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How representing women can convey a more complex narrative of the Russian Revolution to Year 9
Teaching History article
Barbara Trapani was troubled by the oversimplified judgements her students were making about the Russian Revolution. Could the women of the revolution help her students overcome their tendency to focus on success and failure? Trapani revised her enquiry, selecting stories of women who could ‘illuminate’ a longer, more complex history of...
How representing women can convey a more complex narrative of the Russian Revolution to Year 9
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Three strategies to support pupils’ study of historical significance
Teaching History article
When Paula Worth met with history-teaching colleagues to explore how they could improve their teaching about historical significance, she found that she was far from alone in finding the process a daunting one. Prompted to investigate the difficulties she had encountered, Worth realised that that she had previously reached for...
Three strategies to support pupils’ study of historical significance
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Cunning Plan... for studying medieval Ghana and Aksum
Teaching History feature
This Cunning Plan details an enquiry that I developed in order to achieve two curricular goals: to diversify our historical content and to help students to improve their disciplinary thinking and writing about similarity and difference. The enquiry addresses medieval Africa, specifically the East African kingdom of Aksum (approximately 300...
Cunning Plan... for studying medieval Ghana and Aksum
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How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
Teaching History article
While history teachers (and examiners) regularly invite students to consider what cartoons or paintings reveal about contemporary attitudes to particular social or political developments, such sources are often difficult to interpret and to use appropriately. Drawing on a wealth of detailed research and a passion to support teachers and students with...
How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
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Exploring and Teaching Twentieth-Century History
A secondary education publication of the Historical Association
This resource is free to everyone. For access to our library of high-quality secondary history materials along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of history teachers and subject leaders, join the Historical Association today
For a long time, history curricula on the 20th century prioritised...
Exploring and Teaching Twentieth-Century History
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Why this? Why now? Reviewing your history curriculum
North West History Forum keynote
Richard Kennett gave the keynote at the first HA North West History Forum at the end of January. He has turned his talk into this article so more of us can benefit from his thinking about curriculum.
This piece is unashamedly about curriculum. Put simply, curriculum is what stuff we choose...
Why this? Why now? Reviewing your history curriculum
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Teaching 20th-Century History Resources
Article
We hope you enjoyed reading Exploring and Teaching Twentieth-Century History. To help you explore the topic further we’ve put together a selection of just a few additional 20th-century history and teaching resources below.
All these resources are available free to HA Secondary Members – find out more about Secondary Membership.
20th-century history podcast series
We have recorded...
Teaching 20th-Century History Resources
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‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
Teaching History article
Clare Bartington noticed that her students’ focus on the specific kinds of question used in examinations appeared to have undermined their understanding of how historians actually use sources. Instead of approaching the traces or ‘leftovers’ of the past as potential sources of evidence in relation to a particular question, her students believed...
‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
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Film: Making an effective History curriculum
Workshop Film: Yorkshire History Forum 2018
Richard Kennett is a senior leader, teacher, blogger, text-book author and member of HA secondary committee. In November 2018, Richard visited the Yorkshire History Forum to talk about his school’s experience of reviewing and re-planning their Key Stage 3 curriculum. This film is of Richard’s keynote speech at the Forum....
Film: Making an effective History curriculum
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Move Me On 167: Frames of reference
Teaching History feature
This feature is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development.
This issue’s problem: Eleanor Franks doesn’t really understand her students’ frames of reference and the difficulties that many of them have in making sense of the particular historical phenomena she is teaching them about.
Eleanor Franks,...
Move Me On 167: Frames of reference
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Investigating ‘sense of place’ with Year 9 pupils
Teaching History article
Confined to his home during lockdown in 2020, teacher Josh Mellor became eager to explore the history of the physical environment on his doorstep. After reading about different approaches to using environmental history in the classroom, Mellor decided to design an enquiry to explore the changing landscape of the Fens in...
Investigating ‘sense of place’ with Year 9 pupils
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Recorded webinar: The People of 1381
Article
This lecture with Adrian Bell, Helen Lacey and Helen Killick introduces key findings of the AHRC-funded project The People of 1381. Which people and social groups were involved in England’s biggest pre-civil war revolt? How much can we find out about their lives: where did they come from, what actions...
Recorded webinar: The People of 1381
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What’s the wisdom on… Causation
Teaching History feature
What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching. It draws on tried and tested approaches arising from teachers with years of experimenting, researching, practising, writing and debating their...
What’s the wisdom on… Causation
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Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
Teaching History feature
How can we interest students in the world of ideas? How can we help them to see how important ideas were in shaping and reflecting the world of the Victorians? Working with the overarching enquiry question, ‘Why did some Victorians believe in progress in the nineteenth century and others did not?’ I devised...
Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
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The Effect of Prior Knowledge on Teaching International History
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
The students’ prior knowledge is considered to be a factor of paramount importance to the learning process, particularly when teaching history in a diverse and multicultural learning environment. This paper explores the issue...
The Effect of Prior Knowledge on Teaching International History
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Learning from the Aftermath of the Holocaust
Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 14, Number 2 – Spring/Summer 2017
ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
In this article I seek to encourage those involved in Holocaust education in schools to engage not just with the Holocaust but also with its aftermath. I conceptualise the latter in terms of two...
Learning from the Aftermath of the Holocaust
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Triumphs Show 193: Year 8 imagine the First World War trenches
Article
Deep into my PGCE year, I found myself discussing with my mentor how to pre-empt the barriers to understanding the past that students may face. One barrier we discussed was presentism: the tendency of students to interpret the past in light of their own modern knowledge, values and experiences. In particular, we considered...
Triumphs Show 193: Year 8 imagine the First World War trenches
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Studying our own school’s archives to promote historical understanding in Year 7
Teaching History article
Helen Southwood here sets out an example of a hyperlocal history study the focus of which is her own school. She presents a rationale both for the study of hyperlocal history as a means of engaging students and developing their skills, and for the pedagogical use of previously uncatalogued school archives....
Studying our own school’s archives to promote historical understanding in Year 7
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the impact of the English Reformation
Teaching History feature
Since the first stirrings of religious reform in the sixteenth century, people have been writing the history of the Reformation, debating what happened and why it happened. John Foxe arguably became the first historian of the English Reformation when he published Actes and Monuments in 1563. Better known as ‘The...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the impact of the English Reformation
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Teaching History 174: Structure
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial (Read article)
03 HA Secondary news
04 HA update
08 Austin’s narrative: an exploratory case study, with Year 8, into what kinds of feedback help students produce better historical narratives of the interwar years – Alex Rodker (Read article)
16 Cunning Plan: Teaching Year 8 to create and...
Teaching History 174: Structure
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Broadening Year 7’s British history horizons with Welsh medieval sources
Teaching History article
Hiscox wanted to broaden her students’ understanding of the complexity of the British past, and developed an enquiry into the Norman Conquest of Wales to help achieve that aim. Hiscox reports her enquiry design and its outcomes, sharing how she broadened both content and the types of sources that students...
Broadening Year 7’s British history horizons with Welsh medieval sources
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Why history teachers should not be afraid to venture into the long eighteenth century
Teaching History article
As ardent advocates of eighteenth-century history, Rhian Fender and Stephen Ragdale were determined to ensure that the period found a secure place within their department’s Key Stage 3 curriculum. Given the extraordinary range of contrasts that epitomise the long eighteenth century, and only ten lessons within which to explore them,...
Why history teachers should not be afraid to venture into the long eighteenth century
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Imagining cities: exploring historical sites as contested spaces
Teaching History article
Geraint Brown and Matt Stanford share the daunting challenge and intriguing opportunities that are presented by leading a school history trip to a site as complex as Berlin. That the city is a palimpsest, layered with stories and tissued with conflicting identities, experiences and meanings, makes planning a trip extremely...
Imagining cities: exploring historical sites as contested spaces
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Cunning Plan 192: A suggested itinerary for visiting Berlin
Teaching History feature
The principles and approaches outlined in our article on Pages 59 to 64 of this edition can be applied to any site, although not necessarily all on the same trip! If you are visiting Berlin, and you want to examine it as a contested space, in what order might you...
Cunning Plan 192: A suggested itinerary for visiting Berlin
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Polychronicon 166: The ‘new’ historiography of the Cold War
Teaching History feature
A great deal of new writing on the Cold War sits at the crossroads of national, transnational and global perspectives. Such studies can be so self-consciously multi-archival and multipolar, methodologically pluralist in approach and often ‘decentring’ in aim, that some scholars now worry that the Cold War risks losing its coherence as a distinct object of...
Polychronicon 166: The ‘new’ historiography of the Cold War
