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Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
Teaching History feature
As Kristin Ross has persuasively argued, by the 1980s interpretations of the French events of May 1968 had shrunk to a narrow set of received ideas around student protest, labelled by Chris Reynolds a ‘doxa’. Media discourse is dominated by a narrow range of former participants labelled ‘memory barons’ –...
Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
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The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form
Teaching History article
Hark the herald tables sing! Achieving higher-order thinking with a chorus of sixth-form pupils
On 9 April 1930, a philanthropist called Edward Harkness donated millions of dollars to the Phillips Exeter Academy in the USA. He hoped that his donation could be used to find a new way for students to sit around a table...
The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form
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Nazi perpetrators in Holocaust education
Teaching History article
The Holocaust is often framed, in textbooks and exam syllabi, from a perpetrator perspective as a narrative of Nazi policy. We are offered a different orientation here. Interrogating and understanding the Holocaust involves understanding why the people who perpetrated the Holocaust did the things that they did. As Wolf Kaiser...
Nazi perpetrators in Holocaust education
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Polychronicon 140: Why did the Cold War End?
Teaching History feature
The end of the Cold War is a controversial subject. Contemporary analysts did not see it coming. Any explanation of its ending which seeks to build up a network of causation will therefore be forced to make arguments based on events whose significance was not necessarily seen at the time....
Polychronicon 140: Why did the Cold War End?
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Exploring and Teaching the Korean War
A secondary education publication of the Historical Association in partnership with the Korean War Legacy Foundation and World History Digital Education
The Korean War has been called ‘The Forgotten War’. Yet it was profoundly significant to the development of the Cold War. It had a cataclysmic impact on both North and South Korea which continues to affect both nations’ development to this day. And it continues to influence relationships between the...
Exploring and Teaching the Korean War
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Learning lessons from genocides
Teaching History article
‘Never again'? Helping Year 9 think about what happened after the Holocaust and learning lessons from genocides
‘Never again' is the clarion call of much Holocaust and genocide education. There is a danger, however, that it can become an empty, if pious, wish. How can we help pupils reflect seriously on...
Learning lessons from genocides
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Helping Year 9 debate the purposes of genocide education
Teaching History article
Connecting the dots: helping Year 9 to debate the purposes of Holocaust and genocide education
Why do we teach about the Holocaust and about other genocides? The Holocaust has been a compulsory part of the English National Curriculum since 1991; however, curriculum documents say little about why pupils should learn...
Helping Year 9 debate the purposes of genocide education
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Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Teaching History article
‘It made my brain hurt, but in a good way': helping Year 9 learn to make and to evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Why genocides occur is a perplexing and complex question. Leanne Judson reports a strategy designed to help students think about perpetration and evaluate and propose explanations for...
Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
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Mussolini's marriage and a game in the playground: using analogy to help pupils understand the past
Teaching History article
Diana Laffin and Maggie Wilson want their pupils to connect with people in the past and to experience some of their emotions. The emotional factor is a difficult one in history, both for pupils and professional historians. When studying Eden’s actions at Suez, for example, what we lack is a...
Mussolini's marriage and a game in the playground: using analogy to help pupils understand the past
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The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Much has been said and written about different learning styles in recent years. Some people have responded with evangelical enthusiasm, others exercise a more cautious approach, whilst a few disregard it completely. Certainly, there are...
The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
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Triumphs Show 133: Little Miss Cold War
Teaching History feature
Students can find it hard to understand and remember the differing schools of interpretation that they encounter at A2. The process of studying differing historiographic claims can also seem rather dry and tedious. It is crucial that they grasp differences in interpretation if they are to succeed in their examinations,...
Triumphs Show 133: Little Miss Cold War
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Using ‘Assessment for Learning' to help students assume responsibility
Teaching History article
Robin Conway's interest in student led enquiry derived from a concern to encourage his students to take much more responsibility for their own learning. Here he explains how his department gradually learned to entrust students with defining the enquiry questions and planning the kinds of teaching and learning activities to be...
