24 TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY 11–18

innovative schools such as academies which had enjoyed greater curriculum freedoms
at Key Stage 3 than other maintained schools. Examining patterns in the take-up of
history beyond 14, the Historical Association uncovered evidence that significant
numbers of schools placed restrictions on pupils, choices beyond 14, and that these
were largely based on academic achievement. The authors concluded that ‘many
teachers expressed deep regret about the fact that history was effectively out of
bounds for lower attaining pupils’ (Historical Association 2010b: 21). Marked dis-
parities were found between and within schools: history was less likely to thrive in
schools with less affluent intakes, while within schools it was higher attaining pupils
who were more likely to be offered an academic curriculum including history.
This is the context for the teaching of history in the twenty-first century. The aims
and objectives which surround national history curricula emphasize the importance
of learning about the past, and of developing the understandings and competencies
which history as an academic discipline makes possible. The reality in schools is some-
what different: a fragile subject, competing for a place in a curriculum struggling to
adapt to the multiple demands placed on schools. There is some evidence that access
to history is increasingly confined to higher attainers and more affluent pupils, while
the majority of pupils abandon history before they have the maturity to address some
of the more complex and challenging issues history introduces. England is one of
just four European countries which do not require some study of history through
to the end of compulsory schooling: the others are Wales, Northern Ireland and the
Netherlands. This does not mean that all learners should be expected to take a single
subject history course to examination level at 16. However, it is a reminder that the
curriculum in schools can be constructed in ways which support rather than deny
access for all, and that if history is to meet the lofty objectives which national and state
curricula frequently set for it, imaginative curriculum structures may be necessary.
3
Teaching and learning in
classrooms and beyond

In this chapter we begin to explore the raw materials for teaching history in the
classroom – desks, walls, textbooks, but also the pupils and, most importantly, the teachers
themselves.We consider the knowledge base needed to teach successfully, the way this is used
by effective history teachers and some of the challenges posed by historical language.

Resources for teaching and learning: the classroom and beyond

Most history teaching takes place in classrooms. Many classrooms have changed
considerably in appearance over the last thirty years, though not all have. Lift-top
desks which dominated classrooms from the later nineteenth to the mid-twentieth
century have gone, replaced by light, manoeuvrable laminate tables; in some class-
rooms, rectangular tables have been replaced by triangular, rhomboid or hexagonal
worktops. Chalkboards have gone, replaced first by whiteboards, and now supple-
mented by interactive whiteboards. Televisions arrived, were supplemented by video
players and both have now gone as digital technologies open access to web-based
and stored resources. Classrooms sport power towers or laptop access points; wireless
connectivity has replaced fixed internet connections. However, in the vast majority
of classrooms, layout remains stubbornly traditional, with rows of desks facing the
teacher and the teacher’s resources at the front of the room.
In some classrooms, greater attention is now given to display – not simply to
the display of pupil work or maps, but to charts which explain the language of time,
sequencing and dating, of analysis, evaluation and synthesis, of historical concepts,
ideas and understandings. In some classrooms, there are timelines, sequencing his-
torical time on a grand scale or within particular periods and topics. The best history
classrooms offer a rich environment in which to learn about the past, with ideas, lan-
guage and images presented around the room as tools for teacher and pupils. However,
in many schools, specialist teaching accommodation for history teaching does not
exist; unlike science, or technology, the case for a specialist teaching space for his-
tory is not an obvious one to make, though its importance has been noted. Ofsted, in
2007, describing one inspected school, commented: ‘This is a reflective and collegiate
department that works together very well. It is delivering a very high quality learning
26 TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY 11–18

experience for pupils despite the difficulties presented by substandard accommodation’

(Ofsted 2007: para 67, emphasis added).
The physical setting for history teaching in schools varies considerably, then.
One obvious question is how the physical environment is used. There is consider-
able evidence of increased thought among researchers and policy makers about the
importance of the learning environment for the quality of pupils’ experiences, but less
evidence of impact on practice (Galton et al. 1980; Galton and Williamson 1992).
Despite some radical thinking about classroom layout and pedagogy (e.g. Waterhouse
1983), there is evidence that classroom layouts have moved back towards a focus on
the teacher. In itself, as we shall see, this is no bad thing, but it is worth digging a
little deeper into three elements which shape the way classrooms are used as settings
for children’s learning: the technologies at the disposal of the teacher, the ideas about
teaching and learning which are brought into the classroom and the work of history
teachers themselves.
Extensive claims are often made for the transformative effects of technology on
classrooms and on teaching and learning more generally. Where classrooms have
changed in appearance substantially over the last thirty or forty years, this is often
a result of technological change – laminate tables instead of wooden lift-lid desks,
or interactive whiteboards instead of chalkboards. It is certainly the case that dig-
ital technologies put a much greater range of resources at the disposal of the his-
tory teacher than was the case with print technologies. The history teacher teaching
about the Italian Renaissance can access the entire Uffizi collection online (http://
www.uffizi.com/), examine the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in detail (http://www.
drawingsofleonardo.org/) or embark on a virtual tour of Florence (http://www.italy
guides.it/us/florence/florence_italy.htm). These opportunities come at a price: ease of
access to resources does not necessarily make for guarantees of quality. As Ben Walsh
stresses, teachers must ‘insist that proper historical method is used at all times’ (Walsh
2008: 7). Sally Burnham has demonstrated how effectively pupils can use movie-
making technology to demonstrate historical understanding – but also the importance
of structuring their learning around significant historical questions and a sequenced
plan of activity (Burnham 2008).
It would be foolish to underestimate the importance of technological innovation,
but it is equally important not to overstate it. New technologies are frequently used to
support existing pedagogies rather than to extend, challenge or replace them. The gov-
ernment-commissioned evaluation of the use of interactive whiteboards in London
suggested that while teachers used the technologies extensively to present material
to pupils, few thought in sufficient detail about the way pupils were to navigate their
way through the classroom presentations thus created, and many taught lessons with
greater emphasis on presenting material to pupils rather than on pupil understanding
of the material (Moss et al. 2007): as Carey Jewitt puts it the ‘worksheet, for example,
migrates to the interactive whiteboard’ (Jewitt 2008). Terry Haydn has suggested that
interactive whiteboards in history classrooms have encouraged teachers to think more
about their own performance, and the elegance of their presentation, rather than the
interactivity which is made possible (Haydn 2004b). It proved easier to amend a chalk-
board diagram or a marker pen diagram on a whiteboard in discussion with a class, for
example. Technologies in classrooms are permissive at best: they make different sorts
 T E A C H I N G A N D L E A R N I N G I N C L A S S R O O M S A N D B E YO N D 27

