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Where are we? The place of women in history curricula
Teaching History article
Joanne Pearson reflects on her experiences as a history teacher and teacher educator, considering the ways in which she has seen women represented in the history curricula of different schools in England. She makes the case that greater attention needs to be paid by history teachers to the criteria against...
Where are we? The place of women in history curricula
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Polychronicon 146: Interpreting the history of 'big history'
Teaching History feature
In recent decades, a novel approach to history has emerged, called ‘big history', which provides an overview of all of human history, embedded within biological, geological and astronomical history covering the grandest sweep of time and space, from the beginning of the universe to life on Earth here and now....
Polychronicon 146: Interpreting the history of 'big history'
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Understanding 'change and continuity' through colours and timelines
Teaching History article
The small-scale research that Yosanne Vella reports in this article was driven by concern to help pupils develop ‘big picture' visions of the past and to engage effectively with the idea of change as a process rather than an event. The strategy that she adopts - asking groups of students...
Understanding 'change and continuity' through colours and timelines
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Using visual sources to understand the arguments for women's suffrage
Teaching History article
Visual sources, Jane Card argues, are a powerful resource for historical learning but using them in the classroom requires careful thought and planning. Card here shares how she has used visual source material in order to teach her students about the women's suffrage movement. In particular, Card shows how a...
Using visual sources to understand the arguments for women's suffrage
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Developing sixth-form students' thinking about historical interpretation
Teaching History article
Understanding historical interpretation involves understanding how historical knowledge is constructed. How do sixth formers model historical epistemology? In this article Arthur Chapman examines a small sample of data relating to sixth form students' ideas about why historians construct differing interpretations of the past. He argues that understanding interpretation requires students to...
Developing sixth-form students' thinking about historical interpretation
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Beyond the bolt-on: placing local history at the heart of a diverse and decolonial curriculum
Teaching History article
Students’ rapt response to a filmed interview with a former miner now working as part of the school’s premises team convinced Fred Oxby of the power of local stories. This was not simply because they captured students’ attention, nor even because such stories enabled them to see that history was not...
Beyond the bolt-on: placing local history at the heart of a diverse and decolonial curriculum
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Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the reasons why generic models for teaching historical significance are never quite adequate, Rachel Foster found herself considering, instead, the specific contexts in which arguments about historical significance arise. These reflections took her to the fascinating example of stately homes. Drawing on scholarship such as that of Peter...
Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
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Shaping what matters: Year 9 decide why we should care about the Windrush scandal
Teaching History article
Mark Fowle began work on an enquiry to contextualise the Windrush scandal for his pupils in south London, in response to the first national Stephen Lawrence Day, in 2018. He went on to work with his colleagues in a new school to broaden pupils’ historical perspective through stories of migration...
Shaping what matters: Year 9 decide why we should care about the Windrush scandal
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The Holocaust in history and history in the curriculum
Teaching History article
In this powerfully argued article Paul Salmons focuses directly on the distinctive contribution that a historical approach to the study of the Holocaust makes to young people's education. Not only does he question the adequacy of objectives focused on eliciting purely emotional responses; he issues a strong warning that turning...
The Holocaust in history and history in the curriculum
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Deepening post-16 students' historical engagement with the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Peter Morgan represents what is best about the reflective practitioner - an experienced teacher of some 15 years' standing, he continues to challenge himself and to seek ways to improve and develop his classroom practice. Deeply influenced by the pedagogy and resources that he encountered on the CPD of the Institute...
Deepening post-16 students' historical engagement with the Holocaust
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Berlin and the Holocaust: a sense of place?
Teaching History article
As more and more schools take students on visits to locations associated with the history of the Holocaust, history teachers have to find ways to make these places historically meaningful for their students. David Waters shows here how he introduced his students to the multiple narratives associated with the history...
Berlin and the Holocaust: a sense of place?
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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
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Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement
Teaching History article
Inspired by reading the work of Stephen Tuck, Ellie Osborne set out to design a new sequence of lessons that would help her students adopt a longer lens on the American civil rights movement. At the same time, Osborne wanted to put more emphasis on the agency and campaigns of activists,...
Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement
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Connecting past and present through the lens of enduring human issues: International Women’s Day protests
Teaching History article
While studying for his master’s degree in education, Arthur Casey became intrigued by research suggesting that analogies comparing past and present might improve students’ perceptions of the relevance of history. In this article he reports on the findings of his own small-scale research study, in which he used a present-day...
Connecting past and present through the lens of enduring human issues: International Women’s Day protests
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Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
Teaching History article
It seems that teapots really can talk. Eleanor Dimond took her undergraduate experience of studying material culture into the classroom, with startling results. Historians of material culture have developed distinctive evidential methods which, in stark contrast to typical GCSE and A-Level approaches, see a strong interplay between analysis of the physical attributes...
Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
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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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‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
Teaching History article
Clare Bartington noticed that her students’ focus on the specific kinds of question used in examinations appeared to have undermined their understanding of how historians actually use sources. Instead of approaching the traces or ‘leftovers’ of the past as potential sources of evidence in relation to a particular question, her students believed...
‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
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Developing KS3 students’ ability to challenge their history curriculum through an early introduction of significance
Teaching History article
Offered five weeks to teach ‘whatever he wanted’ to Year 7, Andrew Slater decided that he wished to tackle the concept of significance head-on early in his students’ time in his school. He chose the expectedly unfamiliar substantive content of the Khmer Empire, challenging his students to justify the significance of...
Developing KS3 students’ ability to challenge their history curriculum through an early introduction of significance
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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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‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
Teaching History article
While looking to revamp his department’s Year 7 enquiry on the Tudors, Jack Mills turned to historiographical debates regarding the ‘mid-Tudor crisis’ to inform his curricular decision making. In doing so, Mills noted that the debate hinged on interpretations of substantive concepts such as ‘crisis’. He therefore also drew on previous...
‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
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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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Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
Teaching History article
Nathanael Davies explains his radical rethink of how to teach transatlantic slavery. He explains how he came to question his earlier approach of focusing on the causation of ‘abolition’ and ‘emancipation’ and, instead, allowed scholarship, sources and his own students’ meaning-making to guide him to a different, and much more...
Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
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The dialogic dimensions of knowing and understanding the Norman legacy in Chester
Teaching History article
Michael Bird and Thomas Wilson focus their attention directly on the voices of pupils, in dialogue with their teacher and with each other, as they draw inferences from differing sources about the Norman legacy in Chester. By carefully examining dialogue stimulated by these sources, Bird and Wilson demonstrate not only...
The dialogic dimensions of knowing and understanding the Norman legacy in Chester
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Couching counterfactuals in knowledge when explaining the Salem witch trials with Year 13
Teaching History journal article
Puzzled by the shrugs and unimaginative responses of his students when asked certain counterfactual questions, James Edward Carroll set out to explore what types of counterfactual questions would elicit sophisticated causal explanations. During his pursuit of the ‘gold standard’ of counterfactual reasoning, Carroll drew upon theories of academic history in...
Couching counterfactuals in knowledge when explaining the Salem witch trials with Year 13
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Right up my street: the knowledge needed to plan a local history enquiry
Journal article
Inspired by the claim that local history can be taught effectively ‘Any time, any place, anywhere’, Katharine Burn and Jason Todd took up the challenge of planning Key Stage 3 enquiries related to an unusual and diverse, but frequently neglected and often despised, corner of Oxford. They sought not merely...
Right up my street: the knowledge needed to plan a local history enquiry