Using ‘Assessment for Learning' to help students assume responsibility
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Polychronicon 144: Interpreting the 1930s in Britain
Teaching History feature
For students of my generation (born in 1954) the 1930s had a very clear identity; so, when the far-left Socialist Workers Party launched a campaign against unemployment, in 1975, with the slogan: ‘No Return to the Thirties', we all knew what they meant: unemployment, economic deprivation and the political betrayal...
Polychronicon 144: Interpreting the 1930s in Britain
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Nutshell 141 - HEDP
Teaching History feature
Why has the Institute of Education in London set up their ‘Holocaust Education Development Programme': isn't there already an awful lot of attention given to the Holocaust in schools?
It is true that the Holocaust has become ‘probably the most talked about and oft-represented event of the twentieth century' and...
Nutshell 141 - HEDP
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Polychronicon 141: Adolf Eichmann
Teaching History feature
Almost 60 years ago Adolf Eichmann went on trial for crimes committed against the Jews while he was in the service of the Nazi regime. His capture by the Israeli secret service and his abduction from Argentina triggered a number of journalistic books that portrayed him as a pathological monster...
Polychronicon 141: Adolf Eichmann
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Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Students make sense of new learning on the basis of their prior understandings: we cannot move our students' thinking on unless we understand what they already know. In this article, Edwards and O'Dowd report how they set out to scope a group of Y ear 8 students' prior learning and...
Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
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A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs
Teaching History article
Holocaust imagery is very familiar, clichéd even. How can we get pupils thinking about it in novel ways and seeing differently? Phillips reports work completed with his PGCE students, proposes a scaffold of questions with which to deconstruct images and applies it to archive images and to Hollywood representations. Images...
A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs
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Lions of the Great War: How are Sikh soldiers of the First World War seen today?
Key Stage Three History scheme of work
This Key Stage Three History scheme of work focuses in depth on the contribution of Sikh soldiers from the Indian subcontinent fighting on behalf of the UK between 1914 and 1918. It is designed to follow on from a focus on the First World War, probably in Year Nine and...
Lions of the Great War: How are Sikh soldiers of the First World War seen today?
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The Life & Significance of Alan Turing
The History of Science
In this podcast, Dr Tommy Dickinson of the University of Manchester, discusses the life and significance of Alan Turing.
The Life & Significance of Alan Turing
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Polychronicon 139: Civic denouncer: The lives of Pavlik Morozov
Teaching History feature
Germaine Greer (in the context of the Pirelli Calendar) once commented that the defining feature of a legend was that almost nothing said and believed about it was true. Pavlik Morozov, notorious both inside Russia and internationally for having denounced his father, almost certainly never did so. In September 1932, local...
Polychronicon 139: Civic denouncer: The lives of Pavlik Morozov
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'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
Teaching History article
This was an opportunity all good historians dream about. A large box crammed with artefacts about a soldier who fought in the First World War, just begging to be read, studied, sorted and organised. Being faced with such a wealth of uncatalogued primary evidence could have proved daunting enough without...
'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
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Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Laura Tilley recognised that her Year 9 students were finding it difficult to work out the intended message of visual propaganda. To help her students make better use of the substantive knowledge they already had, she devised an interactive activity using a presentation software, Prezi. This approach provided students with...
Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
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Podcast Series: The British Empire 1800-Present
Multipage Article
An HA Podcasted History of the British Empire 1800-Present featuring Dr Seán Lang of Anglia Ruskin University, Dr John Stuart of Kingston University London, Professor A. J. Stockwell and Dr Larry Butler of the University of East Anglia.
Podcast Series: The British Empire 1800-Present
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Working as a team to teach the Holocaust well: a language-centred approach
Teaching History article
Clear themes run through the work of the history department at Huntington School. A remarkably consistent emphasis on language and literacy, including work on speaking and listening of many types, is a hallmark of this sequence of six Year 9 lessons on the Holocaust, described in detail by head of...
Working as a team to teach the Holocaust well: a language-centred approach
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GCSE Podcasts: The Road to World War II
The Road to WW2
Aaron Wilkes and Katrina Shearman of Castle High School in Dudley discuss one of the key topics for modern world history students: The Road to World War II.
GCSE Podcasts: The Road to World War II
