Effective Teaching of History, The

Ron Brooks, Mary Aris, Irene Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317899297
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Effective Teaching of History brings together the varied expertise of three experienced educationalists to provide a practical and invaluable guide for teachers, and teachers-in-training who wish to teach history Key Stages 1-4. It covers a wide range of methods and resources for teaching national curriculum history and examines the role of history in schools and colleges in the 1990s.

CHAPTER 1

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Selling history in the schools and colleges of the 1990s

Ron Brooks

The definition of what constitutes an effective history teacher is not fixed and immutable. It must inevitably reflect the aims and objectives of the history syllabus and the age in which they operate. In the era of the first national curriculum, which came to an end in 1926, both the history syllabus and the task of the history teacher were defined in six lines.

History should include the lives of great men and women and the lessons to be learnt therefrom, and in the higher classes a knowledge of the great persons and events of English History and of the growth of the British Empire. The teaching need not be limited to English or British History, and lessons on citizenship may be given with advantage in the higher classes.¹

The effective teacher of history was the person who could elicit clearly the moral messages to be gleaned from studying the lives of the great and the good; the age demanded that this should be interpreted mainly within an imperial context with the emphasis upon citizenship and service. There was no need to sell the subject, constituting as it did, a core element of the compulsory curriculum. History sold itself in the schools of interwar Britain. Even after the first national curriculum was quietly abandoned, elementary schools remained under the general regulations of the Board of Education, which meant in effect, continuing to teach history. The secondary school regulations drawn up in 1904 stipulated that ‘not less than 4 1/2 hours per week must be allotted to English, Geography and History’. The dropping of the detailed prescription of hours a few years later did not disturb history’s dominant position among the core subjects of the liberal, grammar tradition. Only querulous pupils and awkward governors at interviews asked for some justification for studying it. However, therein lay both history’s strength and its weakness. After the demise of the first national curriculum, the priority given to history in schools was dependent upon the continued dominance of the liberal academic tradition in education. When the second national curriculum was being formulated in the 1980s, this tradition was in retreat. The Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan, attacked it in his Ruskin College speech in 1976 and successive Conservative governments in the 1980s poured resources into technical and vocational education. The decline in the position of history in many of our schools is signified by the fact that it failed not only to be ranked as a core subject in the National Curriculum reinstated under the Education Reform Act of 1988 but was struggling hard for its survival on the list of foundation subjects as schools in the early 1990s tried to pour the National Curriculum quart into the school timetable pint pot. Even the strenuous attempts made by historians over two decades to make their subject more relevant to the needs of late twentieth-century Britain seemed to be overshadowed by the debate over empathy. As the following brief extract from a newspaper article at the beginning of the 1990s shows, history led the descent of the humanities from its secure position in the first national curriculum to the point of possible abandonment during the implementation of the second. To those who hold the view that ‘the more liberal a subject is, the more useless it is’, history must have appeared as the jewel in the non-utilitarian crown.

The history teacher as publicist and salesperson

HISTORY TEACHING ‘COULD BE DROPPED’

by John Clare, Education Editor

History could be dropped from the national curriculum because of ‘all the ink being spilled’ over how it should be taught, 18 eminent historians claimed yesterday…

The 18 included, on the Right, Sir Geoffrey Elton, former Regius Professor of modern history at Cambridge, and Lord Blake, the historian of the Conservative party; and on the Left, Prof. Eric Hobsbawm and Dr Raphael Samuel². (The Daily Telegraph, 20 June 1990)

Many history conferences in the 1970s and 1980s took as their theme the defence of the subject. As the headline suggests, it will no longer be sufficient in the 1990s to mount a defence. The effective teacher of the 1990s must be the skilled publicist and salesperson if the subject is to survive the new age of market forces. A strategy based simply upon warding off attack will be inadequate to guarantee its survival. Teachers must be prepared not only to defend their subject but positively to advance its cause in a hostile climate if history is going to stand a chance of surviving. The effective teaching of history requires first and foremost a healthy environment in which to flourish. A marginalised position on the school timetable with dwindling numbers of pupils and the possible threat of enforced merger with other subjects will not provide that. The history teacher must sell the subject in a highly competitive and possibly unfriendly market place as never before. Teachers in the independent sector have long been used to doing this. Teachers in state schools must adopt some of these selling techniques if history is to flourish in the state sector.

With the publication of the interim and final reports of the National Curriculum History Working Group in 1989 and 1990 ‘the history debate’ finally went public, no longer being confined to in-house shareholders; that is to teachers and students. History is no longer a limited partnership or enterprise between these two groups. It is now History pic. The 1988 Education Reform Act and earlier legislation has altered entirely the political context in which history teaching operates. Parents are now full shareholders, no longer limited to voting by proxy through giving their children advice about subject choice. They have a full say in selecting schools for their children, on governing bodies where the allocation of resources is decided, and whether or not a school should opt out of local authority control, a decision which could affect the status and position of history in a school. Directly and indirectly, they have a great deal of influence over curricular matters. The meetings of the new shareholders of History pic may well be stormy; some indeed may wish to wind up the company or favour a merger with other subject areas to preserve its share of a declining pupil market. Some, who have experienced only the old-style rote learning of facts and dates, may well believe that the subject is already educationally bankrupt and will take a great deal of persuading that history is not only educationally solvent and viable but is vital to the balance and well-being of the curricular economy of the 1990s. The problem is that many shareholders and the public at large may not appreciate that the nature of the history business has changed. History pic no longer deals in the old bankrupt stock of rote learning. Historical literacy today encompasses a wide range of skills as well as the acquisition of and understanding of knowledge.

History pic is not in the theme park business, that is the immediate and shallow enjoyment of a series of short-lived and random experiences. Pupils soon grow weary of a parade of historical topics selected solely because they appear to have a popular appeal or relevance. Hitler’s Germany taught solely as a series of brutal persecutions and bloody deeds soon galls. Such an approach is history without integrity. The crux of the Final Report of the National Curriculum History Working Group was stated in its introduction (point 1.3):

1.3 To have integrity, the study of history must be grounded in a thorough knowledge of the past; must employ rigorous historical method – the way in which historians carry out their task; and must involve a range of interpretations and explanations. Together, these elements make an organic whole; if any one of them is missing the outcome is not history?³

This idea of historical study as the rigorous combination of knowledge and method is central to any defence of a key position for history in the curriculum of the 1990s, and may best be summed up in the term ‘historical literacy’. But a key problem for those wishing to engage in such a defence is history’s poor image. It is often seen as a subject with very limited aims, usually the acquisition of knowledge and information about ages remote from our own, and whose teaching is restricted to dictated notes, copying from textbooks and rote learning. The preface to any argument for giving history an important position in the school curriculum of the 1990s must be an examination of the way in which history has developed into a multi-skilled discipline which has immense relevance to the general and vocational education of students.

In short, the value of history as a school subject must be constantly and publicly argued because:

(1) history may lose out in any modification to the National Curriculum;

(2) in the implementation of the existing national curriculum it may be marginalised in the scramble for resources and timetable space;

(3) a rigorous projection of the value of the subject is important to the well-being of the school in the face of competition from other schools and possible closure;

(4) students have a choice at Key Stage 4 and in the sixth form and it is essential for the integrity of the su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Effective Teacher Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor's Preface
• Preface
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Selling history in the schools and colleges of the 1990s
• 2 History teaching in the primary school: Key Stages 1 and 2
• 3 Effective teaching: Key Stage 3
• 4 Resources for teacher-designed units: some general guidelines
• 5 History 14-16: Key Stage 4
• 6 History in the sixth form
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index