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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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Building an overview of the historic roots of antisemitism
Teaching History article
‘But I still don't get why the Jews': using cause and change to answer pupils' demand for an overview of antisemitism
Research by the Centre for Holocaust Education has suggested that students need and want more help with building an overview of the historical roots of antisemitism and that they...
Building an overview of the historic roots of antisemitism
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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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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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Geography in the Holocaust: citizenship denied
Teaching History article
In this article David Lambert argues powerfully for teachers of the humanities to place citizenship at the centre of their work. He seeks to demonstrate that the division between subject-boundaries needs to be broken through if students are not to be denied what they are entitled to: an understanding of...
Geography in the Holocaust: citizenship denied
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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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Bringing Rwanda into the classroom
Teaching History article
A short 20 years: meeting the challenges facing teachers who bring Rwanda into the classroom
As the twentieth anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda approaches, Mark Gudgel argues that we should face the challenges posed by teaching about Rwanda. Drawing on his experience as a history teacher in the...
Bringing Rwanda into the classroom
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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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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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Triumphs Show 117: Helping Year 9 to think and feel their way through the origins of the Holocaust
Teaching History feature
Dave Woodcraft is passionate about engaging students and making them care about the past. He is unrepentant about wanting his lessons to have an emotional impact and a relevant, immediate appeal. To this end, he frequently uses modern parallels in his classroom to make the point that issues in the...
Triumphs Show 117: Helping Year 9 to think and feel their way through the origins of the Holocaust
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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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Teaching the Holocaust: the experience of Vad Vashem
Teaching History article
No institution is better known for its continuing work on the Holocaust than Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem. In this article Richelle Budd Caplan offers guidelines for teachers, based on its unrivalled experience. She demands that our teaching of this subject should aim to restore the identities of the victims. To do...
Teaching the Holocaust: the experience of Vad Vashem
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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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Challenging stereotypes and avoiding the superficial: a suggested approach to teaching the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Alison Kitson provides a rationale for a scheme of work for Year 9 (13-14 year-olds). She argues that teachers should analyse the kind of historical learning that is taking place when the Holocaust is studied. Critical of the assumption that learning will take place as a result of exposure, she...
Challenging stereotypes and avoiding the superficial: a suggested approach to teaching the Holocaust
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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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'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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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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Parallel catastrophes? Uniqueness, redemption and the Shoah
Teaching History article
Nicolas Kinloch’s 1998 review of Michael Burleigh’s Ethics and Extermination in Teaching History, 93, sparked a debate amongst our readers about the teaching of the Holocaust, concerning both rationales and practical approaches. Citing the damage caused to pupils’ understanding by a Spielberg view of history, he emphasised that the rationale...
Parallel catastrophes? Uniqueness, redemption and the Shoah
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Beyond the classroom: developing student teachers' work with museums and historic sites
Teaching History article
Working visits to historical sites for the purposes of developing pupils’ historical understanding can be extremely useful. As part of their training, student teachers need to acquire understanding and skills in the planning and management of worthwhile ‘fieldwork’. This work can be very powerful indeed if it emerges from co-operation...
Beyond the classroom: developing student teachers' work with museums and historic sites
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From horror to history: teaching pupils to reflect on significance
Teaching History article
In this detailed account of the first stages of a lesson sequence for Year 9 (13-14 year-olds), Kate Hammond sets out the tensions that must be examined and resolved when planning and teaching this most demanding of topics. How can young teenagers be helped to develop a mature response to...
From horror to history: teaching pupils to reflect on significance
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Making history curious: Using Initial Stimulus Material (ISM) to promote enquiry, thinking and literacy
Teaching History article
The idea of gaining pupils’ attention, interest and curiosity at the start of the lesson with an intriguing image, story, analogy or puzzle has long been used by our best history teachers. Michael Riley, through writing and inset, popularised the term ‘hook’ and emphasised its special role at the start...
Making history curious: Using Initial Stimulus Material (ISM) to promote enquiry, thinking and literacy
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Lenses, mirrors and bridges: one department’s holistic approach to diversifying and decolonising local history
Teaching History article
As was the case for many heads of history, Jack Brown was prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to reflect afresh on the content and questions asked within his school’s history curriculum, paying particular attention to local history. In this article he sets out the principles and...
Lenses, mirrors and bridges: one department’s holistic approach to diversifying and decolonising local history
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Causation maps: emphasising chronology in causation exercises
Teaching History article
Analogies for teaching about causation abound. Rick Rogers is alert, however, to the risks inherent in drawing on everyday ideas to explain historical processes.
What most often gets lost is the importance of the chronological dimension; both the length of time during which some contributory causes may have been present,...
Causation maps: emphasising chronology in causation exercises
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Building local history into the curriculum
Teaching History article
Neil Bates and Robert Bowry have chosen to tackle the issue of curriculum coherence by including local history, both as starting point for new students joining the school in Year 7 and as a golden thread running throughout their Key Stage 3 curriculum. In this article they explain the rationale...
Building local history into the curriculum
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Polychronicon 160: Interpreting 'The Birth of a Nation'
Teaching History feature
Controversial from the first year of its release in 1915, 'The Birth of a Nation' has been hailed as both the greatest film ever made and the most racist. On 8 February 1915, it premiered in Los Angeles as 'The Clansman', the name of the novel and play upon which...
Polychronicon 160: Interpreting 'The Birth of a Nation'