of learning and interaction possible. Whether the possibilities are realized depends on
other things, and notably on the ability and willingness of teachers to use the technolo-
gies as tools for teaching in innovative ways.
The way classrooms and their physical resources are used depends fundamentally
on the ideas teachers have about teaching and learning. As Robin Alexander sug-
gested in his study of primary teaching in five countries, these ideas are often deeply
embedded in cultural assumptions about what teaching involves (Alexander 2000).
Ideas about teaching and learning can and do change. In the mid-twentieth century,
research into children’s learning and cognitive development was heavily influenced by
the work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, which emphasized the way in which the
child interacted with objects and experiences. Piaget’s approach to child development
emphasized three elements: the way a child explored her environment, the develop-
mental stages through which children passed in making sense of the environment and
the role of adults in assessing a child’s ‘readiness’ to learn. In later twentieth-century
research, Piagetian ideas were largely supplanted by constructivist theories of learn-
ing heavily influenced by the work of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. In place
of the ‘lone’ child interacting with her environment, Vygotsky stressed the centrality
of language and dialogue. Learning, for Vygotsky, depended on social and cultural
interaction and, importantly on the role of an adult who is able to ‘scaffold’ a child’s
understanding through structured learning:

What the child can do in cooperation today he can do alone tomorrow. Therefore
the only good kind of instruction is that which marches ahead of development
and leads it...For a time, our schools favoured the ‘complex’ system of instruction,
which was believed to be adapted to the child’s way of thinking...In offering the
child problems he was able to handle without help, this method failed to utilize the
zone of proximal development and to lead the child to what he could not yet do.
(Vygostsky 1962, quoted in Alexander 2000: 431, emphasis added;
Alexander notes that the phrase ‘zone of proximal development’ is
perhaps better translated as ‘zone of potential development’)

Piagetian ideas were dominant in pre-service teacher training in the 1960s and
1970s, when training was more theoretical in orientation than it is now. Such ideas
emphasized the importance of the child’s interaction with the world and the impor-
tance of teachers’ ability to assess a child’s readiness for learning. Now, constructivist
theories tend to be dominant in research, with an emphasis on the importance of dis-
cussion, dialogue, the social context of learning and teachers’ ability to scaffold pupils’
learning beyond their current stage of understanding. However, few teachers are likely
to have a close acquaintance with these ideas as a direct result of their training so the
ideas have tended to spread in a relatively haphazard way. Although Vygotskyan ideas
underpin many of the theoretical arguments in favour of deploying group work in
classrooms, teachers who use group work need to be clear about their own practical
rationale for asking pupils to work in this way, and skilled at structuring group work
successfully (e.g. Woolnough 2006).
What this means is that the principal resource for learning – the resource on which
all else depends – is the teacher. There is now compelling international evidence that it
28 TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY 11–18

is teacher quality which is the single most important in-school factor in securing high-
quality learning outcomes (Sanders and Rivers 1996; Barber and Mourshed 2007).
Outstanding teachers inspire, motivate and cajole learners, extending their learning
through imaginative lessons, sophisticated long-term planning and judicious inter-
ventions in classroom interactions. All this is clear. What is somewhat less clear is what
determines teacher quality. Considerable recent attention has been focused on teach-
ers’ own cognitive ability (Hanushek and Welch 2006) and the importance of subject
knowledge as a basis for effective pedagogic practice. Obviously, classroom teaching
depends on much more than simply knowing a good deal about the subject, impor-
tant though this is. In this context, Lee Shulman’s 1986 paper on ‘pedagogic content
knowledge’ (‘PCK’) has been hugely influential. Shulman developed the concept of
‘pedagogic content knowledge’ as a way of connecting distinct bodies of knowledge
for teaching. ‘It represent[s] the blending of content and pedagogy into an under-
standing of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented, and
adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction’
(Shulman 1986: 8). PCK requires teachers to be able to deploy analogies, illustrations,
examples, explanations and demonstrations as conduits for their subject knowledge
to engage and enthuse pupils, to make decisions, often ‘on the hoof’, about what to
do, drawing on a range of understandings about subject and teaching. Studies since
1986 have suggested complex relationships between subject knowledge and peda-
gogic knowledge (Wilson and Wineburg 1988; Turner-Bisset 1999). More recently,
it has been argued that history teachers routinely draw on different types of knowl-
edge which work in relationship with each other. They are able to deploy knowledge
and understanding of subject. They ‘know’ how the discipline works and can call on
detailed contextual knowledge of the topics they are teaching. In addition they deploy
knowledge and understanding of pupils, including understanding of how pupils make
progress in learning history and of a range of pedagogic practices. It is the active
relationship between these sorts of knowledge which underpins successful classroom
teaching (Husbands 2010).
Most history teaching takes place in classrooms. But not all does. Some, perhaps
the most productive, takes place outside classrooms, on historic sites, in museums or
in galleries or simply in the environs of the school. Proponents of out-of-school learn-
ing argue that ‘learning outside the classroom supports pupils’ learning and devel-
opment. It has the potential to enrich and enliven teaching’ (House of Commons
Children, Schools and Families Committee 2010: para. 11). Realizing this potential
outside the classroom is no less challenging than securing high-quality learning inside
the classroom; pupils are no more likely to learn successfully outside the classroom
than they are inside it unless their learning is actively planned, managed and con-
solidated. Successful learning outside the classroom demands skilful planning; as with
all learning, it demands attention to learning objectives, but also to how pupils will
learn in different settings and the best settings to support different sorts of learning.
Although some sites – castles, museums, abbeys – may form particularly strong foci
for learning, almost every school has scope for supporting history learning outside the
classroom on its doorstep. In the 1970s, the Schools History Project proclaimed its
faith in ‘History Around Us’. The local war memorial can offer rich opportunities to
explore historical significance (Brown and Woodcock 2009), local oral history projects
 T E A C H I N G A N D L E A R N I N G I N C L A S S R O O M S A N D B E YO N D 29

