Search

Based on a sample of the most commonly used textbooks and online teaching resources, we find that photos play a central but deeply problematic role in Holocaust education in the UK. The impact of photos on a generation of 'primarily visual learners' is significant. But an over-reliance on a set of problematic stock photos, inadequate or erroneous captioning, and a lack of prompts for a critical analysis of photos create problems. Their combined effect can adversely affect understandings of this difficult history, and limit the development of visual literacy skills required for tackling contemporary misinformation and visual indoctrination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid a growing national debate regarding the current health and future direction of the history curriculum in Britain, there have been numerous calls for an examination of its roles and purposes, and questions have been raised as to how far it engages an increasingly diverse student body. This article examines the perceptions and attitudes of students towards the history curriculum within the context of one secondary school in south-east England through an exploratory case study. The findings draw upon research undertaken with Year 9 students, through 105 completed questionnaires, and through focus group interviews conducted with 12 participants. Thematic analysis suggests that, although students very much value learning about British history, they would prefer a curriculum with a wider focus which incorporates broader global studies. Although the environment offered by the case study is not particularly socially diverse, there is evidence that some groups of students desire greater curriculum reform and inclusivity. As a case study, the results are not intended to be generalised outside of context, but merely to provide points of discussion regarding an area in which prior research has been somewhat limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing literature around reparative futures in education agrees on the importance of multiple and inclusive narratives for learning about the past. Indeed, it is recognised that multiplicity has to be part of a reparative account of history given the harms caused by single, exclusionary and hegemonic historical narratives. However, there is limited literature, pedagogical guidance or accounts of how multiple perspectives approaches apprehend competing narratives of the past specifically on questions of responsibility. Drawing on experiences in Cambodia and the UK – where violent and colonial pasts (and presents) are poorly apprehended in the formal school system – this paper reflects on the place and absence of histories of responsibility within history education. We do so in order to explore the potential role such histories can play in securing more just and inclusive presents and futures. We explore the relevance of multiple perspectives pedagogies for futures research and ask questions around how multiple perspectives can interact, including whether they are treated equally, decontextualised, relativised, or can be weighted ethically towards narratives that are seen to be more 'true' or more in service of reparative goals. We identify limitations in multiple perspectives approaches around questions of 'balance' and representation before reflecting on lessons from theorists engaged in postcolonial and decolonial thinking to parse the ethical and political opportunities afforded through concepts that redefine responsibility around implication, shared future responsibility, and mutual interdependence. • Reparative futures approaches in education agree that multiple and inclusive narratives are an important part of a reparative account of history. • We explore how multiple perspectives approaches have dealt with competing narratives about responsibility for past harms in Cambodia and the UK • We identify limitations in multiple perspectives approaches around questions of 'balance' and representation • We explore the potential value of concepts that redefine responsibility around collective implication and shared future responsibility [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although films based on historical events are usually criticized for their deviation from facts, this paper argues that such films can be used fruitfully in the classroom. Using the example of a course on Elizabeth I, the paper shows that films produced at different times and places can be presented and discussed in ways that demonstrate to students that interpretations of historical people and events are constantly changing and are shaped by the contexts in which they are produced. This method allows students to continue to appreciate films as art, rather than dismiss them because of their perceived historical errors, while it promotes thinking historically about evidence. While the article describes a specific class format and films about one person, it also discusses ways to adapt this model to other formats and topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a lesson plan for teaching the rise of the suffrage movement in Great Britain. Topics include the lessons include introducing the suffrage movement and its key players, examining the methods and goals of different suffrage groups, and discussing the government's responses to militant action, such as force-feeding.

