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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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The ‘Super’ Saxons and the ‘Nasty’ Normans: an argument for investigating popular interpretations of history
Teaching History article
In this article Jane Card outlines the changing popular interpretations of one of the most familiar events in British history, the Norman Conquest. She makes the case for using visual and literary interpretations of the Conquest to engage pupils with thinking about the eleventh century, the subsequent centuries in which interpretations...
The ‘Super’ Saxons and the ‘Nasty’ Normans: an argument for investigating popular interpretations of history
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Triumphs Show: Migration and Empire: teaching the impact of Scots settlers
Teaching History feature
Migration and Empire 1830–1939 is the most popular topic studied for the Scottish Higher qualification. The course specification directs that students should be taught about the impact of Scots emigrants on the British Empire. Marking instructions and classroom practice, however, had historically emphasised the ‘contribution’ of Scots to the empire, while...
Triumphs Show: Migration and Empire: teaching the impact of Scots settlers
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Informed imaginings: using historian Tiya Miles to illuminate the lives of enslaved people
Teaching History article
An enslaved mother faces permanent separation from her nine-year-old daughter who is to be sold. She hurriedly places some items in a sack – a lock of her own hair, some pecan nuts, a tattered dress. The daughter, Ashley, keeps the sack and passes on its story to her children. Ashley’s...
Informed imaginings: using historian Tiya Miles to illuminate the lives of enslaved people
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What’s The Wisdom On… teaching local history
Teaching History feature
What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching. It draws on tried and tested approaches arising from teachers with years of experimenting, researching, practising, writing and debating their...
What’s The Wisdom On… teaching local history
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Finding fragments of change on Endell Street: an interdisciplinary approach
Teaching History article
Gemma Hargraves saw a history book recommended on social media and looked it up. Within the first pages she realised this was a book she needed to share with her students due to the positive female role models and other resonant themes. This article outlines a short sequence of lessons...
Finding fragments of change on Endell Street: an interdisciplinary approach
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Teaching History 186: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 186: Removing Barriers
We have in the past two years encountered a series of novel barriers to learning. Are the schools open? Are both students and teachers well enough to be there? How do you monitor learning on a Friday afternoon across a series of patchy network...
Teaching History 186: Out now
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‘Weaving’ knowledge
Teaching History article
Diane Relf was concerned by what felt like an unbridgeable gulf between Year 7’s vocabulary and comprehension, and her aspirations both for their inclusion in history and their later academic success. As a subject leader without the benefit of any history-specific training at the start of her career, she embarked on...
‘Weaving’ knowledge
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Why history is the future: the centrality of historical thinking in the AI age
Teaching History article
Many young people, aware of the rapid development and widespread use of generative forms of artificial intelligence, assume that the knowledge and skills they will need to navigate their future bear little relationship to those offered by the study of history. In response to these assumptions, Kieran Lavis and Katharine Burn...
Why history is the future: the centrality of historical thinking in the AI age
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... The role of digital archives
Teaching History feature
Archives and the use of primary sources sit at the heart of working or studying within the discipline of history. In the twentieth century, digital humanities, and more specifically digital history, emerged as a discipline or sub-discipline alongside the development of computerised library systems, though its roots lie in the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... The role of digital archives
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To historicise is to exercise: going back to the past to interpret the present
Teaching History article
Mila Bammens and Bjorn Wansink were concerned about young people’s reactions to recent nuclear threats. In the second part of this article they set out a series of approaches and resources, used with young people in the Netherlands, to teach about nuclear weapons. The first part of the article sets...
To historicise is to exercise: going back to the past to interpret the present
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Teaching Jewish, Queer and Roma experiences of Nazi persecution
Teaching History article
In this article, Jacob Thorpe relates his attempts to humanise the teaching of Nazi persecutions by focusing on individuals’ experiences and identity. Deep immersion in the sources enabled him to find the stories fitting his key themes of love, community, identity and culture. Thorpe built on the work of other...
Teaching Jewish, Queer and Roma experiences of Nazi persecution
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Challenging misconceptions and highlighting hidden histories in teaching the Holocaust
Teaching History article
A conversation with some undergraduate students prompted Rob Kanter to explore how his own historical research on Jewish–Muslim relations could be integrated into the history curriculum in secondary schools. Kanter identified two stories of Muslim rescue during the Holocaust which he shares here to empower teachers to challenge misconceptions and to...