can motivate the most reluctant of learners (Johansen and Spafford 2009) and using
the local town as a case study renders the Industrial Revolution more relevant and
personal (McFahn et al. 2009). Museum-based learning offers rich possibilities for
enriching children’s understanding of evidence and the ways in which we build up
ideas about the past. Out-of-school learning offers the opportunity to explore new
surroundings. However, successful out-of-school learning involves going beyond the
nature of the experience of being out of school itself to think about how it engages
learners, and how the focus of the learning relates to what has gone before and comes
later (Hooper-Greenhill 2007).

Organizing and presenting history: language and resources

The lesson in Box 3.1 was taught to a class of 12-year-olds. The lesson is interest-
ing in a number of respects: it required high-level listening and speaking skills, drew
on pre-lesson preparation by the pupils and led into a sophisticated piece of written
work requiring extended argument and critical skills. The focus of the lesson was on
the deployment of higher order reflective skills, and depended on the pupils’ active
engagement not simply with the context but with historical arguments about the con-
text. Yet in other respects it was curious. While it rested on, and managed, high levels
of pupil engagement, it deployed no resources: there was no use of the whiteboard, no
textbooks, no worksheets, no technology. Instead, it rested on the use of discussion and
active listening to develop understanding and argumentation. As in so many complex
lessons, what was happening on the surface – a pupil debate about the causes of the
Civil War, about which historians have disagreed extensively of course – involved a
sophisticated set of processes brought together by the teacher. In this lesson, the girls’
oral and listening skills were the centrepiece, without which nothing else would have
been possible, but they themselves had been developed through other exercises and
lessons earlier in the curriculum. The teacher used her own deep subject knowledge
not just to structure the debate but to feed observations (or interpretations) into it.
The lesson had been actively planned and positioned at a point in the scheme of work
where pupils knew enough to engage with the issues but not too much to squeeze out
their own understanding and observations – even where these were anachronistic. The
relationship between teacher and pupils was rich in terms of extended dialogic teach-
ing (Alexander 2000, 2006).
This is an extreme example in a number of respects: few lessons are so resource-
free, and few depend so much on talk. As Grant Bage notes, the ‘traditional way of
mediating [history] curricula has been through talk; especially teacher talk’. Bage
quotes his own research suggesting that ‘listening to teacher’ was the activity which
pupils cited most frequently as helping them to learn, and observes that this is ‘hard
evidence of a commonsense assumption: teachers are the richest historical resource
to which most children have access’ (Bage 2000: 56). For over forty years, since the
work of Douglas Barnes and James Britton, the inter-relationship between the focus of
the curriculum and its communication between teachers and learners has been a cen-
tral theme of research and understanding (Britton 1970; Barnes 1976). What Barnes
showed was that forms of communication in the classroom shaped understandings as
powerfully, if not more so, than the intended content of the curriculum. In the context
30 TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY 11–18

Box 3.1 Year 8 debate the execution of Charles I

Classroom – a very small room for 22 pupils but at least dedicated to history teaching.
Tables arranged in a horseshoe with two tables parallel to the sides. Some girls had
their backs to other girls and some were sitting at right angles to the board. There was
no fussing or any issues around seating – there was no evidence of a seating plan.

0:00 T[eacher] registered the class electronically on the computer at side of

the room by calling out names.
0:02 T discussed the aim of the lesson (which followed on from one previously)
– ‘How much have you understood the causes of the Civil War? At the end
we will have a vote as to whether it was King or Parliament who were
responsible.’
T asked S[tudent]s to recap the events leading up to the war – Ss had
their exercise books with a sheet of information but the onus seemed to
be on remembering and sifting relevant facts as they did not really appear
to use this sheet.
T: ‘Why didn’t the Protestant Parliamentarians like the French princess?’
Ss discussed who was responsible in the various stages.
T recapped and pointed out that the three arguments were about ‘money’,
‘religion’ and ‘power/politics’; she asked which was most important? T
pointed out that all were present at one time so ‘we could argue that this
is why this particular crisis led to the Civil War’ (as previous crises had
only involved one of these factors). ‘It was a big smelly soup of economic,
religious and political fights.’
0:15 T: ‘Shall we fight for the King or the Parliament?’
She asked for two ‘advocates’ – one for each side (homework had been to
write a speech for either side).
S1 defended the King in the role of someone who was there at the time.
T and Ss made notes of important points – S1 used arguments like ‘God-
given authority…’. T summed up and congratulated S1 for being ‘very
convincing.’
S2 defended Parliament: ‘We have the right to choose our leaders. He has
no God-given right.’ T also congratulated S2 and said her speech was ‘pretty
radical’. She likened her to Oliver Cromwell and told the class they would
be studying him after Easter. She also picked up on S2’s use of language
by saying she liked the phrase ‘tossed around on the seas of religion’.
S3 then was chosen to defend the King – she had prepared cue cards.
T picked up the fact that S3 introduced herself as a woman and reminded
them that although women had no political rights or representation at that
time there were some women who had campaigned for both sides and
of one woman who disguised herself as a man. She said she liked S3’s
‘emotional appeal’.
S4 then read out her speech on behalf of Parliament – the T praised her
for pointing out the ‘economic side’.
 T E A C H I N G A N D L E A R N I N G I N C L A S S R O O M S A N D B E YO N D 31

