Engaging Year 9 Students in Party Politics: Exploring the Changing Nature of Political Campaigning in Victorian Britain

Sarah Black wanted to remedy Year 9's lack of knowledge about nineteenth-century politics. With just five lessons to work with, she decided to devise a sequence on Gladstone and Disraeli, shaping the sequence with an enquiry question that invited argument about change and continuity. Black analyses the status and function of different layers of knowledge within her sequence, evaluates the interaction of that knowledge with students' analyses of change and reflects on how she might have improved her enquiry question in order to help students to argue effectively about scale, direction and significance of change. (A list of references and notes is included.)