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
- Moving Year 9 towards more complex causal explanations of Holocaust perpetration
- Film: What's the wisdom on...Causation
- What’s in a narrative? Unpicking Year 9 narratives of change in Stalin’s Russia
- Changing thinking about cause
- Planning increasingly complex causal models at Key Stage 3
- What’s the wisdom on… Causation
Change and continuity
- 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?
- Cunning Plan 178: How far did Anglo-Saxon England survive the Norman Conquest?
- Dealing with the consequences
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
- 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?
- Active remembrance
Evidence
- Questions and answers about questions and answers
- Touching, feeling, smelling, and sensing history through objects
- Cunning Plan 181: Incorporating a more global perspective within Key Stage 3
- Beyond slavery
- ‘What is history?’ Africa and the excitement of sources with Year 7
- Being an historian
Interpretations
- Building Key Stage 5 students’ analysis of interpretations
- Teaching Year 9 to argue like cultural historians
- Unpicking the threads of interpretations
- Using the Harkness method to help post-16 students make confident historical claims
- Film: What's the wisdom on...Historical Interpretations
- Modelling the discipline