0:30 The vote! T told the girls to shut their eyes ‘to make it more exciting.’ The
vote took place twice as T had to clarify ‘who is to blame’.
(The only writing all lesson) On board: King 12, Parliament 9, Abstentions 2
T: ‘This group believes the King was to blame.’
T then asked class if they were interested in what she thought – they were
so she told them she agreed it was the King and gave her reasons.
Their homework was to make sure that they had written up their speeches
in the front of their books over Easter (most had done so anyway).
0:34 Ss were asked to write in their books: ‘The Civil War was the fault of …
I think this because…’
0:36 There was some discussion around the issues that came out of this
lesson. The news that morning (on BBC Radio 4) was that Gordon Brown
was going to repeal the 300-year-old law that the monarch or heir to the
throne could not marry a Catholic. Another girl had also listened to this
radio report – T picked up on this and reminded the class of the Human
Rights Act i.e. the freedom to marry who you want and of freedom of
religion. She said it was ‘about time’ and that these old laws were in
conflict with the human rights of the monarch.
0:40 Bell goes – class dismissed. No (need for?) formal ending or summing up
of what had been covered in the lesson.

of what were then – and in many ways still remain – transmission-based models of
teaching, what Ian Luff in 2001 memorably captured as ‘I talk, you listen’ (Luff 2001),
this closes down, rather than opens out the potential for teaching and learning history.
This model of history teaching has been enormously dominant. David Sylvester called
it the ‘great tradition’ in which the ‘history teacher’s role was didactically active; it was
to give pupils the facts of historical knowledge, and to ensure through repeated short
tests that they had learned them’ (Sylvester 1994: 18); it was overlain by a powerful
moral and interpretive mission.
The civil war example, although it demonstrates the extent to which access to the
past in history lessons is powerfully mediated through language, and depends on lan-
guage, was not dependent on teacher transmission talk but on extended speaking and
listening skills on the part of the pupils. There is extensive research to demonstrate the
power of structured speaking and listening in supporting pupils’ historical thinking,
and their learning more generally (Alexander 2000; Bage 2000; Coffin 2007).
Conventionally, history teachers have drawn extensively on paper and book
resources to supplement or extend their own expertise. In the vast majority of history
lessons, paper resources have been the artefacts through which the past is present-
ed and through which pupils access it. Paper resources take many forms: textbooks,
reproduced, and normally edited, extracts from primary historical documents, repro-
duced photographs, artworks, pictures of objects. For much of the period since educa-
tion became compulsory in 1870, the textbook has dominated the teaching of history.
There is an extensive tradition of textbook analysis, much of it subtle and sophisti-
cated, and textbooks have been used to illuminate the mediation of curriculum into the
32 TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY 11–18

classroom (Chancellor 1970; Nicholls 2006). Even so, textbooks can be misleading,
and teachers need to use them, not to be used by them (Foster and Crawford 2006).
Eamonn McCann recalled an extreme example in his experience of learning history
in Northern Ireland in the 1960s:

History lessons did not always follow the curriculum laid down by the Northern
Ireland Ministry of Education. One teacher, admittedly regarded as something of
an eccentric, was at pains to discredit English propaganda…At the beginning of
a new school year, he would lead the class through the set text books instructing
them to tear out pages of fiction…That done, the lessons could begin.
(McCann 1993)

The Schools Council History Project set out to provide pupils with the opportunity to
understand the process as well as the product of history in the 1970s and to grapple
with the challenges and fascination that the imperfect, incomplete traces of the past
present to the historian (Schools Council 1973). Linked with the late 1970s repro-
graphics revolution, SCHP encouraged history teachers to produce and reproduce
evidence extracts which underpinned classroom work.Textbook publishers responded
quickly too, and the standard history textbook ceased to be the analytical narrative text
and became instead a collection of authorial text and edited evidential extracts. We will
explore the practical implications of placing evidence and enquiry at the heart of the
history classroom, but the key point to make here is about the nature of the resources
at the disposal of the classroom teacher – his or her own voice, the work of textbook
authors, and extracts from historical source material – and the extent to which they
are all to some degree dependent on language. History is a school subject drenched in
language – the teacher’s language, the pupils’ language in response, the written texts,
and in a language with its own vocabulary, register and genres (Edwards and Furlong
1978; Husbands 1996). Partly for this reason, history has gained a reputation as one
of the most difficult of school subjects: learning history involves mastering much of the
language of historical times and ideas, and finding ways to express this in controlled
and sustained argumentation in order to convey the complexity of understandings of
the historical past (Andrews 1995; Counsell 1997).
Although history is predominantly explored through the written word, many of
the most promising of materials are non-written, and the skill of the successful history
teacher lies in combining text and non-textual resources to explore and develop the
language and ideas of historical thinking – whether inside the classroom or outside it.
Sixteenth-century conceptions of monarchy are perhaps best accessed through por-
traits of monarchs; the rise of Nazism through newsreel or extracts from newsreel,
and the legacy of the Roman Empire through Roman remains, whether on site or on
screen. Artefacts, whether encountered in handling sessions, in museums or remotely
through digital images, are more than simply objects. Frances Sword, in yet another
context – Egyptian mummies in a museum – puts it like this:

The functions of many objects are multi-faceted and complex. An Egyptian cof-
fin, for example, was made to hold not just a body but a belief system: the body
was contained in the coffin, and the belief system is contained in its style. The
 T E A C H I N G A N D L E A R N I N G I N C L A S S R O O M S A N D B E YO N D 33

object contains many sorts of information but, as with so many artefacts, style is
the thickest cable of communication...Whatever the object, if it communicates
through its style, we are presented with ideas held in shape, form and colour which
are often far more important than those held by any other aspect of the artefacts.
(Sword 1994: 9)

In the contemporary history classroom the concept of the ‘thickest cable of commu-
nication’ is the critical one. Language, knowledge and resources are the raw materials
of the history teacher from which she fashions the ‘thickest cable of communication’.
The materials at the history teachers’ disposal are richer and more complex than ever
before. Box 3.2 provides one example of such a resource provided through the col-
laboration between the British Museum and BBC Radio 4 to trace the history of the
world in a hundred objects, from any number of perspectives, challenging conven-
tional perceptions of the past. However, rich though this resource is, it and others
are useful only in so far as they are used effectively in classrooms, and the practices
underlying their use are central to the craft of the history teacher.

