Teaching the enquiry question: What does the fight for the Lincolnshire Fens reveal about attitudes towards the land?

After reading Hawkey’s History and the Climate Crisis and Verity Morgan’s article in Teaching History, 194, I knew that I needed to revisit Boyce's Imperial Mud for my Year 8 curriculum. Morgan had given me the idea that I could simply adjust the focus of some of my enquiries, rather than writing new enquiries, so that I could include environmental history in my curriculum. This was my starting point.

When, however, I returned to Imperial Mud, I realised that I couldn’t do justice to this scholarship with a ‘light touch’ approach. My original enquiry on the agricultural revolution was going to have to change. I wanted to create an enquiry that would reveal to students the attitudes of different people to the land, to see what Boyce meant when he referred to the Fennish peoples’ ‘indigenous way of life’. I wanted students to be in awe of the human relationship with the land, to see how fragile this self-sufficiency was, to see that people resisted the attack on their land and I wanted this knowledge to feed into future enquiries about the British Empire and the making of America...