Teaching History in a Neoliberal Age

Policy, Agency and Teacher Voice

Mary Woolley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367227104
• eBook ISBN: 9781000681185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This book explores changing practice in history classrooms from the autonomy of the 1980s through the introduction of GCSEs and the National Curriculum to the prescription of the National Strategies and the pervasive influence of league tables in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It uses individual narratives from history teachers to shed light on a changing profession.

Showcasing research that is crucial reading for leaders in education, it uses oral accounts from 13 experienced teachers to provide a rich testimony of the constraints and affordances acting on history teachers. The book offers a unique perspective to show how teachers experienced steady but substantial changes in policy and autonomy and how this affected their practice; this detail enhances an analysis of policy and curricular documents across three decades. The findings are crucial for educational settings today, facing crises of teacher recruitment and teacher retention.

This book will be of great interest to academics and higher degree research students in history education, history of education and education policy. It will also be of interest to beginning history teachers and senior school leaders responsible for teacher development and curriculum.

1 Debating history education

History education has become a topic of political discussion and media debate in many countries, with ‘history wars’ having been identified in Australia and the United States over what content should be taught in the school history classroom and how that content should be approached. There is inevitable academic debate surrounding history education, and a brief survey of articles in the History Education Research Journal demonstrates the transnational nature of many such debates as the papers raise themes that are also relevant within an English context. For example, the second issue of the journal, published in October 2018, includes papers on ‘the history canon’ in Denmark (Haas, 2018), representations of the ‘other’ in Cyprus (Constantinidou, 2018), constructions of patriotism in Canada (Wallace-Casey, 2018), investigations of historical controversy in Singapore (Baildon et al., 2018) and interpretations of national monuments in Switzerland (Mathis & Gollin, 2018). Most of the articles in this issue of the journal relate to the practice of history in the classroom although some go beyond that precise remit. One looks at textbooks as a source (MacGearailt, 2018), another studies the views of high school students (Innes & Sharp, 2018) and a further article is a case study of trainee teachers' changing models of history teaching in Ghana (Oppong, 2018). Themes of nationalism, pedagogy, representations of the past and teacher development emerge from these articles and can also be identified in other contemporary literature on history education. In his edited book on teaching history and the changing nation state, Guyver (2016) identified themes related to pedagogy, the nation, landmarks and shared histories to compare experiences of history education from countries as diverse as Ireland, Rwanda and Palestine. From consideration of diversity in the twenty-first century to representations of past acts such as slavery and colonisation, the way the past is remembered and represented has been a crucial strand of educational research, but also at times a source for high-profile political debate (Van Nieuwenhuyse & Pires Valentim, 2018). Although the research evidence in this book comes only from the English context, it reveals patterns of practice relevant to educational policymakers, senior leaders and teachers of history in a variety of international settings.

The purposes of history education research

The main body of history education research in England can be placed within four very broad categories. The first broad category is concerned with identifying and defining the purpose of school history. Such research has often been related to concerns about national identity, the development of national identity and the extent of the relationship identity formation should have with school history. As Parkes and Vinterek (2012) succinctly asserted, history education is ‘tethered to its national milieu, but increasingly confronted by cultural diversity’ (p. 54). From the 1980s onwards a desire for multi-cultural history was evident in research literature in England (Edgington, 1982; Goalen, 1988). Around the turn of the century, a wave of writing focused on the place of English history within Britain and Europe came to the fore (Bracey & Gove Humphries, 2003; Low-Beer, 2003; Phillips, 1997). In the 2000s increased concerns emerged in the literature over teaching a ‘diverse’ history sensitively and effectively (Mohamud & Whitburn, 2016; Wilkinson, 2014). Chapman, Burn, and Kitson (2018) suggested very recent debates have been characterised by a defence of the discipline against ‘advocacy of the use of story and canonical narratives as tools for fostering national identity and integration across the political divide’ (p. 1). Harris et al. (2019) identified debates over the place of knowledge in the history classroom, with followers of Hirsch on one side believing curriculum should develop students' ‘core knowledge’ and cultural literacy and followers of Young et al. (2014) promoting a more disciplinary approach to the subject. As Harris et al. point out, such debates raise fundamental questions about the purpose of education.

