History 5–11

A Guide for Teachers

Hilary Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138720817
• eBook ISBN: 9781351762359
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Now in its third edition, History 5-11 aims to make teaching about the past exciting and stimulating for both teachers and children. Focusing on the English National Curriculum for History (2013), and with an emphasis on the importance of learning about the past through the processes of historical enquiry, History 5-11 contains case studies, lesson planning guidance and methods to develop pupils' historical understanding. It offers creative and innovative ways to teach the subject of history, refreshing teachers' confidence in teaching the 2013 curriculum, and is illustrated by new case studies and research.

This fully updated third edition includes:

• References to the 2013 National Curriculum, its aims and purposes, and its content and processes for Key Stages 1 & 2
• Guidance on making local, national and global connections between societies

over time

• Planning for assessment and progression
• New research and illustrative case studies
• New sections on local history and links to oracy
• Updates to all existing chapters
• Reflection on practice and research: undergraduate, Masters level and PhD.

This textbook is an invaluable resource to all trainee and practising primary teachers interested in teaching history in an accessible, dynamic and above all, enjoyable way.

PART
I
Teachers’ pedagogical knowledge

Understanding the processes of historical enquiry

CHAPTER
1
Changes in the teaching and learning of history

This chapter considers how the history people have learned has changed over the years. First it illustrates this through a focus on King Alfred (849–899), since he is a significant figure in the current history curriculum. He first became known as ‘Alfred the Great’ in the sixteenth century, because his piety and his emphasis on ‘the English’ made him seem like a precursor of the Protestant Reformation. The Hanoverian kings promoted him because they shared his Saxon roots. In Victorian times, the English believed they could trace their laws back to the fifth century, when they defeated the Romans. So Alfred, because of his Constitutional Code, piety and sense of duty, (recorded in the biography which he commissioned himself, from Bishop Asser), was rediscovered as the perfect king. It was felt that Alfred represented positive facets of the national character, which enabled the English to rule those less fortunately endowed (Yorke 1999). In the millenary celebration of Alfred’s birth, at Wantage in 1849, 8,000–10,000 people enjoyed traditional games, an ox roast and the following jubilee poem.

Anglo-Saxons! – in love are we met

To honour a name we can never forget!

Father, and Founder, and King of a race

That reigns and rejoices in every place,

Root of a tree that o’er shadows the earth

First of a family blest from his birth

Blest in this stem of their strength and their state

Alfred the Wise, and the Good, and the Great!

(Martin Tupper 1849)

In A Child’s History of England (1851–1853), Charles Dickens represents many examples where Alfred was used to demonstrate the best of the English character:

The noble king … in his single person, possessed all the Saxon virtues. Whom misfortune could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose perseverance, nothing could shake. Who was hopeful in defeat, and generous in success. Who loved justice, freedom, truth and knowledge.

(Dickens 1905)

This tradition continues in Our Island Story (Marshall 1905), reprinted by friends of The Daily Telegraph in 2005, for distribution to schools. It represents the view of the past, as generally taught in elementary schools from about 1905–1965. Marshall illustrates a reference to one of Alfred’s sea battles against the Danes with this rousing song, actually written eight centuries after King Alfred.

Ye mariners of England

That guard our native seas,

Whose flag has braved a thousand years

The battle and the breeze,

Your glorious standard launch again

To match another foe

And sweep through the deep,

While the stormy winds do blow;

While the battle rages loud and long

And the stormy winds do blow …

(Thomas Campbell (1774–1844))

But now, with the marvels of new technology, you can sing along to ‘Ye mariners of England’ on YouTube (www­.yo­utu­be.­com­/wa­tch­?v=23pPQDJiCm4).

The experience of such history lessons was brilliantly satirised by Sellar and Yeatman (1930: 18):

Alfred noted that the Danes had very long ships, so he built a great many more much longer ones, thus cleverly founding the British Navy. From that time onwards foreigners, who, unlike the English, do not prefer to fight against long odds, seldom attacked the British Navy. Hence the important International Law called the Rule Britannia, technically known as the Freedom of the Sea.

And if you do not think that is funny – good! You did not experience that sort of history teaching. (Table 10.3 offers a modern take on learning about King Alfred, inviting children to investigate the question ‘Was Alfred Great?’)

Anyone who was in primary school between 1967 and 1991, following the recommendation of the otherwise progressive Plowden Report, probably did not learn history at all:

History, it is said, again and again, is an adult subject. How can it be studied by children without being so simplified it is falsified? There is first the problem that it is not until the later years of primary school that some children develop a sense of time. … Yet we visited an Infant school where one exceptional child had memorised the dates of the Kings and Queens of England.

(Plowden Report 1967, paragraph 620)

Rethinking primary history: a personal perspective

Only since the 1980s, have we identified what exactly is involved in finding out about the past and explored ways in which young children can actively engage with this process, in ways which develop critical and discursive thinking, rather than brainwashing. I read history at university, but found teaching young children, in the Plowden tradition, much more interesting than teaching history in the sort of high school for girls that I had attended. After some time I was seconded to take an Advanced Diploma in Child Development, at the Institute of Education in London. There I realized that no one had ever systematically tried to apply theories of constructivist learning to the processes of historical enquiry, so I made this the subject of my dissertation. When I returned to school, I used my work as a Year 4 class teacher to collect empirical data that informed my PhD on ‘Young Children’s Thinking in History’ (Cooper 1991). The International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research (www.history.org) illustrates how history educators around the world, ranging from previously Communist countries of Eastern Europe to previously fascist countries of Western Europe and South America, have also begun their own researches into the teaching of history to young children, in their own contexts, which engage children in active enquiry rather than giving them a simple ‘story of the past’, which can be politically manipulated.