Challenging misconceptions and highlighting hidden histories in teaching the Holocaust
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Rethinking citizenship through the history classroom, a global perspective
Teaching History article
Teaching history and politics in an international school in Beijing, Andrew Carey found himself in a position to reflect on the teaching of citizenship in schools, particularly the concepts involved in global citizenship. He describes how global citizenship is integrated into schemes of work for a concept-based humanities course in...
Rethinking citizenship through the history classroom, a global perspective
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Cunning Plan 202: interdisciplinary teaching of landscape through time
Teaching History feature
From a young age I have been fascinated by the history of the landscape. Family holidays in the Lake District offered early encounters with the past that did not come mediated through textbooks, but through place. Driving over Dunmail Raise, my father would point out that the ancient ruler, Dunmail...
Cunning Plan 202: interdisciplinary teaching of landscape through time
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How hidden local histories and geographies can be used to overcome imperial amnesia
Teaching History article
This article summarises the learning from a project that uses local history and geography to support the process of diversifying and decolonising the school curriculum. The project was inspired by a seminar within the University of Sheffield PGCE course, initially taught by Mark Cottingham and intended for history student teachers. As the...
How hidden local histories and geographies can be used to overcome imperial amnesia
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Cunning Plan… for using Lego to aid disciplinary understanding
Teaching History feature
The idea that history is constructed can be a difficult concept for pupils to grasp, yet it is foundational to disciplinary understanding and crucial if pupils are to understand both the relevance of history and the responsibility of the historian. When asked about the nature of history, many of my...
Cunning Plan… for using Lego to aid disciplinary understanding
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Move Me On: Supporting SEND students
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: Supporting SEND students
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Teaching History 185: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 185: Missing stories
In their prologue to What is History Now? (published earlier this year to mark the 60th anniversary of E.H. Carr’s seminal work), Helen Carr and Susannah Lipscomb both admit to owning a ruler of rulers: a list of monarchs of Britain from the year...
Teaching History 185: Out now
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Making substantive concepts (do the) work
Teaching History article
Several years back, Alistair Dickins and Tommy-James Alexander realised they wanted to incorporate explicit consideration of substantive concepts into their Key Stage 3 teaching, to enable students to make sense of and order information about the past and to offer students a usable language that would support their historical reasoning. In reality,...
Making substantive concepts (do the) work
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Using the concept of place to help Year 9 students to visualise the complexities of the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives,...
Using the concept of place to help Year 9 students to visualise the complexities of the Holocaust
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Exploring a logical conceptualisation of continuity with Year 9 pupils
Teaching History article
As a PGCE student, Miles Eades confronted the challenge of teaching about change and continuity. Reflecting on scientific, mathematical and sociological conceptualisations of change as a constantly occurring process led him to reconsider the common characterisation of continuity in history as the opposite of or absence of change. Eades set...
Exploring a logical conceptualisation of continuity with Year 9 pupils
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Doing a Gombrich: Year 9 make connections by shaping big narratives
Article
Oliver Scott explains how he fused two goals: planning a new Year 9 history curriculum and finding a way to help Year 9 connect it all together. Inspired by the distinctive style of E.H. Gombrich, Scott decided to have his pupils write a grand narrative at mid- and end-year points. The narrative...
Doing a Gombrich: Year 9 make connections by shaping big narratives
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Look again: teaching about disability in history
Teaching History article
After listening to a talk by historian Phillipa Vincent-Connolly and following this up with reading about disability in history, Alex Fairlamb examined her own department’s teaching to consider how effectively it included narratives of disabled people. This was the beginning of a productive journey. She concluded that much more needed to be...
Look again: teaching about disability in history
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Triumphs Show: Seeing consequences in 3D
Teaching History feature
‘You think you’ve found a way to help our Year 7s explain historical consequence?’ My head of department sounded intrigued. ‘View them as shockwaves!’ I exclaimed. ‘Just like Boba Fett’s ship in Star Wars!’ My head of department raised an eyebrow.
It was September 2024, and I had just joined...
Triumphs Show: Seeing consequences in 3D