Conclusion
History teachers themselves are pivotal to young people’s experiences of learning
about the past. Successful learning depends to a large extent on the ways in which
teachers make active use of the tools and resources at their disposal – the ways in
which they are able to use and navigate language, the ways they define historical prob-
lems and the ways they marshal the extensive resources at their disposal to support
learning. The best history classrooms are rich settings for children’s historical – and
general – learning, places where language, text and objects are combined to support
high levels of enquiry and thinking. In our work in classrooms for this book, we came
across another significant dimension of this: pupils’ own perceptions of the way their
teachers worked. Effective teachers appeared open to pupils’ ideas and interests – in
effect pupils felt they and their teacher were learning together. In some classrooms
there was a sense of a ‘shared experience’ where teachers also took part in the historical
explorations of their pupils. In one classroom the teacher ‘modelled’ a presentation he
had produced so the pupils could understand how to assess each others’ presentations,
‘because we can’t ask you [pupils] to do something that we [teachers] are not prepared
to do ourselves’.

Box 3.2 A History of the World in a Hundred Objects

The BBC ‘History of the World in a Hundred Objects’ is a hugely ambitious and accessible
attempt to trace major themes in world history through objects. A partnership between
the BBC and the British Museum, it uses radio programmes and a linked website –
from which the programmes are downloadable – to explore objects. The series travels
‘through two million years from the earliest object in the collection to retell the history
of humanity through the objects we have made’. Sequences of objects are tied to a
34 TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY 11–18

particular theme, such as ‘after the ice age’, ‘pilgrims and traders’ or ‘the beginning of
science and literature’.
The website provides rich resources for learning: http://www.bbc.co.uk/
ahistoryoftheworld/. Each object is available as a zoomable image, and a set of
commentaries provide context, together with interpretations of the objects offered by
academics. For example the Kilwa pot sherds are

broken pieces of pots … found on the shores of Kilwa Kiswani, an island off
Tanzania, which was once home to a major medieval African port. The pale green
porcelain pieces are from China, the dark green and blue pieces come from the
Persian Gulf and the brown unglazed pieces were made in East Africa. This rubbish
reveals a complex trade network that spread across the Indian Ocean, centuries
before the European maritime empires of Spain, Portugal and Britain. From around
AD 800 merchants from Africa, the Middle East, India, and later even China flocked
to the East African ports of Kilwa and Mombasa, which quickly grew into wealthy
cities. These merchants traded in pots, spices, ivory, gems, wood, metal and slaves.
A new language, Swahili, developed in this multicultural environment, combining
existing African languages with Arabic. Islam was adopted as the religion in these
ports, perhaps to aid in trade relations with the Middle East and also to protect
African merchants from being enslaved by other Muslims.

This one object – a pile of rubbish – is used quickly to highlight major themes of cultural
exchange and migration on a global canvas – to move from an object to a wide canvas,
on which a big picture can be sketched.
Part 2
Learning history in schools

In Part 1, our attention was focused on history as a subject and on the curriculum
framework in which it is embedded. In this section, we turn our attention to learners.
Too often, debates about school subjects and the ways in which they should be taught
can ignore the interests, needs and, indeed, voices of the learners themselves. In this
section we seek to remedy this, although of course it is not possible entirely to separate
discussion of learning from discussion of teaching. Chapter 4 begins with a general
review of the literature on ‘pupil voice’ before going on to explore what we know about
what pupils want from the study of history. Chapter 5 takes a different tack; given that
history is often seen as being one of the more difficult subjects for pupils to learn, we
try to use pupils’ own voices to explore what it is that they find difficult.
4
What do pupils want from learning history?

In this chapter we explore the perspectives of learners in the history classroom.We try to look
at the history classroom from the point of view of what learners want as a way of invit-
ing teachers to do the same. Like the previous section that considers the general issues of
history and history teaching, this section too focuses on learners in schools generally and in the
history classroom specifically.Throughout we have tried to include the voices of learners and
their teachers that we have met in the schools we visited.

Why consult pupils about learning?

A good deal has been written about the aims of school history, about what should be
included in the curriculum and how it should be taught. There is also a strong research
tradition exploring young people’s cognitive development in history which examines
the difficulties that pupils face in understanding different aspects of the past and why
this is the case. However, there is considerably less work on the views and voices of
pupils themselves. There are pupil voices in research on historical understanding but
fewer studies of what pupils think history is, how they perceive history’s value and
whether they enjoy studying it. As one commentator puts it, ‘Somehow educators
have forgotten the important connection between teachers and pupils. We listen to
outside experts to inform us, and, consequently overlook the treasure in our very own
backyards, the pupils’ (Soo Hoo 1993: 389). In this chapter, we draw on existing
evidence and our own experiences to explore pupils’ perspectives because we believe
it to be an essential resource for teachers in thinking about their own practice. We do
so by drawing, first, on the general literature on ‘pupil voice’; secondly on the fairly
limited research carried out on pupils’ attitudes and experiences of studying school
history and finally on some of the voices of pupils that we have heard in our own work
with schools. We cannot claim that the voices that we have chosen to include are neces-
sarily representative or statistically sampled – in many ways these student contribu-
tions result through serendipity rather than design – but we present them here because
they challenge thinking about what history teaching currently is and perhaps what
it could be.
38 TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY 11–18

