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Integrating black British history in the National Curriculum
Teaching History Article
The question of what to include is a constant challenge to those given the responsibility of education, whether writing at the level of a national curriculum or the departmental scheme of work. Dan Lyndon and his department have been rethinking inclusion in history. In any school, representative history is essential...
Integrating black British history in the National Curriculum
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Rethinking progression in historical interpretations through the British Empire
Teaching History 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....
Rethinking progression in historical interpretations through the British Empire
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The wrong beach? Interpretation, location and film
Teaching History article
In this article Paul Sutton examines the concerns associated with place in films. He points out the problems that this poses for our students - problems mainly, but not only, associated with a common lack of geographical authenticity. But this, he suggests, can be turned to our advantage. For what...
The wrong beach? Interpretation, location and film
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A need to know: Islamic history and the school curriculum
Teaching History article
In this article, Nicolas Kinloch questions some of the principal justifications often advanced for teaching Islamic history in schools. In particular, he wants to move us beyond our concern with current events in the Middle East. He suggests that there are dangers in looking at Islamic history if it is...
A need to know: Islamic history and the school curriculum
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Narrative: the under-rated skill
Teaching History 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....
Narrative: the under-rated skill
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Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn shows how a study of the life of Olaudah Equiano can support pupils’ historical learning in a number of ways. Not only is this a ‘little story’ that can help to illuminate or raise questions about the the ‘big picture’, it can also help pupils to reflect upon...
Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
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Sense, relationship and power: uncommon views of place
Teaching History article
Liz Taylor invites history teachers to consider how diverse and uncommon the ‘common’ person’s experience of place might be. She draws upon cultural geography to show how words like ‘place’, ‘space’ and ‘landscape’ can be unpacked and questioned and so become better tools for pupils’ critical thinking in both geography...
Sense, relationship and power: uncommon views of place
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Uncovering the hidden histories: black and Asian people in the two world wars
Teaching History Article
The stories we tell in history are often stories about ourselves. This can lead to tremendous distortion. Rupert Gaze was shocked when a young black student told him that there was no point in his studying the Second World War because it had nothing to do with him or his...
Uncovering the hidden histories: black and Asian people in the two world wars
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‘You hear about it for real in school.’ Avoiding, containing and risk-taking in the classroom
Teaching History article
In this article, Alison Kitson and Alan McCully discuss the findings of their research into history teaching in the most divided part of the United Kingdom: Northern Ireland. Drawing on interviews with students and teachers, they consider what history teaching might contribute to an understanding of the current situation and...
‘You hear about it for real in school.’ Avoiding, containing and risk-taking in the classroom
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Meeting the historian through the text
Teaching History 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...
Meeting the historian through the text
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Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their casual reasoning
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Does new vocabulary help students to express existing ideas for which they do not yet have words or does it actually give them new ideas which they did not previously hold? James Woodcock asks whether...
Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their casual reasoning
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'Britain was our home': Helping Years 9, 10, and 11 to understand the black experience of the Second World War
Teaching History article
In this article, Helena Stride shows how the Imperial War Museum responded to criticism that insufficient attention had been paid to the contribution of black and Asian people to Britain’s wars. She focuses on one of two resource-packs produced by the Museum, which highlights the experience of Britain’s colonial peoples,...
'Britain was our home': Helping Years 9, 10, and 11 to understand the black experience of the Second World War
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Getting Year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge
Teaching History article
Up until the early 1990s, historical knowledge sometimes had rather a bad press. Various developments, in National Curriculum, at GCSE and, importantly, in ordinary teachers’ practice and debate, then led to a much closer integration of what we once called ‘content’ and ‘skills’. Tony McAleavy examined changing perceptions of the...
Getting Year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge
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Seeing, hearing and doing the Renaissance (Part 1): Let's have a Renaissance party!