This paper examines the potential of outdoor learning for supporting children's understanding of and attitude towards history. A class of primary school children participated in an intensive experiential, residential history programme. A range of data was collected before, during and after the residential programme, and the findings suggest that the experience had a positive impact on the children's attitude towards history and enabled many of the children to be able to easily recall highly specific factual knowledge. However, the children's understanding of history as a provisional construct was not developed, as it was not a strong feature of the programme. Nor was the experiential nature of the experience fully exploited. Overall the study suggests that such a programme has the potential to support children's learning of the past, but a deeper understanding of history, drawing on the benefits of outdoor learning pedagogy, needs to be planned for more explicitly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an empirical study that takes a multimodal analytical approach to examine how mobile technologies shape students' exploration and experience of place during a history learning activity in situ. In history education, mobile technologies provide opportunities for authentic experiential learning activities that have the potential to re-mediate students' understanding of space and place through enacted interaction, and to make the learning more memorable. A key question is how learners work with the physical and digital information in the context of that learning experience, and how this supports new experiences and understanding of space and place. Findings suggest that embodied mobile experiences foster the creation of both physical and digital markers, which were instrumental in concretizing the history experience and developing new narratives. The findings also show how different representational forms of digital information mediated interaction in specific ways and how digital augmentation can lead to conflation in student understanding of space and time. These findings inform our understanding of the value of mobile applications in supporting embodied learning experiences and provide key implications for pedagogical design, both in situ and back in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The History Workshop movement took its stance on the democratisation of history making, becoming notorious for its exuberant gatherings and impassioned ‘histories from below’. At the centre of the early Workshop was the British historian Raphael Samuel, who has been described as the personification of its intellectual and ethical politics. This paper examines Samuel’s role in the Workshop arguing that his distinctive intellectual personality was critical in shaping its early form and ethos. Drawing on a biographical approach, it explores the development of this persona over the course of his formative years. It argues that Samuel’s life history provides an insight into the renewed appeal of libertarian ideas in post-war British radical political and educational thought and that as an individual he illuminates the application of these ideas to the social role of the historian-educator. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses battlefields in Great Britain. Topics discussed include history of Great Britain, study of history and civil war in the country. Other topics which includes study and teaching of history, history curriculum and informal education are also discussed. Study of battles and War of the Roses are also mentioned.

This paper introduces the concept of the absent curriculum on the premise that the study of curriculum has been prone to privileging curricular presence to the exclusion of curricular absence. In order to address this imbalance and to articulate a theory of absence in the curriculum, the paper applies ideas derived from the philosophy of critical realism—‘absence’ and ‘totality’—to curriculum theory to conceive of the absent curriculum. The paper outlines three components of the absent curriculum: the null curriculum at the level of national curricular policy, the unselected curriculum at the level of school curricular planning and the unenacted curriculum at the classroom level of teacher delivery. This conceptual framework is illustrated by a case example of how the absence of the history of Muslim contribution from the teaching of the National Curriculum for history in four English schools formed an absent curriculum which prompted some of the research sample of 295 British Muslim boys to disengage from their learning of history. The paper concludes that the absent curriculum is a hidden curriculum that suggests to groups whose histories are missing from the national curricula that they are relatively insignificant citizens in the community of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study focuses on the comparison of the English and the Dutch primary history curriculum regarding the understanding of historical time. We compare different aspects of both curricula that can apply to other subjects as well, for example the question ‘what age would be appropriate to start a subject in primary school?’ Here, we emphasize that exposure to different learning processes is more important than pupils’ age and maturity. Drawing on analyses of curriculum documents, surveys (n?=?128) and interviews (n?=?25), we explored how the understanding of historical time is addressed in the intended and the implemented primary curricula for history. The analysis of the data indicates that teachers in both countries do not teach all objectives of the understanding of historical time. Although in England the history curriculum starts earlier, the episodic structure of the curriculum is not very helpful to support pupils’ understanding of historical time. In the Netherlands the framework of 10 eras is mostly taught chronologically; however, neither the sequence nor the dates of historical periods are explicitly taught. Apparently, the teaching and learning of historical time in both countries needs improvement and we conclude with some suggestions to accomplish this. