Helen Snelson today talking about oral history and its use in the classroom. Helen was inspired by a story on Her Story Made History on Radio 4, in particular the story of Madera Al Ajroush, who has successfully campaigned for women to be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. When Helen attended a seminar on oral history, she was recommended a book called The Voice of the Past by Paul Thompson. If you...
Read More »Claire Alexander, Robin Bunce, Maya Parmar, Pragya Vohra and Brodie Waddell presenting their work on the award winning ‘Our Migration Story’ – teaching migration history and why it matters so much. Claire is approaching the study from a sociological focus and has worked with the Runnymede Trust, a race equality think tank. She’s also been working with a Cambridge historian ...
Read More »Tim Cole, Professor of Social History at Bristol University, speaking on Beyond Auschwitz: exploring the meaning of local landscapes in the evolution of the Holocaust. Tim begins with the famous spot in Auschwitz where the rail line branches close to the gates. This was completed in 1944 for the deportation of the Hungarian Jews and has become an iconic vision of the Holocaust. There’s a spa...
Read More »Putting ordinary people back into the history of the Industrial Revolution, with Hannah Barker, Sarah Alderson and Daisy Horsley. Hannah has recently written a book called Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution. She encourages us to stick with it through the first two chapters of economic history as ‘it does get juicier’. Who should history be about? History that focuses ...
Read More »The conference kicks off, after a welcome from director Michael Riley, with a plenary session from Richard McFahn, co-planned with Neil Bates, on helping your students to achieve at GCSE. Rich says that when they started planning the session they looked to Twitter to find out what students had thought about it. Their tweets revealed some good knowledge of the GCSE but perhaps not much confidence! ...
Read More »A particular hallmark of the original Schools History Project was the emphasis it placed on diversity. SHP believes that the history curriculum is often too narrowly defined, and that it should continue to offer more opportunities for children and young people to study: a range of periods in history; civilisations and cultures beyond Europe; local and family history; social and cultural history. S...
Read More »In this final post in our series on using sources in the classroom, Rich Kennett, Head of Humanities at Redland Green School, Bristol, writes on the topic of strong arming your students into using knowledge in their answers to source questions. At my current school the cohort is above national average attainment and many students are very able. Two years ago, however, we noticed that, by and large...
Read More »Sally Thorne, Head of History at Colston’s Girls’ School in Bristol, shares her simple idea for demonstrating the importance of contextual knowledge when assessing a source. My focus for the year was thinking about how to assist students to start recognising sources as evidence, rather than just pillaging them for their information. Struggling to explain the year 8 how important it was...
Read More »In this post, Phil Arkinstall, Head of History at Hardenhuish School, Chippenham, explains his use of verbal rehearsals and a spruced-up inference diagram to help students build stronger arguments. The Verbal Rehearsal My aim was to improve the essay writing of Year 8. The issue was that in previous years students had struggled to write a decent ‘causes of the English Civil War’ essay; they were,...
Read More »In this post, Kate Smee, Head of Humanities at Chipping Sodbury School, asks, can Colin the Centipede help students to understand what the point of using sources is? Rationale: As we come under ever greater pressure to achieve higher grades, the push has been to make source work simpler. We have used the familiar strategies such as writing frames, formulae, deconstructing techniques, mnemonics…etc...
Read More »