Consequence easily becomes ‘causation’s forgotten sibling’, as Fordham noted, in the title of a workshop presented at the 2012 Historical Association conference. The choice to treat consequence separately from causation in this series of articles is, therefore, a very deliberate one. Yet an emphasis on the importance of consequences should...

Inspired by the claim that local history can be taught effectively ‘Any time, any place, anywhere’, Katharine Burn and Jason Todd took up the challenge of planning Key Stage 3 enquiries related to an unusual and diverse, but frequently neglected and often despised, corner of Oxford. They sought not merely...

Bjorn Wansink and his co-authors have aligned their teaching of a recent and controversial historical issue – the Cold War – in the light of a contemporary incident. This article demonstrates a means of ensuring that students understand that different cultures’ views of their shared past are nuanced, rather than monolithic – a different concept in philosophy as well as in...

What, exactly, is learned knowledge - and why does it matter in history teaching? Michael Fordham seeks to use the general tenets of cognitive psychology to inform the debate about how history teachers might get the best from their students, in particular in considering the role of memory. Fordham surveys the latest research concerning memory while also arguing that remembering does matter in history...

Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation. It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their ‘signpost sentences'. She found herself showing students how an academic historian anticipates a chunk of argument in a single, well-turned, opening sentence. Foster created an intervention in which students...

The knowledge that ‘flavours' a claim: towards building and assessing historical knowledge on three scales While marking some Year 11 essays, Kate Hammond found her interest caught by significant differences between one kind of strong analysis and another. Some scored high marks but were less convincing. The achievement in these...

Using regular, low-stakes tests to secure pupils' contextual knowledge in Year 10 Lee Donaghy was concerned that his GCSE students' weak contextual knowledge was letting them down. Inspired by a mixture of cognitive science and the arguments of other teachers expressed in various blogs, he decided to tackle the problem...

Editorial New Zealand - Developing an Historical Empathy Pathway with New Zealand Secondary School Students - Martyn Davidson, University of Auckland Cyprus - Deanna Troi and the Tardis: Does Historical Empathy have a Place in Education? Lukas N. Perikleous, University of Cyprus Brazil - An Investigation of the Ways in which...

The Facts Increasing numbers of trainee teachers are entering the profession with little or no history-specific training. Opportunities for graduates to increase subject knowledge alongside subject-based teaching practice in university centred school partnerships have been cut. Our research shows that 90% of respondents agreed that all trainees should receive a...

It is very common for people in politics and the media to make assumptions about what happens in history classrooms. Too often these preconceptions are based on little more than anecdote, examples from the Internet or memories of what someone experienced at school themselves. In this article, Catriona Pennell reports...

Editorial Sweden Ethical Values and History: a mutual relationship? Niklas Ammert, Linnaeus University (Kalmar)   Australia  Teaching History Using Feature Films: practitioner acuity and cognitive neuroscientific validation Debra Donnelly, University of Newcastle   Greece  The Difficult Relationship Between the History of the Present and School History in Greece: cinema as...

A new research project promises to have a significant impact not only on our teaching about the Holocaust but also on our understanding of how young people make sense of the past. Surveying up to 10,000 secondary students across the country and conducting a range of thematic and case studies...

Content  Editorial History teaching, pedagogy, curriculum and politics: dialogues and debates in regional, national, transnational, international and supranational settings Robert Guyver, University of St Mark & St John, Plymouth   Australia Scarcely an Immaculate Conception: new professionalism encounters old politics in the formation of the Australian National History Curriculum Tony...

Historical reasoning in the classroom: What does it look like and how can we enhance it? The history education community has long recognised that historical thinking depends on the interplay between substantive knowledge about the past and the procedural, or second-order, concepts that historians use to construct, shape and give...

The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) is a Cyprus-based organization that works to foster dialogue among history teachers and other educators across the divide in Cyprus. In one of their UN-funded projects, ADHR members worked with UK colleagues to shape a lesson sequence and resources on the Ottoman period...

Editorial Articles Eleni Apostolidou Teaching and Discussing Historical Significance with 15 year-old students in Greece Manuela Carvalho and Isabel Barca Students' Use of Historical Evidence in European Countries P. Checkley and C. Checkley ‘Future Teachers of the Past' - An initial analysis of Initial Teacher Training students and their preparation...

There are few periods in our history from which we turn with such weariness and disgust as from the Wars of the Roses. Their savage battles, their ruthless executions, their shameless treasons seem all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the ends for which men fought, the utter...

A school-designed, post-14 course on multi-cultural Britain since 1945  Robin Whitburn and Sharon Yemoh describe the design of a school-generated GCSE course on the challenges that British people faced in forging a multicultural society in post-imperial Britain. Drawing on their own research into their students' experience, they build a discipline-based case...

Department meetings have a range of purposes, and all teachers will be aware of some of the more tedious tasks that have to be completed at such meetings. The most exciting meetings for us are those where we can sit down as a history department and design a new enquiry....

In recent decades, a novel approach to history has emerged, called ‘big history', which provides an overview of all of human history, embedded within biological, geological and astronomical history covering the grandest sweep of time and space, from the beginning of the universe to life on Earth here and now....