For, of course, young children are aware of times before their own, although their understanding may be incomplete and even stereotypical, if not mediated through education. From their earliest years, children have some awareness of ‘the past’ through illustrations of traditional stories and rhymes, family photographs, old buildings, then later through film, television and heritage sites. But to begin to understand the past children must learn, from the beginning, the questions to ask and how to answer them.

The evolution of history as a discipline

Content

Originally the story of a society’s past was handed down orally, and in some societies it still is. In others, it was written down: by the Greeks as epic poetry, in The Odyssey; by Medieval monks as chronicles, lists of events, of battles lost and won; in Shakespeare’s histories as the story of a nation’s kings. The story was always told for a particular audience and a particular reason.

Over the past 150 years, history has become recognized as an academic discipline and its scope has broadened. Frederick Maitland (1850–1906) justified history as the study of the law, in any society. Marc Bloch (1886–1944) drew on new disciplines to study human settlement: place-name study, technology and social sciences. Lewis Namier (1888–1960) analysed political life, and Mortimer Wheeler archaeology. Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) linked geography and history, making connections over time and space and exploring the role of large-scale, socio-economic factors in finding out about the past.

A history then may be broad or in-depth. It may be about an individual, about social groups, economic or political movements, local, national or global. Historians have their own interests: women’s history, black history, the history of childhood, the history of a particular class, left-wing or right-wing perspectives. And since history is an umbrella subject that includes all aspects of life there are histories of music, art, science, religion, geographical histories and sports history.

Selecting content

Within the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum there are vast opportunities to plan content creatively. But no teacher can have a comprehensive knowledge of every period of history, in every civilization, so it is important to do your own research in planning a topic and also to engage with the children in their enquiries. Children need to understand that teachers do not know all the answers and it is good to see teachers modelling the enquiry process and getting as involved in, and as excited by it, as their pupils. For if they do not find it interesting why should anyone else?

Books and websites for adults, for example websites for art galleries and museums, frequently have good illustrations and photographs that can be projected as a PowerPoint^® presentation and that children of any age can use as sources, although seeing sources first hand, whenever possible, conveys a far more exciting connection with the past. Your local history librarian and archivist will offer invaluable support for local history.

The process of historical enquiry

The process of enquiry, too, has evolved gradually. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) studied records. How did this document come into existence? How has it come down to us? How do the answers to these questions influence its trustworthiness? How do they explain the differences between two accounts? For Marc Bloch, clarity of analysis and asking the right question were consistent criteria. What do we know? What can we know? How do we know? How can we communicate that knowledge? Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) employed imaginative sympathy in describing characters and events.

R.G. Collingwood clarified the process of historical enquiry in his Autobiography (1939). He saw historical enquiry as beginning with a complex of ordered, specific questions in the tradition of the great philosophers, such as Plato, Bacon, Descartes and Kant. He said that, just as philosophy had found it necessary to accommodate a revolution in thinking about the natural world, based on empirical observation and deduction in the seventeenth century, it must encompass a similar revolution in the way it studied man in constantly changing societies.

Collingwood worked out this philosophy of history through constant practical application in archaeology. He proceeded from specific questions about sources, the significance and purpose of objects, whether they were buttons, dwellings or settlements, to the people who made and used them. The sequence proceeded from what can be known about an object, then what can be ‘guessed’, then, finally, what he would like to know, in order to support, extend or contradict his guesses. For instance, he knew from concrete evidence that a Roman wall from the Tyne to the Solway existed. He guessed that its purpose was to form a sentry walk with parapets as protection against snipers. He wanted to know if there were towers as a defence against vessels trying to land between Bowness and St Bees, in order to support his guess. A resulting search revealed that towers had been found but their existence forgotten, because their purpose was not questioned. History, then, involves interaction between the known content and the process of enquiry, in order to try to make sense of it. First, then, we need to find out how historians use sources and how we can use them with children.

Planning for enquiry

History is not just a story or a list of events. Whatever content an account of the past may focus on, it must be investigated through the process of historical enquiry. It is important to remember that children need to understand the process of historical enquiry and how to integrate content with process, if they are to learn history, to understand why there are different perspectives and interpretations and not simply to learn what Charlotte Mason, an innovative educationist writing in the nineteenth century, called ‘miserable little chronicles of feuds, battles and death which are presented as “a reign”’ (Mason 1993, vol. 1: 281).

Different strands of the processes of historical enquiry are addressed in the following three chapters. However, it is important to read them together as the processes described are interdependent.

CHAPTER
2
Historical sources

At Key Stage 1 ‘children should understand some of the ways in which we find out about the past’ and at Key Stage 2 they are expected to ‘use a range of historical sources’ (DfE 2013). Historical sources are any traces of the past that remain. They may be written sources: documents, newspapers, laws, literature, advertisements, diaries, place names. They may be visual sources – paintings, cartoons, film, video, maps, field patterns, plans – oral sources or music. They may be artefacts, sites or buildings.

Children enjoy working with all kinds of sources, but particularly with artefacts, visual sources, sites and buildings (Cooper 1991). These are exciting because they were made with another person’s hands and touched and looked at by people, many years ago, yet we too can touch them. This frisson makes us reflect on how something was made and used...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Teachers’ pedagogical knowledge: understanding the processes of historical enquiry
• Part II Connecting with the past
• Part III Planning, assessment and recording
• Part IV Practitioner research
• References
• Index