Editorial: Crossing Boundaries

Read Teaching History 204: Crossing Boundaries

Boundaries take many shapes and forms, from lines to walls to marks on a map. Some are hard and some are permeable. As history teachers we are used to teaching and raising questions around boundaries, whether geographical borders or delineators of time. We also tend to work within the boundaries of the discipline of history, taking care to introduce students to the evidential standards that historians seek to uphold in their truth claims, ensuring that they can discern fictional embellishment and modelling the boundaries of an historical question.

Although there is reassurance in the rigour of our discipline, reaching out across boundaries can lead to connections, constructive dialogue and mutual enrichment.¹ This edition of Teaching History is full of history teachers and educators nudging at or crossing boundaries with the intention of developing students’ understanding of the discipline of history. Making connections, Mark Cottingham, Christine Winter and Katie Dennis build on the classic humanities partnership of history and geography to explore Sheffield’s largely hidden connections to Empire, colonialism and the trafficking of enslaved people. The authors emphasise the need for school pupils to understand the historical context that helps to explain modern geopolitics while also recognising the role physical and cultural geography has played in shaping historical events.

Following the Empire theme, Joe Smith and Fiona Barclay worked with a group of Scottish teachers on taking a decolonised approach to Scotland’s relationship with empire and particularly the impact of Scots settlers. In this edition’s Triumphs Show, several teachers from this project share enquiries involving possum skin cloaks and Merino sheep in Australia and residential schools in Canada. Questions of boundary crossing are raised not only from the Scots crossing the globe, but in the way various cultures were disturbed by settlement.

Jane Card, sharing a host of brilliant visual sources, challenges us to explore the boundaries between academic and popular interpretations of the Norman Conquest. Card raises the issue of common pupil preconceptions about the past, often deriving from popular interpretations. She warns that if such popular interpretations remain unexamined or unchallenged, they can encourage the abuse of history. Card chooses the Norman Conquest as a key site for exploring persistence and change in popular interpretations because visual and literary sources from the period abound. A quick search of the internet shows that strong views of the Conquest are held today. How far are your students able to compare academic with popular interpretations?

Gemma Hargraves, reflecting on her sequence of lessons using Wendy Moore’s Endell Street, found interdisciplinary connections with art and poetry. Endell Street housed a First World War military hospital led by female doctors. Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray, previously suffragettes, were happy to challenge the gender boundaries of their generation. Hargraves found that paintings of women from wartime and poetry gave richer and deeper opportunities for understanding changes in women’s experience across the period. Terry Graham pushes at various boundaries in his lesson sequence inspired by the work of historian Tiya Miles. All That She Carried tells the story of Rose, an enslaved mother in South Carolina, whose daughter, Ashley, was taken from her in 1852. Graham helps his students explore the boundaries of the discipline by examining how historians handle a dilemma. What is the historian’s role in establishing and interpreting evidence, when the source record is limited?

Sometimes, as history educators, we place boundaries around the content we teach. Some topics evoke challenging emotions and some feel too close to home. There is no denying that we live in difficult times and therefore students naturally ask challenging questions of their history teachers. Bammens and Wansink, working in the Netherlands, have devised a series of lessons that confront the threat of nuclear weapons and deal with contemporary threats in an historical way. History teachers who have found students asking questions about contemporary events will find their approach and their lessons thought-provoking. In the same way as Cottingham, Winter and Dennis, they have found that modern geopolitics are best explained through an historical lens.

There is more. In ‘What Have Historians Been Arguing About’, Michael Brown takes on the rich but complex historiography of Britishness in the eighteenth century, highlighting the importance of clarity around precise parameters, as well as reflection on naming conventions and definitions. Cunning Plan explores some clever uses of Lego as an analogy for history as a construct. Back Page Pick shows ways of using historic maps to help pupils cross time periods and investigate change. What’s the Wisdom On collates work on local history. However your year starts, this edition of Teaching History will supply ideas to help you reach out across boundaries. We hope it gives you ideas for making new connections, ones that you will want to share with colleagues within and beyond your immediate teaching community.

References

1 Barbour, I.G. (2000) When Science Meets Religion: enemies, strangers, or partners? HarperSanFrancisco.