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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

In the final decades of the twentieth century, history in British higher education experienced major challenges that highlighted fundamental issues of educational purpose and value. As the hitherto private world of university history teaching and learning began to open up to public scrutiny, what emerged was a statement of what one subject representative body called 'the traditional standpoint of historians' on undergraduate history education. Drawing particularly upon evidence from national discipline consultations and recent rethinking of the representation and uses of tradition, this article argues that the appeal to the educational past was more complex than public statements suggested and that more critical scrutiny of history's educational traditions might play an important role in imagining pedagogic and professional futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data from 1740 pupil questionnaires and 160 pupils in focus-group interviews, the study aimed to gain insight into British pupils' ideas about why they study history at school. The paper considers the implications of these ideas for history teachers and teacher educators. The data suggest that many pupils have very vague ideas about the purposes of school history. The variations among schools suggested that there are things that teachers can do to explain the purposes and benefits of school history to their pupils. The outcomes of the study also indicate that there is a case for teachers devoting more time and thought to helping pupils to understand the purposes and benefits of studying their subject in secondary school in order to improve the motivation and engagement of their pupils. The study may also have similar implications for teachers of other school subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the final decades of the twentieth century, academic history was beset by powerful anxieties that played upon the self-confidence and sense of identity of its practitioners. While this 'crisis' has been widely discussed in terms of historical writing, its pedagogic dimensions have been largely absent. This article examines the place of pedagogy in the public life of the discipline, the nature of academic historians' beliefs about teaching and on student learning, and the influence of these upon practice at a time of considerable change in British higher education. It uses the notion of a 'moral order' to explore dominant notions of educational 'good' in the discipline and analyse the tensions between a mainstream, and often implicit, pedagogic paradigm, an ascendant instrumentalist policy discourse in British higher education and revisionist voices within the discipline. Finally, it advocates a more expansive and reflexive stance to pedagogy grounded in attentiveness to taken-for-granted beliefs, assumptions and aspirations, their histories and the practices that stem from them, and a willingness to subject these to public scrutiny through informed critique, contestation and reinvention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The appropriateness of history in primary schools is yet again questioned in the Rose Review (The Times, 8 December 2008). This age-old debate was in part silenced with the subject's inclusion for all pupils in the National Curriculum, but is raging once more. The Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) has cautioned that history is becoming endangered in all key stages and the President of the Historical Association has warned that its dilution in a skills-led curriculum is a cause for social, as well as educational alarm. It is therefore opportune to investigate the rationale for its teaching, not in a new analysis of the well-trodden twentieth-century curriculum, but in the largely neglected Victorian period, using the evidence of Her Majesty's Inspector (HMI) reports. The paper is divided into two sections, the first analysing the Victorian rationale for studying the subject in elementary schools and the second investigating the numbers of children actually studying history and the extent of this study. It shows the avid debates on its appropriateness, particularly for the poor, although the vociferous concerns of many HMI finally led to it being brought into the mainstream classroom by the beginning of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the British Labour government's developing political discourse on patriotism, citizenship and multiculturalism since 1997, particularly following the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and the 2005 London bombings. It focuses on the speeches of key government figures, notably Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and on the ways in which they apply their ideas to the teaching of history and citizenship in schools. It contrasts a broadly cosmopolitan rhetoric about Britain and its role in the world with a narrower focus on British history and “British values”. It considers concerns about the radicalisation of Muslim youth and how such concerns are related to a discourse about separation and communication, applied to minorities in general, and to Muslims and to Muslim women in particular. Political discourse is contextualised within the race relations legislation of the period. The author reflects on challenges that arise when history is harnessed in a project to promote national unity. It suggests that history teaching needs to be reframed, so as to recognize that students are not only citizens of a nation-state but are also emergent cosmopolitan citizens living in an age of globalization and universal human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of an exploratory study at three universities (two in the UK and one in the USA) of how first-year students in three disciplines (biology, electrical engineering and history) learn to argue, we conducted interviews (individual and group) with university faculty and students about the place of argument in their teaching and learning. Here we reflect on the complexity of researching a term that refers both to an abstract concept and process and to diverse actual practices that often appear to be in excess of, or only partially covered by, such abstraction. We found stable, definitive data about argument hard to abstract convincingly from the interviews. The analysis instead drew our attention to how faculty and students inflected the term 'argument' in diverse, nuanced ways; constructed their accounts of 'argument' and of themselves as students or teachers interactively in the interview; and introduced various related terms (e.g. 