Disciplinary concepts
Although history teachers, education researchers and curriculum designers may use different terms, all of them recognise that learning history involves the development of both substantive knowledge (the ‘stuff’ of history) and familiarity with the ‘second-order’ or procedural concepts, that shape the way in which the ‘stuff’ or ‘substance’ is understood, organised and debated, as well as the ways in which it is actually generated. Lists of these ‘disciplinary concepts’ have varied slightly over the years, but each of the following six areas of conceptual understanding are specifically named in the current National Curriculum and (individually or collectively) form the focus of specific assessment objectives at GCSE and A-level. None of them can be taught separately from the substance of history, but effective planning needs to encompass and address them all.
Cause and consequence
- Film: What's the wisdom on... Consequence
- Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
- Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments
- What’s The Wisdom On... Consequence
- Moving Year 9 towards more complex causal explanations of Holocaust perpetration
- Film: What's the wisdom on... Causation
Change and continuity
- Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
- ‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
- Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
- Film: What's the wisdom on... Change and continuity
- Teaching Year 9 to argue like cultural historians
- What’s The Wisdom On... change and continuity?
Similarity & difference
- Film: What's the wisdom on...Similarity and Difference
- What’s The Wisdom On... Similarity and difference?
- Cunning Plan 177: teaching about life in Elizabethan England by looking at death
- ‘Man, people in the past were indeed stupid’
- Triumphs Show 167: Keeping the 1960s complicated
- Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution
Significance
- Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Significance
- What’s The Wisdom On... Historical significance
- Anything but brief: Year 8 students encounter the longue durée
- Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
- Significance
- Of the many significant things that have ever happened, what should we teach?
Evidence
- Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
- It’s just reading, right? Exploring how Year 12 students approach sources
- Dialogue, engagement and generative interaction in the history classroom
- What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Histories of education – and society?
- Historical learning using concept cartoons
- Building local history into the curriculum
Interpretations
- What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Histories of education – and society?
- Historical learning using concept cartoons
- Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
- Triumphs Show 182: A public lecture series
- What Have Historians Been Arguing About... medieval science and medicine?
- ‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing