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Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
Teaching History article
As part of her department’s effort to diversify the history curriculum, Paula Worth began a quest to research and then shape a lesson sequence around the Inkas. Her article shows how she allowed the new topic and its historiography to challenge and extend her own use of sources, particularly oral tradition....
Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
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Bringing school into the classroom
Teaching History article
The Secondary Education and Social Change (SESC) research project team at the University of Cambridge collaborated with four secondary school history teachers to produce resource packs for teaching Key Stage 3 pupils about post-war British social history through the history of secondary education.
In this article, Chris Jeppesen explains the...
Bringing school into the classroom
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What can rituals reveal about power in the medieval world? Teaching Year 7 pupils to apply interdisciplinary approaches
Teaching History article
Much has been written in recent years about how historical scholarship can be used to shape practice in the classroom. As an historian of the medieval period now working as an history teacher, Dhwani Patel offers a fresh perspective on these debates. During her PGCE year, Patel found herself reflecting...
What can rituals reveal about power in the medieval world? Teaching Year 7 pupils to apply interdisciplinary approaches
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Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in the KS3 history curriculum
Teaching History article
In this article, Dan Lyndon-Cohen makes the case that history departments should move from diversifying the curriculum to decolonising it. After reflecting on some examples of how he made the content of his lessons more representative, he explores how the influence of writers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Emma Dabiri...
Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in the KS3 history curriculum
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the long-term impact of the Black Death on English towns
A Polychronicon of the Past
In the summer of 1348, the Chronicle of the Grey Friars at Lynn described how sailors had arrived in Melcombe (now Weymouth) bringing from Gascony ‘the seeds of the terrible pestilence’. The Black Death spread rapidly throughout England, killing approximately half the population. While the cause of the disease, the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the long-term impact of the Black Death on English towns
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Themes over Time
HA Resources
The study of an aspect or theme in British history that consolidates and extends pupils'chronological knowledge from before 1066While the 2014 Curriculum sets out the broad focus of each particular content area, considerable choice has been left to history departments in determining which particular events or developments to include and...
Themes over Time
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Tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9
Teaching History article
Inspired by Jeanne Theoharis’s biography of Rosa Parks, Ed Durbin initially planned to challenge the ‘fable’ that had been constructed around her life. He soon realised, however, that he wanted to take the opportunity to get ‘behind’ the fable and help his students understand how and why it had been constructed. Drawing...
Tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9
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Reading with other readers in mind
Teaching History article
Peter Turner, along with his colleagues, wished to design a cross-curricular activity for post-16 students in history and English. The enquiry they devised addressed the issue of the changing reception of the classic novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the immediate aftermath of its publication, and...
Reading with other readers in mind
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Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
Teaching History article
Nathanael Davies explains his radical rethink of how to teach transatlantic slavery. He explains how he came to question his earlier approach of focusing on the causation of ‘abolition’ and ‘emancipation’ and, instead, allowed scholarship, sources and his own students’ meaning-making to guide him to a different, and much more...
Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
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Triumphs Show: Recovering the queer history of Weimar Germany in GCSE history
Teaching History feature
Berlin staged its first Christopher Street Day celebration in 1979. This queer pride event commemorated the Stonewall riots that took place a decade earlier in New York City, and it has continued to be a popular annual event in Germany. Its celebration of a landmark moment in American history, however,...
Triumphs Show: Recovering the queer history of Weimar Germany in GCSE history
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How history learners can ‘dig school’ under lockdown
Teaching History article
In March 2020, when Covid-19’s lockdown restrictions saw schools closed to the majority of children, Carenza Lewis quickly began thinking of ways to help both teachers and parents. Drawing on extensive experience of enabling children and young people to learn from practical engagement in archaeology, she came up with a...
How history learners can ‘dig school’ under lockdown
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How introducing cultural and intellectual history improves critical analysis in the classroom
Teaching History article
In his article in this journal just over a year ago, Steven Driver set out his vision for a less myopic range of topics in A-level coursework. In this edition, Driver demonstrates how he has built student enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, a topic which he had previously identified as...
How introducing cultural and intellectual history improves critical analysis in the classroom
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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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Exploring the importance of local visits in developing wider narratives of change and continuity
Rethinking religious rollercoasters
The authors of this article take a well-known structural framework for students’ thinking about the Reformation and give it a twist. Their Tudor religious rollercoaster is informed by local visits in their setting in Guernsey – an area where the local picture was not quite the same as the national...
Exploring the importance of local visits in developing wider narratives of change and continuity
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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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Triumphs Show 176: Using material culture as a means to generate an enquiry on the British Empire
Teaching History feature
Triumphs Show is a regular feature which offers a quick way for teachers to celebrate their successes and share inspirational ideas with one another. While the ideas are always explained in sufficient depth for others to be able to take them forward in their own practice, the simple format allows...
Triumphs Show 176: Using material culture as a means to generate an enquiry on the British Empire
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Year 7 challenge stereotypes about the Mexica
Teaching History article
After discussing a new book about the Mexica (Aztecs) during a routine meeting with a trainee teacher, Niamh Jennings decided to construct a sequence of lessons around the history of the Mexica Empire. Struck by the vivid storytelling of historian Camilla Townsend in her book Fifth Sun, and fascinated by...
Year 7 challenge stereotypes about the Mexica
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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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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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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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‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
Teaching History article
Having specialised in the history of material culture during her degree, Gabriella West was struck by the dismissive attitude of her pupils towards the study of material objects from the past. She therefore set out to find the perfect object through which to induct her Year 8 pupils into the history...
‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
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Couching counterfactuals in knowledge when explaining the Salem witch trials with Year 13
Teaching History journal article
Puzzled by the shrugs and unimaginative responses of his students when asked certain counterfactual questions, James Edward Carroll set out to explore what types of counterfactual questions would elicit sophisticated causal explanations. During his pursuit of the ‘gold standard’ of counterfactual reasoning, Carroll drew upon theories of academic history in...
Couching counterfactuals in knowledge when explaining the Salem witch trials with Year 13
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The Past, the Present and the Future of the Economic Crisis, through Greek Students’ Accounts of their History
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
This is an analysis of 97 written questionnaires given to university students’, prospective teachers’. Students were asked first to narrate the Greek state’s history, second to make predictions about the future. It took...
The Past, the Present and the Future of the Economic Crisis, through Greek Students’ Accounts of their History
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‘Compressing and rendering’: using biography to teach big stories
Teaching History article
In principle, Rachel Foster had long been aware of the value of creating an interplay between depth and overview across the history curriculum. But in practice, as she acknowledges here, she had tended to shy away from telling outline stories that encompassed a big chronological or geographical range. Recognising the...
‘Compressing and rendering’: using biography to teach big stories