'analysis', 'interpretation', 'critique'). Reflecting on ways in which the interview can foreclose as well as open up opportunities for sense making around 'argument', we concluded that an approach that anchors talk in detailed accounts of practice is most fruitful in developing our understanding. In this way, interviewing can be a valuable research tool in developing understanding of how 'argument' is used in discourse and manifested in actual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that students of retail history need to give more attention to the idea of the retail format. Employing a conceptualisation of the format recently presented in contemporary retail studies, it reveals the importance of so-called 'offering' and 'know-how' components to a fuller understanding of the development of the supermarket format in post-war Britain. Supermarket development is shown to be affected by, and itself impact on, a complex interplay of factors. Arguments presented in the article are supported by a detailed examination of supermarket development at the London Co-operative Society between 1960 and 1965. The paper thus also contributes to our knowledge of the history of co-operative retailing in the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The momentum gathering behind authentic learning/critical skills raises fundamental issues concerning teaching and learning. This article discusses some of the more general arguments surrounding authentic learning with particular reference to an in-depth evaluation of its impact on schools in one part of Great Britain. It then moves on to describe how this approach to teaching and learning influenced the design of a multimedia CD-ROM examining attitudes and policies towards poverty in the nineteenth century Glasgow. The article concludes by arguing that authentic learning and multimedia together create a powerful medium for learning by mirroring the methodology and sources used by historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the ways in which historians in Britain developed American history, focusing on attitudes towards the founding of the American republic. With reference to such historians as Goldwin Smith, Lord Acton, Winston Churchill, and Denis Brogan, the essay traces how they helped legitimate the United States as a subject of serious study, and the ways in which their work informed the creation of American Studies in Britain. Historians and students in Britain came to respect the ideals on which the American republic had been founded: against the backdrop of international fascism and communism the United States represented freedom and political progress. More recently, however, British ideas about American exceptionalism have faded, as international organizations have developed alternative protectors of democracy and liberty. The erosion of an American ideal once held dear by British historians symbolizes the end of a particular kind of American history in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to concerns about the place and nature of dance history in British higher education curricula, a database was compiled of representative but significant examples of modules which focused directly on the teaching and learning of history, or had history as a key component. An analysis is presented of these modules in terms of the place of history in dance programmes; how syllabi are organised; the nature of their content; the relationship between substantive knowledge and skills, and modes of assessment. These findings are meshed with more general debates drawn from the philosophy and pedagogy of history. The findings reveal a tendency to conventional chronological narratives, the dominance of US-related content but emergence of a European focus, and a comparative under-privileging of British dance history. Skills and methodologies have an arguably increasing profile, thus revealing the propensity of dance history pedagogy to move with macro-debates in the wider field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing concern throughout the UK and beyond about the lack of suitably qualified post-primary teachers in some subject areas, particularly mathematics, design and technology and the sciences. This paper reports on a survey of teacher qualifications in Northern Ireland which indicates that a significant percentage of teachers are unqualified in the areas of mathematics, physics, ICT, history and Irish, and that Key Stage 3 teachers tend to be less well-qualified than those at Key Stage 4 or post-16. Unqualified teachers are less likely to be found in the grammar sector than the non-grammar sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thinking about the museum’s engagement in educational programmes is increasingly adopting a more critical perspective on the implications of a programme in authorizing and defining particular knowledge. While objects are still invoked to define history and culture and to underscore their authority, the museum’s claim to educational purposes is being questioned by the museum itself. This has resulted in changes to the ways in which student learning occurs within the museum. Using data gathered during a year‐long study of the changing role of a Canadian regional history and ethnology museum, this paper argues that the changing role of the museum prompts reconsideration of their roles not only as sites of knowledge but also as sites of knowledge‐production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Locates the teaching of postmodernism to adults in Great britain within the wider debate about history. Overview on the discipline of history in Great Britain; Emergence of critical awareness of postmodernism among British historians; History in adult education.