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research suggests that Muslim boys have become the ‘New Folk Devils’ of British education, who are characterised by resistance to formal education, especially at secondary level, and under-achievement. Since the 1990s, British Muslim boys would appear to have become increasingly alienated from compulsory schooling, especially in the humanities subjects which lack obvious instrumental value. This mixed-methods study of the performance of 295 secondary school British Muslim boys in their compulsory school history provides evidence which interrupts this narrative of the academic under-achievement and educational dis-engagement of Muslim boys, especially in the humanities subjects. When viewed through the prism of a laminated, non-reductive model of educational success, this indicative sample of British Muslim boys could be considered to have had significant success at a traditional humanities subject such as history intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, instrumentally and civically. This paper therefore proposes that history can provide a vital meaning-making tool to generate the success of Muslim boys in a variety of significant dimensions both in and out of school. It suggests how history can be more fully and effectively harnessed by teachers, parents and policy-planners to encourage internal integration and external social engagement in British Muslim pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My purpose is to test the proposition that academic historians are central - rather than peripheral - to the practice of public history. Public history generally refers to work that is pursued outside the academy, by the combined efforts of historians and lay people, often pursuing a heritage agenda with a strictly local remit. The resulting enlargement in the scope of historical enquiry is greatly to be welcomed, but it should not be treated as the sum total of public history, still less as grounds for disparaging the historical profession. The civic importance of academic historians arises from their ability to enhance public understanding of national and international issues which form no part of 'public' history as usually understood, because they transcend questions of locality and identity. The health of a representative democracy depends in part on the citizen's readiness critically to examine issues which do not affect him or her directly but which are in the public interest. This argument was first made by the leaders of the historical profession following the Second Reform Act in 1867. During and after the First World War it was put into practice, not least within the pages of History (taken over by the Historical Association in 1916). More recently the relationship between active citizenship and critical history has been re-asserted for the digital age by the History and Policy website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology has been long understood to play a central role in limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Evolving nuclear technology, increased access to information, and systematic improvements in design and manufacturing tools, however, should in time ease the proliferation challenge. Eventually, even developing countries could possess a sufficient technical ability. There is evidence that this transition has already occurred. The basic uranium-enrichment gas centrifuge, developed in the 1960s, has technical characteristics that are within reach of nearly all states, without foreign assistance or access to exportcontrollable materials. The history of centrifuge development in twenty countries supports this perspective, as do previously secret studies carried out by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom. Complicating matters, centrifuges also have properties that make the detection of a clandestine program enormously difficult. If conditions for the clandestine and indigenous production of weapons have emerged, then nonproliferation institutions focused on technology will be inadequate. Although it would represent a near-foundational shift in nuclear security policy, the changed technology landscape may now necessitate a return to institutions focused instead on motivations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent public discussions of curriculum and pedagogy that have accompanied the English National Curriculum review have been structured around clichéd dichotomies that generate more heat than light and that, as Robin Alexander has argued, reduce complex educational debates to oppositional and incompatible slogans. This paper begins by exploring the ways in which these dichotomies have structured recent debates and goes on to critically explore arguments in two contemporary debates, in the fields of history education and music education, assessing how these debates have been framed and the extent to which the debates can be considered fruitful and progressive. In the first case, we seek to show, through a discussion of ‘knowledge’ and ‘skill’ in history, that bipolar thinking is both inadequate and dysfunctional in relation to the matters under discussion. A third term – disciplinary understanding – is advocated and explored. In the second case, we demonstrate that dichotomous thinking about formal and informal music education has generated a debate that has become more sophisticated as various authors have problematised and critiqued informal learning. Analysis of these debates suggests that dichotomous thinking is pernicious when dichotomies are used only as slogans, although dichotomies can be generative when they are used as starting points to open discussion, not to close it. The paper suggests that the difference between the debates might be explained by the varying degrees of political involvement in them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century teaching manuals, reports of Her Majesty's Inspectors, history textbooks (‘readers’), other administrators' and teachers' accounts, policy documents and pupils' reminiscences to refute common and generalised assessments of the period (often by those who have not looked closely at these specific sources) that the teaching of history was a negative and boring experience, limited mainly and simply to reading comprehension of lengthy pages devoid of timelines and visual materials. The article concentrates on the experience of English elementary schools and draws comparisons between past and present teaching approaches. The findings show that there is extant evidence that there did exist in the late Victorian period clear conceptions of how to make history accessible to children, many of which reflect current best practice in the subject. They also show that many leading educationalists, and probably the teachers who read them, were aware of the need to make the subject accessible to children. The pupils themselves have left very little evidence of their experience, but some pupils were enabled to develop picturesque understandings of the past of benefit to their lives beyond the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the challenges facing British history teachers in 2014, as Great Britain prepares to commemorate the centennial of the First World War. Topics discussed include a January 2014 newspaper article by the British Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove, the alleged influence of nationalism on British education, and educational resources teachers can use to educate students about the war, either through battlefield tours or the use of the creative arts.