Consulting children, that is those under the age of 18, about things which affect
them is an increasingly common feature of planning and delivering services for chil-
dren. Children can be, and increasingly are, consulted in a variety of ways. The roots of
current practice in consulting children lie in the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child (1989), in particular Article 12 which states that each country ‘shall assure to the
child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views
freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in
accordance with the age and maturity of the child’. For all of its expansiveness, the UN
Convention had relatively little direct influence on practice in English education until
the early years of the twenty-first century, when a wider interest in understanding,
children’s perspectives through the Every Child Matters initiative (DfES 2003) began
to influence work in schools. Jean Rudduck, who developed much of the theoretical
understanding and the realization of the potential of children’s consultation in schools,
explained that

pupil voice is the consultative wing of pupil participation. Consultation is about

talking with pupils about things that matter in school. It may involve: conversations
about teaching and learning; seeking advice from pupils about new initiatives;
inviting comment on ways of solving problems that are affecting the teacher’s
right to teach and the pupil’s right to learn; inviting evaluative comment on recent
developments in school or classroom policy and practice.
(Rudduck 2005)

Rudduck and McIntyre define pupil consultation as ‘talking with pupils about things
that matter to them in the classroom and school and that affect their learning’. Ideally
consultation is a conversation that builds a habit of easy discussion between pupil and
teacher about learning. They add that real consultation occurs when pupils ‘know that
their views are being sought because it is expected that they will have something to
contribute’ (Rudduck and McIntyre 2007: 36).
There are practical and pragmatic reasons for ‘consulting pupils’. While
some teachers might be initially sceptical that not all young people would take
the consultation process seriously or that they might suggest ridiculous ways of
working, evidence from the Consulting Pupils project (Flutter 2002) suggests
otherwise: pupils responded with insight and intelligence when consulted mean-
ingfully. The evidence also suggested that being consulted directly about the class-
room issues that most affect them actively generated greater pupil ‘motivation’ towards
learning (McIntyre et al. 2005: 150). Drawing on pupil perspectives, the Consulting
Pupils project team identified four dominant themes which pupils saw as key
elements for effective teaching to generate learning (Box 4.1). In many ways these
findings may appear self-evident but it is worth noting that they draw on the unprompt-
ed voices of pupils themselves, and help to frame directly thinking about teacher
practices. It is also interesting that many of these correspond with other research
findings from history classrooms coming from pupil surveys. Our own visits and
discussions with pupils also elicited similar responses on which we draw throughout
this chapter.
 W H AT D O P U P I L S W A N T F R O M L E A R N I N G H I S T O R Y ? 39

Box 4.1 Key elements of effective teaching for learning: dominant themes from the
Consulting Pupils about Teaching and Learning project

Interactive teaching for understanding – teachers need to actively engage with what
pupils bring to their own learning.
The need for teachers to contextualize the learning so that new ideas are connected
with something pupils are already familiar with.
Learning tasks that foster a stronger sense of ownership and that recognize pupils’
growing sense of independence and maturity.
Collaborative learning that promoted greater discussion and working together on
shared tasks.
http://www.consultingpupils.co.uk/

Consulting pupils in history classrooms:

what do we know about pupils’ views?
The most recent survey of pupils’ attitudes towards school history was carried out
by Richard Harris and Terry Haydn for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority
in 2005 (Harris and Haydn 2006, 2008). This study was one response to a reported
increase in pupil disaffection towards schooling in general and the researchers were
keen to investigate the factors that led to greater or lesser pupil engagement and enjoy-
ment in history. They were also influenced by the ideas emerging from the Consulting
Pupils projects and cite the argument that an understanding of pupils’ perspective
is critical because of its potential to give teachers resources for strategies based on a
deeper knowledge and firmer understanding of the complex processes of teaching and
learning (Flutter and Rudduck 2004: 2).
Harris and Haydn based their work on 1740 questionnaire responses from
Key Stage 3 pupils in 12 schools from the east of England, London and the south
coast, followed up by more in-depth focus group discussion in each school. They
did find that the majority of pupils said that they enjoyed history – overall it was the
fourth most enjoyable school subject among boys after physical education, design and
technology and ICT and the fourth among girls after art, physical education and
design and technology, which, the authors remark, made it the most popular ‘academic’
subject at KS3 (Harris and Haydn 2008: 40). However, pupils’ enjoyment varied
greatly between schools and there was evidence that it is teachers and teaching style
that have greatest impact on the attitudes of pupils in history rather than the nature of
the subject itself. Harris and Haydn concluded that ‘what they are taught, how they are
taught and by whom they are taught are very important in determining their level of
interest. Active and participatory teaching approaches are rated very highly’ (Harris
and Haydn 2006: 321).
Results from this study chime with the general results found in much larger stud-
ies focused on ‘pupil voice’ (e.g. McIntyre et al. 2005) across different subject areas.
The teaching strategies, and therefore learning processes, that pupils identify as most
‘enjoyable’ in history were also found to be ‘investigative work, group work, discussion
40 TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY 11–18

