Thinking History 4-14

Teaching, Learning, Curricula and Communities

Dr Grant Bage, Grant Bage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317827054
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book the author looks at the past, present and the future of history teaching in primary schools in an attempt to provide a practical framework for teachers. Section one reviews relevant literature with an aim to clarify the dilemmas and advance present thinking and practice in history teaching in primary schools. Section two offers case studies, curriculum materials and designs, teaching ideas and methods, teacher-development and curriculum development materials, at the same time as tying it in to the existing knowledge-base. Section three considers the 'perennial dilemmas' for school history in the 21st century, including: how can history survive in an increasingly over-crowded and competitive school curriculum? How can history be harnessed to improvements in literacy and numeracy? What should the primary history curriculum contain? How can IT secure easier access to historical information and evidence?

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Section 1

Retrospect

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1 Learning History

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I was transfixed by the way time buckled, met itself in pleats and folds; I stared at a picture in a book of a safety pin from the Bronze Age – a simple design that hadn’t changed in thousands of years … I stared at pictures of prehistoric bowls, spoons, combs. To go back a year or two was impossible, absurd. To go back millennia – ah! that was… nothing.

(Michaels 1996 p. 30)

Mapping the Questions

Underlying Questions About How History Learning:
Is pursued for instrinsic or extrinsic ends	Governance Issues
Starts from the curriculum’s requirements or different children’s needs	Issues of Diversity
Is only communicated through writing or is expressed via other media	Media Issues
Develops multiple or singular intelligences	Values-led Issues
Increases or decreases a child’s dependence on the teacher	Democratic Issues
Aims for knowledge through questioning or memorisation	Cognitive Issues
Is designed for groups or individuals	Social Issues

Just like history, one of learning’s main purposes is to prompt questions. As a critical reader you bring your own to this text. As its writer I shall explore some which have underlain my own classroom practice, curriculum development and research experience over the last couple of decades. These are highlighted in the map sketched in the introduction. They preface each of these first four chapters, they help locate the policy and practice of Chapters 5 to 8 and they will be discussed again during the final chapter. A brief overview now will set these opening chapters in context and perhaps stimulate you as reader to reflect further upon your own learning opinions, experiences and questions.

Fundamental to much educational thinking, especially from the time of Rousseau, has been the question of whether children learn about a subject such as history because it is intrinsically interesting and useful; or for extrinsic reasons such as promoting ‘citizenship’ or ‘national identity’. Although such a question may appear as remote from practice as a superceded national curriculum, skilful teaching translates or embodies such structures into learning that feels friendly and intrinsic to students (see Bage 1999a). Many everyday pedagogic skills lie in navigating children’s learning through such choppy curricular waters: or, on carefully considered occasions, refusing to take to sea at all. History is in particular need of such sympathetic and assertive treatment, being centrally concerned with the fragments of the past still present in our children’s ‘here and now’.

This leads to a related question. Does learning start from the curriculum’s requirements or different children’s needs? To an extent, before the advent of national curricula such a question about educational history could be sidestepped. Within living memory, in primary schools teachers could ignore history as a subject or mould it to fit ‘their’ children’s perceived individualities: differences in age, ethnicity, geography or social class, for instance. Such independence is perhaps atypical. In the overall history of formal history curricula, teachers’ autonomy has more often been circumscribed. Throughout the twentieth century secondary history students have followed largely preordained exam courses and syllabi, shaped more by traditional structures than learners’ needs, or the worlds beyond school. Related criticisms could be made of elementary, textbook-led history courses in Victorian England (e.g. Gosden 1969 pp. 31, 38) or today’s subject-led national curricula.

Some classic ways in which history teachers have attempted to translate such curricula into learning are suggested by the next questions on our map. These ask whether history learning should be communicated only through writing, or whether it should rely upon ‘varied media’ and developing ‘diverse intelligences’. This book argues towards the latter in both cases, not from sentiment but for efficiency and effectiveness. Subjects which fail to relate to other subjects produce a narrow range of learning, and face an increasingly perilous curricular future; especially in societies where information is as widespread, and work skills as fluid, as in the industrialised Northern world.

The fifth and sixth questions on our map about learning tap similar fundamentals. Do the ways in which we organise our history classrooms ‘decrease or increase a child’s dependence on the teacher?’ In parallel, do history curricula ‘aim for knowledge through questioning or memorisation?’ It seems a consensual assumption that the coming world will require people to be increasingly confident learners, able to question more than memorise masses of information for their work (e.g. Askew and Carnell 1998; Beare and Slaughter 1993; Day 1999). Such an aspiration contrasts with most state-sanctioned nineteenth century curricula, when textbook or exam history typically promoted rote and decontextualised memorisation, at least for the masses. This typical critique of prevailing primary history was made in 1867:

No attempt is made to interest the pupil in his studies by teaching him the broad principles or general applications of the various branches of knowledge … proficiency is sought to be attained by cramming the pupils to bursting-point with definitions, dates, and figures … wholly uninteresting and practically useless to students…

(quoted in Gosden 1969 p. 31)

Before we become too complacently modernist, within forty years much had changed. Edwardian history educators were claiming that the acquisition of logic and the development of thoughtful citizenship, formerly an expectation of adult elites, could be learnt by all adolescents through studying history (e.g. Bridge 1907; Fletcher 1907; Howard 1905). The foundations for such curriculum development could and were being laid in at least some primary schools. Although ‘learning logic and citizenship through history’ might appear remote to young children, some Edwardians argued that it could be achieved:

The child’s interest must be won… by… an incident and event that arouses him, as we can see quite clearly in his games, where he loves to be acting… however the ultimate aim need not be forgotten. We can teach a child to reason, even when we are telling him a story.