Highlights the documentation of history teaching in England and Wales during the 20th century. Historical background of English schools; Information on the making of the National Curriculum history; Themes of history teaching in England and Wales during the 20th century.

Evaluates CD-ROM packages that are used to teach the Jewish Holocaust at Key Stage 4 of the British national curriculum. Extent to which CD-ROM material compounds or alleviates certain problems; Ways in which CD-ROM material on the Holocaust should be incorporated into the teaching of the subject; Comparison of Microsoft Encarta '97, World War II Sources and Analysis, and Lest We Forget.

Provides information on a study which explored the relationship between history teaching and the construction of national identity in Great Britain. Review of related literature; Controversy surrounding history teaching in England; Discussion on the history curriculum in the Northern Ireland.

Examines the ways in which the history curriculum in Schools in Great Britain has been subject to contestation, and highlights the implications of the impact of postmodernism upon the teaching of history. Relationship between `official history' taught in schools and `unofficial histories' which influence children; Discussion on the future direction of history in schools.

Focuses on the issues of adapting a national curriculum in history in Great Britain. Expression of strong public interest in history; Reactions of historians and teachers of history to the formulation of national curriculum; Impact of politics on the debate.

Discusses the need for a practical approach toward the implementation of the National Curriculum for the study of history in British schools. Problems of funding, staffing and practicalities that might arise when providing an expanded schools service; Division of the educational system into four key stages; Benefits of studying themes rather than a strictly chronological or political sequence.

Discusses the integration of research validated knowledge with practice in lesson planning for the subject of history in Great Britain. Implication to history teachers of the National Curriculum framework; Revelation of implicit theories of teaching through different approaches to planning; Types of curriculum planning.

Presents an overview of the teaching of history in British schools from its establishment of the subject as a university discipline in the 1870s through the 1960s. Examination of the nature and developmental framework of Jean Piaget; Recent research's challenge to the Piagetian framework of cognition; Introduction of the History of National Curriculum (HNC).

The article focuses on the new Business History Unit in London, England. Professor Leslie Hannah who is Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, took up the Directorship of the Business History Unit on a part-time basis from August 1, 1978. This will become a full-time appointment, of professional status, on January 1,1979. A second post in the Unit was advertised at the end of September 1978 and further posts will be advertised during 1980. The idea of the Unit dates back to the period 1972 to 1973 when professor L.S. Pressnell, professor T.C. Barker and professor W.J. Reader got together to discuss how best to move from the writing of company history, which had made such great strides in Great Britain during the previous fifteen years, to the broader study of business history itself. There was general agreement that Business History was a branch of academic study, which had been rather neglected by British universities. It was agreed from the outset that the relation of science and technology to the growth of industry should form part of the proposed Unit's activities.

Discusses the most recent volumes in the Harvard Business History Series and the first studies prepared under the auspices of the Business History Foundation, related to business history. Value of the books and the uses to which they may be put; Basic differences between the approach to, and conception of, business history in the United States and Great Britain that they appear to illustrate; Future course of the discipline that they seem to imply.

The article focuses on historical education in the nineteenth century in Great Britain. History textbooks should be constantly changing. They are the reflection of how each generation regards the achievements of its predecessors and evaluates what motivated their conduct, and with what result. Since they are largely used by the young, they represent what their elders think they ought to know. In this article an attempt is made to consider the aims and purposes of nineteenth-century history-teaching through a survey of the books which were being written for use in schools. The changing pattern of history textbooks in the nineteenth century marks what advances were being made in the teaching of the subject. The first history textbook in the nineteenth century was "Historical Questions," published privately in the year 1800. For over a quarter of a century there was little to challenge the virtual monopoly of the book. But the emergence of history as a separate subject, and not as an adjunct to the classics, and the influences encouraging modern history opened up a market. By the 1850s books were appearing with some profusion.