and debate’. The types of activities that were popular were cited as ‘interactive’ activi-
ties, such as role-play, drama, presentations, discussion, debate, making things, and
other creative activities. So much is clear, and our own work with schools has gener-
ated countless examples of individual activities which involve alternative forms of
communication which do not depend on extended writing. Underlying this is a
profound tension for pupils and for teachers: as we saw in Chapter 3, learning history
depends fundamentally on the acquisition of the language and argumentation of
history. Thus, while it is possible to devise classroom activities which enthuse, the
challenge is to develop these and to connect them together in ways which allow pupils
to engage with complex historical ideas.
Many of the negative comments that pupils made about history classrooms cen-
tred around ‘written work’ and most particularly related to writing tasks that did not
offer a sense of ‘ownership’ – such as copying from the board – or tasks requiring
higher level literacy skills such as extended writing, or argumentative writing in a par-
ticular style. However, the same pupils often said that they enjoyed tasks using creative
writing, drama and historical texts that require the development of empathetic under-
standing. Empathy is often perceived, by history teachers, as either too difficult or too
problematic not only because pupils are required to assume (often adult) roles from
the past but also because, as one teacher remarked, ‘the history can get lost and the
English takes over’. Harris and Haydn note that while interactive teaching approaches
were mostly popular, this was not always the case, especially if only used sporadically
or if the teacher was not skilled in their use. The authors conclude that in history ‘the
teacher matters – a lot’, not only in how skilled they are in their teaching approach but
also in how they talk to pupils and relate to them. Again the finding that the relation-
ship between pupils and their teacher is a key factor in pupil enjoyment of a subject
resonates with findings from the ‘pupil voice’ project. In our own visits to schools we
also found evidence of the importance of the relationship between history teachers
and their pupils. Teachers and pupils in one successful history department appeared to
be constantly developing, challenging and debating with each other to create their own
learning community. In one outer London comprehensive school, the history depart-
ment had established a history working group involving pupils to explore ways of
teaching and learning with which pupils felt they could engage. The pupils suggested
new units of work, such as examining the history of crime locally.
Harris and Haydn were also interested in pupils’ perceptions of history as a
subject and therefore probed their understandings of its ‘usefulness’ alongside their
‘enjoyment’ of it. An earlier survey of Year 9 pupils’ perceptions of history and geog-
raphy carried out by Adey and Biddulph (2001) revealed a large discrepancy between
the numbers of pupils who enjoy geography and/or history at Key Stage 3 and the
number who opt to study each subject at GCSE, arguing that ‘for a large number of
pupils, “enjoyment” of history or geography is not an adequate reason for opting to
study it further’ (2001: 449). Adey and Biddulph suggested that perceptions of ‘use-
fulness’ in relation to future careers were more important than ‘liking’ the subject in
shaping option decisions and that most pupils saw ‘usefulness’ in terms of direct appli-
cation to employment (2001: 449). Although Harris and Haydn found that a much
higher proportion of pupils in their survey did think that history as a school subject
was useful, on the whole, their pupils could also not say why it was useful. Again the
authors comment that the results were also highly dependent on the school surveyed
 W H AT D O P U P I L S W A N T F R O M L E A R N I N G H I S T O R Y ? 41

Box 4.2 Pupils’ understanding of the purposes of learning history

(a) History ‘to help understand the present’ type responses

School 6 (13- to 14-year-olds) 32.5% of comments
School 8 (13- to 14-year-olds) 4.5% of comments

(b) History for ‘vocational’ reasons

(e.g. to be a history teacher or archaeologist)
School 3 (11- to 12-year-olds) 22% of comments
School 10 (11- to 12-year-olds) 1.5% of comments

(c) History ‘to avoid making the same mistakes’ type responses
School 10 (13- to 14-year-olds) 28.5% of comments
School 12 (13- to 14-year-olds) 2% of comments

Source: Adapted from Harris and Haydn (2008: 47)

(Box 4.2), suggesting that some schools made the aims and therefore possible pur-
poses of history much more explicit than others.

Making choices: history and the options maze

Pupils in English schools are required to make choices about the subjects or routes
they wish to pursue beyond the age of 14 at some midpoint in what is normally their
third year at secondary school. As we have seen, something like a third choose to con-
tinue their study of history to GCSE (Harris and Haydn 2008). This figure is highly
variable; in some schools the figure is well over 60 per cent and in others it is below
10 per cent (Historical Association 2010). History teachers themselves differ in their
view of the figure. Some argue that GCSE history is extremely difficult and that it is
unfair to lower attaining pupils to put them through an examination course on which
they are likely to struggle; one teacher in an outer London school said to us that ‘we
don’t say “no” to any student at GCSE, but we think management guide some pupils
to other courses, so we don’t see them’. A teacher in the same school said ‘We have not
been given any E or F pupils since last year...some pupils are only offered integrated
humanities or vocational courses.’ A teacher in the 2010 Historical Association survey
saw the development of vocational, diploma courses as a serious threat to the attrac-
tiveness of history to lower attaining pupils: ‘History was very popular among the
weaker pupils who are now not able to take it. They are increasingly encouraged into
vocational streams’ (Historical Association 2010b: 23). The overall educational logic
for an options-based post-14 system is that it should allow pupils to build a curricu-
lum around their long-term aspirations, strengths and interests. The danger is that the
pressure on schools to secure high levels of performance in examination, coupled with
increasing vocational pressures on the 14–19 curriculum, means that some subjects
– including history – become inaccessible to lower attaining pupils, removing what
ought to be their entitlement to learn about the past.
Late in 2010, the new coalition government made a potentially decisive inter-
vention in the post-14 curriculum, by defining some GCSE subjects as an ‘English
42 TEACHING AND LEARNING HISTORY 11–18

Baccalaureat’. The ‘E-bacc’ was to be awarded to pupils who secured GCSE grades at
C or better in English, mathematics, science, a language and either history or geogra-
phy. For history teachers the development of the E-bacc appeared to secure a position
in the post-14 curriculum, defining the subject as a part of an academic core. For
pupils the impact is more difficult to predict. It appears that one motivation underlying
the E-bacc was to redefine expectations around the central academic purposes of the
post-14 curriculum, but it is equally likely that the E-bacc will be used to distinguish
between those pupils deemed able to cope with an intensively academic curriculum
and those less able to do so.
In discussions with pupils in schools we detected a certain pragmatism among
many pupils in discussing their future choices – particularly from those placed in
lower attaining sets. Different forces are at play in their responses (see Box 4.3): there
is an understandable, if in some cases naive and under-informed sense, that GCSE
choices are connected to the demands of the employment market, coupled with a
sense that the pupils should choose subjects they are good at for largely instrumental
reasons – they are less likely to do badly – and, underpinning both, a reminder that they
might also be influenced by their enjoyment of a particular subject. There is a complex
relationship between liking and being good at a subject: in general most pupils are
uncomfortable with subjects they find difficult but being good at something does not
necessarily mean that the pupil likes it. It is difficult to generalize from the evidence

Box 4.3 12-year-old pupils discuss the subject choices they face in school

Interviewer: Next year in Year 9 you’ve got to make options. Do you know what you
want to do?