The decision of the Malaysian government to make it compulsory for students to pass History at the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia level in 2012 has attracted a positive response from Malaysian people. General public opinion on making history compulsory seems favourable on all sides of the social and political spectrum, but there remain many questions to be answered regarding the content of the history syllabus. Certain quarters have pushed for a re-evaluation of the syllabus that includes, amongst other things, the history of each Malaysian race and its leaders. This paper provides a comparison of the successes and failures of history education in developed countries including Britain, Australia and Canada, to consider whether Malaysia can learn from their experiences. It also provides an evaluation of Malaysia's history syllabus at Form Five level, particularly in terms of what, should properly constitute Malaysian history, as well as exploring the relevance of history teaching to the country's educational objectives. Finally, it explores problems of teaching history at school level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrutiny of the statements of UK politicians about the nature and purposes of teaching history in schools shows a strong desire to return to the 'traditional' form of history education which was dominant in the UK until the 1970s, with its strong emphasis on a positive and heroic rendering of the national past and movement away from the idea of history education to develop intellectual autonomy and provide historical perspectives on contemporary issues and problems. The concluding section of the paper considers the implications of this attempt to 'turn back the clock' and argues that it is intensifying the polarization between policymakers and history education professionals, perhaps ultimately leading to a form of school history which many young people consider to be irrelevant and implausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximately 7 out of 10 pupils in England choose to exercise their right to drop history as a school subject as soon as they are able to do so (at the age of 13 or 14). However, this 30% overall take‐up rate conceals massive variations between schools, with over 80% of pupils continuing to study the subject in some schools, and under 5% in others. The study which was funded by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority sought to gain greater insight into the factors influencing post‐compulsory take‐up of history, with a complex range of factors emerging as influencing these figures. The findings should be of interest to those involved in history education in high schools and for those involved with other subjects that are similarly affected by the freeing up of the post‐14 curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In response to recent discussions in the UK about the history national curriculum in schools, Cultural and Social History invited several historians to comment on the issues. Their responses to our questions have been interleaved and lightly edited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A response is presented to literary criticisms of the book "Empire in Question," by Antoinette Burton. The author agrees that she addresses the major imperial events in her study courses, analyzes the difficulties associated with teaching Victorian-era history classes, and explores how imperial political culture should be taught to students, citing the reading of "Jane Eyre" as one methodology. She explains how she prepares the Victorian history syllabus for her courses and notes that she will rework her curriculum to reflect the questions raised by these criticisms.

The article presents a roundtable discussion sponsored by the journal on the study of 20th century British history in Western Europe. The article features scholars from France and Germany including Martina Steber of the German Historical Institute in London, England, Antoine Capet of the Université de Rouen, and Laura Lee Downs of the Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales.

