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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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Move Me On 153: Teaching about genocide
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Susie Cook is struggling to sustain an emphasis on developing historical knowledge and understanding in teaching about genocide.
Susie Cook worked for nearly ten years as a web designer before deciding to move into teaching. Once she had secured her place on the programme she spent several months...
Move Me On 153: Teaching about genocide
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Can we educate Year 9 in genocide prevention?
Teaching History article
Patterns of genocide: can we educate Year 9 in genocide prevention?
Alison Stephen, who has wrestled for many years with the challenges of teaching emotional and controversial history within a multiethnic school setting, relished the opportunity to link her school's teaching of the Holocaust with a comparative study of other genocides....
Can we educate Year 9 in genocide prevention?
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An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
Teaching History article
It is common practice to invite survivors of the Holocaust to speak about their experiences to pupils in schools and colleges. Systematic reflection on the value of working with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides and on how to make the most of doing so is rarer, however. In...
An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
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Helping Year 9 to engage effectively with ‘other genocides’
Teaching History article
In this article, Andy Lawrence returns to arguments made in Teaching History 153 about the importance of teaching young people about other modern genocides in addition to the Holocaust. Building on those arguments with his own rationale, Lawrence also acknowledges the constraints on curriculum time that compel all departments to...
Helping Year 9 to engage effectively with ‘other genocides’
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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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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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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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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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History, music and law: commemorative cross-curricularity
Teaching History article
James Woodcock continues his theme from Teaching History 138 about the difference between superficial, thematic cross-curricularity and much more rigorous interdisciplinarity. His concern is to retain rather than compromise the integrity of the subject disciplines. Woodcock argues that interdisciplinary working adds value to learning only when the knowledge and the distinctive...
History, music and law: commemorative cross-curricularity
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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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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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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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Limited lessons from the Holocaust?
Teaching History article
Limited lessons from the Holocaust? Critically considering the ‘anti-racist' and citizenship potential
Previous issues of Teaching History have seen extensive debate about the appropriateness of approaching Holocaust education with explicitly social or moral - as opposed to historical - aims. Rather than taking sides, Alice Pettigrew first acknowledges the range...
Limited lessons from the Holocaust?
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Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
Teaching History feature
The field of Holocaust studies has been hit by an intellectual earthquake whose precise magnitude and long-term consequences cannot be ascertained at this stage. In 2007 Saul Friedländer published The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945. The book has been rightly celebrated as the first victim-centred synthetic history...
Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
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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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Working 9–5: how painters, plumbers and programmers help our pupils understand the role of the historian
Teaching History article
Struck by the misinformation that their pupils were bringing from social media to the history classroom, Phillips and Jackson-Buckley were keen to help their pupils identify the signs of good quality history. They decided to focus on developing their pupils’ understanding of how history works, specifically, how historians construct their...
Working 9–5: how painters, plumbers and programmers help our pupils understand the role of the historian
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Stalin’s final years
Teaching History feature
Stalinism overshadows Soviet history. Few historical subjects are more controversial. Historians have read the years before 1928 as Stalin’s long rise to power, those after 1953 as an extended reckoning with the Stalinist dictatorship. Definitions of Stalinism fix the features, policies, and practices that constituted Stalin’s personal dictatorship between 1928...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Stalin’s final years
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Teaching History 201: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 201: Interpreting the Past
Interpreting the past is the daily bread-and-butter of history teaching. In each lesson, an history teacher interprets the past to their pupils, structuring and shaping the way in which they present historical material in order to form a coherent lesson. Planning lesson sequences...
Teaching History 201: Out now
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Cunning Plan… to teach about environmental history in the medieval period
Teaching History feature
As an undergraduate, following a traditional history course, I was surprised and intrigued, one sunny summer day, to find myself reading about sunspots and studying graphs of solar activity. My reading list for an essay on the social and economic history of the fourteenth century included the work of historians...
Cunning Plan… to teach about environmental history in the medieval period
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Approaches to teaching about national identities and belonging across the history curriculum
Teaching History article
How might ideas from social science help history teachers and their students make sense of multiple and hybrid identities in a complex world? Magnoff, Tengra and Walker explore their pupils’ thinking about identity over time and the ways in which they have sought through their long-term curriculum planning to develop...
Approaches to teaching about national identities and belonging across the history curriculum
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Teaching History 200: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 200: Telling Histories
In his recent book on the experiences of Parisians in the years leading up to the French Revolution, Robert Darnton describes the Tree of Cracow, a large chestnut tree in the garden of the Palais-Royal in central Paris.1 ‘Nouvellistes de bouche’ (oral newsmongers) gathered...
Teaching History 200: Out now
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Telling rich stories about women’s lives in the American West at GCSE
Teaching History article
Concerned by the absence of women’s voices in her school’s scheme of work on the American West, and struck by the narrow, male-dominated narrative in her GCSE textbook, Nicole Ridley set out to rethink the way the topic was taught. Galvanised by her research into different ways to integrate women’s history,...
Telling rich stories about women’s lives in the American West at GCSE
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
Teaching History feature
Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians’ aversion to sweeping generalisations meant that they typically conducted their research within the boundaries of the nation state. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of globalisation and the birth of the internet, new political, intellectual, and practical developments began...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