Teaching History article
In two, linked articles, appearing in this and the next edition, Maria Osowiecki shares an account of a five-lesson enquiry, based on the concept of historical significance (National Curriculum Key Element 2e) for mixed ability Year 8. She wanted to experiment with an array of creative teaching techniques that would...
Seeing, hearing and doing the Renaissance (Part 1): Let's have a Renaissance party!
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Hitting the right note: how useful is the music of African-Americans to historians?
Teaching History article
Here is a wonderful reminder of the richness of materials available to history teachers. With ever greater emphasis being placed on different learning styles, it is a good moment to remind ourselves that we can cater for virtually all of them in our classrooms. This includes a preference for learning...
Hitting the right note: how useful is the music of African-Americans to historians?
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The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
Teaching History article
What would you expect the differences to be between Japan and England in how pupils learn history in the post-14 phase? Perhaps your guess would be: Japanese school students learn a lot of historical facts and focus upon their own identity and English school students talk a lot more in...
The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
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'Really weird and freaky': using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom
Teaching History article
Can 25 so-called ‘low ability’ girls access 30 pages of difficult text? Yes, much more easily they can access the tiny, sanitised, made-easy ‘gobbets’ that they are normally exposed to in the name of ‘access’. Mary Woolley makes the point that boring texts are those that tell you only essential...
'Really weird and freaky': using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom
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Putting life into history: how pupils can use oral history to become critical historians
Teaching History article
However imaginative and enquiring classroom history may be, the history itself is usually constructed by a historian, a textbook author or a teacher. It is rare that pupils gain the opportunity to construct original histories of their own. Oral history can offer this opportunity. Yet as a methodology, oral history...
Putting life into history: how pupils can use oral history to become critical historians
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Using fictional characters to explore the relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary attitude
Teaching History article
Helping students to understand how and why people in the present interpret the past differently is a challenge. It is also vital if we are to develop an understanding of why the meanings we ascribe to the past are not fixed, but rather are subject to our own prejudices or...
Using fictional characters to explore the relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary attitude
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'I just wish we could go back in the past and find out what really happened': progression in understanding about historical accounts
Teaching History article
This is the second in a series of articles for Teaching History in which Peter Lee and Denis Shemilt share the findings of Project Chata (Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches). In their first article (see Edition 113), they questioned the wisdom of using the National Curriculum attainment target as...
'I just wish we could go back in the past and find out what really happened': progression in understanding about historical accounts
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Historical significance - the forgotten 'Key Element'?
Teaching History article
How many history departments regularly discuss the quality of their enquiries and teaching processes that relate to historical significance? It would not be unusual, in 2002, for a history department to spend time in a department meeting reflecting upon pupils’ learning about causation or to explore the connection between pupils’...
Historical significance - the forgotten 'Key Element'?
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Voices from Rwanda: when seeing is better than hearing
Teaching History article
Where were you when you last witnessed history being formed? How did you know that the events you had witnessed would turn out to be significant? The missile attack on a plane in Rwanda on 6 April 1994 passed Martyn Beer by at the time. It was later that he...
Voices from Rwanda: when seeing is better than hearing
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'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
Teaching History article
How can the Holocaust be represented? In this article, Andrew Wrenn takes as his example the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He helps teachers encourage pupils to get beneath the surface, and look analytically at the Museum itself as an interpretation of the Holocaust. Such an investigation provides pupils and...
'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
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Moral dilemmas: history teaching and the Holocaust
Teaching History article
The new Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London has been very favourably received by the general public, and by teachers and their students. Initially controversial - was a war museum the ideal site for such an exhibition, for example? - it has since been widely praised for...
Moral dilemmas: history teaching and the Holocaust
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Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
Teaching History article
Dale Banham and Ian Dawson show how active learning deepens students’ understanding of attitudes and reactions to the Norman Conquest. At the same time they build a bold argument for active learning, including a direct strike at the two most common objections to it. Many teachers still see it as...
Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