This contribution is an annotated interview with Mark Wallis, founder and director of the UK's most established professional live history company. Its main purpose is to provide insights into the practice of first-person interpretation and to explore the potential of this practice for historical understanding. Beyond this, it has a particular interest in the way in which professional live historians address ethical questions that inevitably arise in every serious attempt to re-present the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence-based policy-making has long been a significant method of government. Academics in a range of disciplines have contributed in supplying the evidence on which, in part, governments develop their policies. However, the arts and humanities, and in this case historians, are less well represented in this influencing role. In May 2008, The National Archives, in partnership with History and Policy, was awarded a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to run a series of workshops under its Collaborative Research Training Scheme, on ‘Using Archival Sources to Inform Contemporary Policy Debates.’ The purpose was to explore the relevance of history—and the archival sources that underpin it—to policy-making and to identify areas where this had been done, more or less successfully. In describing the workshop and analyzing its outcomes, the authors identify emerging themes and explore ways in which other archive services might implement similar initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the development of women's history in Scotland since the first conference of the International Federation for Research in Women's History (1989). The title is taken from a 1997 article in Scottish Affairs (issue 18), in which Esther Breitenbach asked whether the 'curiously rare' women in Scottish history was a case of the 'suppression of the female in the construction of national identity'. Thus, this study focuses on key themes in the modern period of that history, notably education, the military, politics, labour, religion and literature. It concludes that while the place of women in Scottish history has indeed been asserted since 1989, and different questions are now being asked of the source material, women are still only slowly being integrated into mainstream studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history education community's efforts to help pupils distinguish between the discipline of history and rawer forms of collective memory have been beset with problems from inside and outside the education community. From without, teachers face criticism for their supposed failure to foster narrowly celebratory versions of Britain's past; from within, pressure to reduce history to generic 'skills' of the 'new cross-curricularity', apparently in the interests of relevance, utility or engagement. This article will argue that such genericism is, first, redundant, in that it adds nothing to strong disciplinary practice in fostering thinking, reflection, criticality and motivation; and, second, inadequate: disciplinary knowledge and concepts are necessary in order to reach or challenge claims about the past. The argument is built from history teachers' discourse about their own efforts to find out how to make disciplinary history work at the pedagogic site. The article examines history teacher efforts to address complex problems of uniting content and concept and of motivating lower-attaining or marginalised students whom others (variously) claim can be helped only by narrow narratives or by giving up on disciplinary rigour altogether. The story of history teacher efforts contains valuable lessons for curriculum reviewers about the potential of strong classificatory framing for emancipatory and engaging learning. The article argues that any improvement of the existing Key Stage 3 curriculum is pointless, however, unless wider cultural and structural problems impeding lower-attaining students' entitlement to the subject are resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the benefits of using wikis, websites that allow users to edit and add information to the web page, when attempting to teach and study Victorian history and culture. Emphasis is given to an analysis of the workings of the website "Victorian Contexts." The author explains how she incorporated wiki-use into her lesson plans and coursework on the Victorian-era British periodical "Punch." More broadly, the author is concerned with how the use of this technology fits in well with pedagogical methods celebrating collaborative learning.

This article seeks to position the debate on the Labour Aristocracy, an important one during the early years of the Society for the Study of Labour History, within the wider controversies of the 1970s and 1980s on the future of the Labour Party and the adoption of post-modernist methodology. Its objective is to return discussion to the usage of the term as originally developed by Marx and Engels. This, it is argued, was not essentially about income differentials. Its central focus was on the active process of working-class formation and fragmentation. It assumed that working-class consciousness in the full sense was a historically rare though socially transformative phenomenon, usually constrained by the apparent inevitability of capitalist relations, and requiring a specific conjunctural analysis of working-class challenge and capitalist crisis and response. The article seeks to re-establish the validity of this approach using recent research on the Chartist movement and its decline. It takes issue with the interventions by Gareth Stedman Jones and argues for the continuing relevance of Marx's cultural analysis, as elaborated by David Harvey, for the understanding of social stereotyping and class fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article appraises the field of labour history in its anniversary year and notes that it was one of the earliest specialities to challenge the divisions of the discipline that had reigned supreme since academic History first emerged as a recognized subject in the late nineteenth century. At a time when there was a growing desire to find ways of studying 'social' history, labour history set out to show how this could be done, and to provide a concrete series of concepts, issues, and topics that historians could investigate. It asks whether this well-earned reputation for conceptual innovation and debate has been lost, and concludes that the field is unlikely to be re-energized unless labour historians look beyond national histories to embrace the shift towards transnationalism, as epitomised in the work of Marcel van der Linden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that examines how the 19th century British labor movement known as the Chartist Movement is taught is high school and university classrooms. It discusses the importance of teaching students how to properly frame historical events and narratives, it examines the origins, results and key events of the movement and explores the importance of understanding the role socio-economic class played in the movement.