The second category of literature, not unrelated to the first, concerns research into the practice of history education itself, in particular, theorising and defining the structures of school history. Haydn (2012a) has identified England as one of a number of countries that moved away from the ‘traditional’ model of school history centred on national canonical narratives with the introduction of a National Curriculum in 1991. This document placed significant emphasis on the importance of developing pupils' disciplinary understanding (Fordham, 2016a). The development of this form of history education and the move to this structure within a National Curriculum is detailed in Chapter 3. As Fordham has argued, the transition to this ‘New History’ in the 1970s and 1980s led to ‘a growth in interest in how pupils progressed in their understandings of the discipline, particularly in the form of second-order concepts’ (p. 47). Counsell (2011) has defined second-order concepts as ‘those intellectual categories essential to the practice of history, such as cause, change and evidence’ (p. 206). The two largest empirical studies in this area were the evaluation of the Schools Council Project ‘History 13-16’ (Shemilt, 1980) and Project CHATA (Lee & Ashby, 2000). The latter sought to explore pupil progression in understanding of second-order concepts. Further research work sought to clarify and refine such models and definitions both nationally and internationally (Cercadillo, 2001; Pickles, 2010; Seixas & Morton, 2012). Practitioner research has been a distinctive feature of the history education community over the last two decades, with many articles published in the professional journal, Teaching History, seeking to tease out practical ways to develop students' disciplinary understanding of history (Hammond, 2007; Howells, 1998). Key texts recently published within the history education community are structured around second-order concepts, or building blocks of the discipline of history with chapters on historical change, historical causation, evidential thinking, historical interpretation and historical significance (Counsell, Burn, & Chapman, 2016; Harris, Burn, & Woolley, 2013). Other countries have developed similar, but slightly differing disciplinary models. In Canada, for example, The Historical Thinking Project developed a framework of six ‘historical thinking concepts’ including a focus on the ‘ethical dimension of historical interpretations’ which is not so prevalent in the English setting.¹ The disciplinary frame of the National Curriculum has, to a great extent, defined history education literature in England. Part of the purpose of the research detailed in this book was to explore how far that disciplinary language, explicit in the policy documentation, also framed the practice of history teachers. This approach to history education has a history in itself which will be explored further in Chapter 3. There are some examples of research into the teaching of substantive aspects of history, most notably the Holocaust. Large-scale projects have explored how teachers approach Holocaust education and students' understanding of the Holocaust (Foster et al., 2016; Pettigrew et al., 2009). This can be seen as part of a subgroup of recent literature exploring students' attitude to and perspectives of history as a school subject (Harris & Haydn, 2006; Hawkey, 2012).

A third category of literature took a more political or historical approach to researching history education. Aldrich and Dean (1991) and Sylvester (1994) provided brief but important overviews of the development of history education in the twentieth century which are explored in Chapter 3 to provide a context for this study. Phillips' (1998) detailed book on the battle over the History National Curriculum was a key political and historical study. More recently, Counsell (2011) provided an historical analysis of how the disciplinary form of history emerged through research and teachers' practitioner research. Fordham (2016b) built on this work in conducting a citation analysis of articles from Teaching History which charted a development in the published discourse of teachers. Haydn (2012b) has explored the role of politicians, particularly Secretaries of State for Education, and their relationship with the history curriculum. Even so, there was an obvious gap for research which looked in more depth at history education in England over a longer period of time. Having identified this gap in the literature, Cannadine, Keating, and Sheldon (2011) established the ‘History in Education Project’ in 2009 to explore the development of the teaching of history in English state schools across the twentieth century. While offering a superb overview of history teaching over a long timeframe, the project left plenty of scope to explore specific periods of change within history education in more detail. Edwards, for example, set out to do just that in his analysis of history education in the 20 years following the Second World War (2016).