(Neild 1907 pp. 290–1)

Recent national curricula may have been the first to legislate for cross-phase history learning in England, but its desirability had long been argued.

Finally, in this introduction. Should history learning ‘be designed for groups or individuals?’ As with most of the issues traced on our map, a characteristic of effective history teachers is that they seem able to plot courses between such polarities. A fine teacher can retain the wholeness of a class, simultaneous with stimulating personal learning. A fine teacher balances creating memories with questions; and offers a child independence, simultaneous with maintaining contact. In fine teaching, group events leave beneficial marks on individual minds: marks which we call learning. Often a fine teacher may be unaware that she has done so at the time, and a learner unaware of her impact until much later in life. This young, contemporary teacher remembered her history learning from some twenty years previously:

As a child I remember hearing the story of the Fire of London. I was sat on the carpet in my classroom, surrounded by open-mouthed six year olds, and the storyteller was Mrs Harwood. She told it well and we were there among the flames and the screaming crowds. I could smell the smoke, feel the terror … I knew this really happened and I knew it happened a ‘long time ago’, but I couldn’t have told you when or given you any more factual information. Instead I was given images and impressions that are still with me today. I’m sure Mrs Harwood did supply us with facts and figures it’s just that they ‘evaporated’ … dry facts left me cold and I could never remember them anyway – I failed my GCSE history…

(Froggatt 1998 p. 1)

In broader social terms memory is a:

Key mediating term between the individual and society … Our intentions for the future are grounded in the past and without remembering we cannot see, for how else would we know what we see?

(Tonkin 1992 pp. 98, 104)

In educational terms, learning history is something of a social equivalent to personal memory. We shall now therefore move on from underlying learning questions in our map of thinking history, to more immediate aspects. These start with learning about time and memory, before moving on to consider historical knowledge and understanding, historical interpretations, historical enquiry, organisation and communication. These categories mirror ‘historical knowledge, skills and understanding’ as presented in the year 2000 English national curriculum in history (DfEE 1999a).

Time and Memory

Language and memory define humanity: by lending access to past and present experience, they help humans construct visions of a future towards which we work. Memory and language are also interdependent. Memory needs language to name its memories, but language needs memory if users are to become skilful in language’s turns and terms. Learning rests upon the increasing degrees of intellectual precision which a child’s developing memory provides, memory then being employed to interpret feelings, objects, people and symbols. Learning anything involves remembering things about it: and often, though not always, remembering more about it. If people need such memories, so do societies. Laws, customs, cultures and technologies rest upon memory. Although the centrality of memory to individual and societal learning broadly buttresses history’s educational status, learning history involves more than ‘remembering’. History in schools entails asking and answering questions about the past, making selections from memories or records, and joining these selections together into an explanatory narrative (Bage 1999a). Interpretation of memories becomes the distinctively educational ingredient.

There are also many ways of remembering and interpreting other than those offered by history. Literature, art, science, indeed most intellectual disciplines, remember and interpret experience. Hence for instance ‘natural history’s’ foundation in the story of science, or the importance of ‘the autobiographical’ in literature and art. These reasons alone lend history learning a powerful and broad curricular function, but the construction of memory in individuals mirrors learning about history in another important way. Like an individual’s memory, learnt history is a social construct, built from interactions between individual preferences and experiences and those of the people, power groups and structures within which our lives are embedded:

Infants initiate: they do not just respond or copy. But they can only become human through interaction with other persons and the whole environment… cognition, the ability to think, is developed interactively. The world outside is used to build the means of understanding that same outside world, and as we grow, we continue to process and internalise the outside to think with, as well as to think about…

(Tonkin 1992 pp. 105, 104)

This anthropological and psychological argument leads to the conclusion that we need to learn history not just because history is one of society’s most important ways of remembering and learning about itself; but because our very own, personal memories also derive from without, as much as within (Morton 1993). When we learn about ‘the past’ in general we are not just extending knowledge and experience of others. We are also learning how to think about our own past, present and future, faculties essential to expanding children’s minds (e.g. Crites 1986).

A growing understanding of time generally develops naturally, as children’s memories and experiences widen. Donaldson (1978) discovered that socially contextualised tasks helped young children show more abstract thinking than had previously been discerned. In parallel a recent researcher concluded that in the context of discussing literary and historical stories ‘Children between the ages of three and seven evidently try to use the terminology of time measurement’ and have ‘a grasp of the key historical concepts of change and continuity. They know what has gone for good. They also know that other things still exist’ (Hoodless 1996 pp. 108, 109). Talking with peers and adults seemed crucial to yo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors' Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mapping this Book
• Section 1 Retrospect
• Section 2 Introspect
• Section 3 Prospect
• References
• Index