spot’ pushing empire forward, be they...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the British Empire and the age of revolutions in the global South
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Film: A Jewish Divorce Case in Medieval England
Virtual Branch
In 1242, the prominent thirteenth-century Jewish financier David of Oxford attempted to divorce his wife, Muriel. In the process, he met with a number of obstacles which seriously hampered his efforts and had far-reaching implications for the Jewish community as a whole. In the end, David had to appeal directly...
Film: A Jewish Divorce Case in Medieval England
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Cunning Plan 149.2: Exploring the Migration experience
Teaching History feature
Teaching a class of newly arrived immigrant teenagers from various backgrounds and ethnicities poses many interesting challenges: varied levels of schooling, varied levels of mastery in a new language, no common frame of reference, varied ways of understanding and making sense of the world and very varied ways of making...
Cunning Plan 149.2: Exploring the Migration experience
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Past Time Toolkit: new learning resource about Victorian Prisons
New resource for teachers of GCSE history from Warwick University's Centre for the History of Medicine
Past Time Toolkit: A Learning Resource about Victorian Prisons is aimed at teachers of GCSE History students and is also of interest to anyone exploring the Victorians, prison history, isolation, or food history.
The resource is particularly useful to those working with the Edexel GCSE History course’s Crime and Punishment...
Past Time Toolkit: new learning resource about Victorian Prisons
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Interpretations of History: Issues for Teachers in the Development of Pupils' Understanding
Article
This article is based on collaborative work between staff at a University department of educational studies and a comprehensive school. Ian Davies and Rob Williams reviews the status and meaning of interpretations in history education and draws from work undertaken with students following an initial teacher education course in History,...
Interpretations of History: Issues for Teachers in the Development of Pupils' Understanding