The final category identified here relates to research into history teachers themselves. This can be sorted into two subgroups: one associated with beginning teachers and the other dealing with more experienced teachers. Key literature in this area includes the work of Husbands, Kitson, and Pendry (2003) exploring the experiences and practices of practising history teachers engaging with Curriculum 2000 and the work of Harris and Burn (e.g., Burn & Harris, 2009, 2016) with the Historical Association surveys. This category of literature will be explored in more detail below.

History education research has become prominent over the past decade or so with substantial papers on history education in leading research journals. The position of history as a ‘foundation’ subject on the curriculum, however, seems to have limited the amount of large-scale funded research projects in comparison with ‘core’ subjects of Maths and Science. In contrast, practitioner research into history education is thriving, and the experiences of a group of what Counsell (2011) has termed ‘intellectually-confident’ history teachers are well publicised.² The research detailed in this book sought to give voice to a different group of teachers and, therefore, broaden understandings of the experiences of history teachers over the last 30 years.

Contemporary debates in history education

School history has often been a site of contentious debate, whether at a political level or media stories about what content should be taught or between academics theorising the precise definition or significance of certain concepts. The history education community has often sought to defend itself and its integrity from various perceived attacks, such as the imposition of a new set of standards in the United States or a new version of the National Curriculum in England. This section sets out two current debates concerning history education.

The first, related to one of the categories above, concerns the fostering of national identity and its place in the history classroom (Chapman, Burn, & Kitson, 2018; Harris & Burn, 2016; Haydn, 2012b). All three of these studies, written in response to a new draft history curriculum proposed by Michael Gove, found a markedly different discourse about history education within the history teacher community to that promoted by politicians and in the media. This raises questions about conflict between consecutive versions of curriculum and policy documentation and the teachers that enact it. As Chapman et al. conclude, ‘curriculum projects that seek to mobilise school history in service of a national narrative in its “island story” or “British identity” genres are unlikely to find favour with undergraduates and postgraduates trained in the discipline of history’ (p. 24). There are parallels to these specifically English debates in other countries. Denmark, for example, introduced a ‘history canon’ in 2009 as part of a high-profile ‘cultural battle’ initiated by the Danish liberal-conservative political and intellectual elite. However, Haas (2018) found that despite the canon being structurally and substantially introduced into schools through inclusion in textbooks, teachers responded in different ways. Some were unaware of the history canon being a means to further identity politics, others seemed happy to reproduced the master narrative uncritically, but a third group questioned ‘the relevance and legitimacy of mono-cultural history education’ (p. 191). These examples demonstrate the importance of listening to teachers' experiences of curriculum and policy rather than relying on documentary evidence to form conclusions about history education.

The second debate concerns the place of substantive knowledge in the history classroom. Young (2008) wrote a seminal book promoting the place of knowledge within debates on the curriculum. Emerging from this work, Young and Lambert (2014) have described three possible futures for schools. Future 3 promotes the place of subject-specific knowledge and treats subjects as ‘the most reliable tools we have for enabling students to acquire knowledge and make sense of the world.’ The history education community has sought to use Young's work to defend the subject-specific nature of history as a discipline, particularly against some of the more generic education policies of the twenty-first century (Counsell, 2016). Questions have been raised about the place of substantive and disciplinary knowledge echoing some of the debates of the 1970s and 1980s in history education. This second debate in particular relates to teachers' testimony of experience from across their careers.

History teachers and experiences of teaching history

Little research has been undertaken on English history teachers' perceptions and experiences of curriculum and policy. There was some research at the inception of the National Curriculum in the late 1980s and early 1990s (O'Neill, 1994; Phillips, 1993). Husbands et al. (2003) based their book, Unders...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Debating history education
• 2 Exploring teacher voice
• 3 The historical and global context
• 4 Freedom and choice 1985 to 1990
• 5 Enacting the National Curriculum 1991 to 2011
• 6 Enacting policies beyond the National Curriculum 1991 to 2011
• 7 Collaboration, textbooks and technology 1985 to 2011
• 8 Conclusions
• Index