Girl 1: PE, drama and music.

Interviewer: Would anyone choose history?

All: No.

Girl 2: …maybe.

Boy 1: If it helps you in the army – yes.

Interviewer: When it comes to the two options you’ve got to choose will you choose
things you like or things you’re good at or things that are useful for a job?

All: Useful for a job.

Interviewer: What about you [2]?

Boy 2: Good at – ’cos then I won’t fail it.

(Another girl also said ‘good at’)

Interviewer: So none of you are saying that you would choose things you enjoy?
Or are the things that you are good at the things that you enjoy?

All: Yes.
 W H AT D O P U P I L S W A N T F R O M L E A R N I N G H I S T O R Y ? 43

we have available, but there is some concern that the position of history in the post-14
curriculum is increasingly fragile as options choices, and pupils’ own expectations, are
geared to ‘sorting’ pupils into academic and non-academic choice routes.
History at Key Stage 3 may frequently be highly enjoyable, but for some pupils,
the demands of GCSE are forbidding. In a school that used group work extensively
and successfully in Year 9, a pupil’s reaction to history in Year 10 was ‘It’s not like last
year – we do more writing and less discussion’. Another girl said that she was ‘not
enjoying it as much as I thought’ and others felt the same even though they recognized
that the teacher had to adopt a more strategic approach because of the examination
demands of the course. In this school, the head of history felt that there were con-
straints on the way he could teach the subject at GCSE, but the tension between the
pressures he experienced and the perceptions of pupils was clear. Of course, there is
ample counter-evidence; the evidence of Ofsted inspections and GCSE results is that
history post-14 is successfully taught to those who opt for it, particularly to those who
experience examination success. The point here is different: the gap between teachers’
experiences of teaching the subject and pupils’ experiences of learning it is critical, and
can only be closed by listening hard to pupils about their experiences.

Learning from listening to pupils

McIntyre and his colleagues noted that ‘pupils who have experienced most success in
school learning tend to be the most articulate about what helps them to learn. Those
from whom teachers most need to hear are those whom it will be most difficult to con-
sult’ (McIntyre et al. 2005:167). There is a powerful message here for history teachers
about their relationship with pupils.The scattered and perhaps unrepresentative voices
we have drawn on suggest that the messages from pupils become more comfortable
and ‘easier’ to hear as we deal with pupils who are older and academically successful;
the voices which are most difficult and challenging to listen to are those who find their
engagement with school learning the most challenging and difficult. The ‘uncomfort-
able’ learning for history teachers may focus specifically on those pupils who need to
be engaged and enthused with their Key Stage 3 history if they are to consider the
subject beyond 14, and those for whom GCSE is a struggle. The challenge for history
teachers if they want to realize the potential of pupil voice is to ensure that all pupils
are consulted and all are heard. It is easy to focus on the higher attainers, yet at KS3
all pupils should have the entitlement of studying history in ways that enable them to
enjoy and gain from it.
During our visits we did find examples of history teachers consulting pupils and
acting on this consultation. In one school pupil consultation led to a rethink of how
the school dealt with the local history of migration to the town as pupils said that the
only images of black people in the history curriculum were those of slaves (Sheldrake
and Banham 2007). History teachers worked with the local Afro-Caribbean com-
munity to produce a DVD detailing their early experiences of moving to and living in
the town. These resources were used in the classroom and pupils saw local people talk
about their experiences. These examples of pupils contributing to their own history
curriculum to produce units of work that acknowledge local contexts and the people
who live there suggest that ‘pupil voice’ is a route to exploring what pupils want and
how it might be achieved.
5
What do we know about pupils’
understanding of history?

In this chapter we explore challenges that learning history presents for pupils in some way or
another. In doing so, we remain faithful to our belief that any child can learn ‘good’ history,
based in part on our experiences of observing and meeting teachers who make history an
engaging, challenging but also accessible and attainable subject in school, and on our own
classroom experience. There is a perception that pupils find history difficult. To some extent,
this is to be celebrated: without challenge, history would lack engagement and meaning and
its role in the school curriculum would be less valuable, though we acknowledge that for some
pupils history can seem prohibitively difficult. Clearly, the more teachers understand about
what makes history difficult, the more they can plan to address this in the classroom.We sug-
gest that pupils bring with them their own knowledge and interests that need to be explicitly
recognized and built upon.

Understanding substantive knowledge

Box 5.1 16-year-old history pupils discuss the difficulty of history

Interviewer: People say that history is difficult – is history difficult?

Mary: I find it quite difficult. It’s not just looking back over the facts, you have
to interpret them and always provide evidence for your opinion – like why something
happened or what the most important consequence of something was. So it’s not
just the pure history – you have to put your own spin on it. It can be quite difficult
to look at sources and use them to come to a conclusion. It’s quite a difficult skill
I think.

Joanne: I think it’s hard because history is ongoing. One of the topics we did was
the Arab–Israeli conflict and our teacher would say ‘Did you see this in the news?’
We looked at the bombings in America and she covered the bit after that and you
can see how that links on to where we are today. I think that was quite mind-blowing:
we looked at the origins and you can see how it has developed and it is still going on