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Teaching History 182: Out now
Article
Read Teaching History 182
The editorial in the previous edition of Teaching History began by recognising that 2020 would go down in history as the year of the coronavirus pandemic. The words you are reading now were written in the aftermath of another long period of partial school closure in...
Teaching History 182: Out now
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... medieval science and medicine?
Teaching History feature
The phrase ‘medieval science’ may seem nonsensical. ‘How can... a synonym for “backward”,’ the editors of The Cambridge History of Science Volume 2 ask rhetorically, ‘modify a noun that signifies the best available knowledge from the natural world?’ To answer their question, we must rethink our assumptions, both about the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... medieval science and medicine?
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Cunning Plan… for teaching medieval Muslim Spain
Teaching History feature
Good morning Year 7. Once upon a time in the mid-eighth century, a young prince was forced to abandon his home. His home was in Damascus, and there, one night, his family had been taken by surprise. The young prince belonged to a family called the Ummayads. The Ummayads had...
Cunning Plan… for teaching medieval Muslim Spain
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Who was Paul Downing and what can his life tell us about trans history?
Teaching History article
Among the ‘ordinary people’ in the past, who constitute the focus of this issue of Teaching History, will be many who have not conformed to the gender norms of their own time. For Black trans artist Remi Graves, encountering one such individual – Paul Downing – in the London Archives was...
Who was Paul Downing and what can his life tell us about trans history?
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What’s The Wisdom On... Historical significance
Teaching History feature
The idea of historical significance eludes tidy answers. It doesn’t thrive on the quick fix. Yet we do not need to be confused by it. It just requires some clear thinking about what it distinctively offers. In other words, we need to clarify overall curricular aims, and think big about...
What’s The Wisdom On... Historical significance
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Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
Teaching History feature
‘Who hates PEE paragraphs?’ A collective groan resounds around my classroom. ‘Today, Year 10 we are going to master PEE paragraphs, and make our written historical explanations explode.’
I always remember one deflated Year 10 student who said, ‘Miss, I just don’t get PEE paragraphs. I couldn’t do them in Year 7, and I still...
Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
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Britain’s forgotten colony? Why Hong Kong deserves a place in the story of empire
Teaching History article
Ollie Barnes encountered Hong Kong history on honeymoon and, powerfully, in the classroom in Nottinghamshire. Historical changes in the former colony’s present had resulted in increasing numbers of Hong Kongers arriving in school. This history demanded attention – important historical changes were in process and pupils needed to understand them....
Britain’s forgotten colony? Why Hong Kong deserves a place in the story of empire
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What’s the wisdom on… Interpretations of the past
Teaching History feature
How often do your pupils actually look at the products of historians – their scholarly writing, their debates, their to-and-fro of argument?
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...
What’s the wisdom on… Interpretations of the past
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Unpacking the enquiry puzzle
Teaching History article
The defining qualities of a good enquiry question have been regularly revisited by contributors to Teaching History in the 25 years since Riley first outlined what he saw as three essential characteristics. Despite these endeavours, Ben Arscott notes that the properties of a good enquiry question remain somewhat elusive. His...
Unpacking the enquiry puzzle
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Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
Teaching History article
The enquiry sequence on which Alex Benger reports in this article was inspired by two specific concerns: a sense that history education must have more to contribute to young people’s understanding of and ability to confront the climate crisis; and a desire to help pupils to engage more broadly with...
Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
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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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Using extra-curricular opportunities to broaden students’ encounters with history
Teaching History article
In this article, Jess Angell shows how her department seeks to make extra-curricular activities accessible to all. There is a strong focus on involving professional historians, since so many students seem not to understand who historians are, or what they do. But the audience is wider than just history students:...
Using extra-curricular opportunities to broaden students’ encounters with history
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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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Tackling A-level students’ misconceptions about historical interpretations and the historiography of Scottish witchcraft
Teaching History article
Maya Stiasny was troubled by a stubbornly persistent flaw in her A-level students’ conception of historical interpretations. Students were seeing historians’ arguments as snapshots in time, emerging magically and unproblematically out of personal views, rather than crafted as a process. Stiasny wanted her students to understand that process as an academically rigorous...
Tackling A-level students’ misconceptions about historical interpretations and the historiography of Scottish witchcraft
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Teaching Year 9 to take on the challenge of structure in narrative
Teaching History article
Reflecting on challenges that had surfaced in their own and others’ efforts to get pupils to write historical narratives, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie went back to the drawing board to consider the disciplinary purposes of narrative. They used both historical scholarship and theoretical works by historians on narrative construction....
Teaching Year 9 to take on the challenge of structure in narrative
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Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
Teaching History article
Many history teachers will already be familiar with ‘meanwhile, elsewhere...’, a website offering freely downloadable homework resources on individuals, events and developments in world history. In this article the website’s creators, Richard Kennett and Will Bailey-Watson, set out a curricular rationale for the project. They argue that using homework tasks...
Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
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Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the reasons why generic models for teaching historical significance are never quite adequate, Rachel Foster found herself considering, instead, the specific contexts in which arguments about historical significance arise. These reflections took her to the fascinating example of stately homes. Drawing on scholarship such as that of Peter...
Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
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Integrating heritage education and public history at school
Teaching History article
As a busy teacher of history and part-time doctoral student exploring history, heritage and identity, Joris thought a lot about heritage, students’ understanding of heritage and how such ideas could best be brought into the history classroom. Meanwhile, he discovered that the buildings next to his school were about to...
Integrating heritage education and public history at school
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Why do we continue to study the Holocaust?
Teaching History article
Educators at Imperial War Museums (IWM) have been leading voices in Holocaust education since the Holocaust Exhibition opened at IWM London in June 2000. In this article, Clare Lawlor shares the design of IWM’s new Holocaust Learning Programme for schools, and the pedagogic research that underpinned the design process. The...
Why do we continue to study the Holocaust?
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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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Learning history outside the classroom in an age of climate crisis
Teaching History article
Helen Snelson has long been an enthusiastic advocate for learning history outside the classroom. In recent years, as the extent of the climate crisis has become ever more apparent, she has been rethinking her approach to teaching within and about the historic environment. In this article, written in consultation with Adrian Gonzalez, she focuses...
Learning history outside the classroom in an age of climate crisis
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How including histories of trees can connect the past with the present and the future
Teaching History article
Barbara Trapani’s article sprung from, and is written in, hope. Through introducing the history of, specifically, Europeans’ relationships with trees in Madeira, the Banda Islands and Britain, Trapani enabled her Year 8 pupils to appreciate the ways in which exploitative nations have used irreplaceable resources and profoundly altered ecosystems and landscapes...
How including histories of trees can connect the past with the present and the future
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Using narratives and big pictures to address the challenges of a 2-year KS3 curriculum
Teaching History article
Faced with cutting her Key Stage 3 curriculum to two years, Natalie Kesterton and her department were determined to do more with less. Not only did they want to ensure that their pupils developed a secure, wide-ranging knowledge of British and world history, they also wanted to address deficits in pupils’...
Using narratives and big pictures to address the challenges of a 2-year KS3 curriculum
