Nathanael Davies recognised that previous efforts to diversify the history taught at his school by weaving new stories into the curriculum had made little impression on his students' assumptions about what really counted as history. Planning a new enquiry on the creation of Bangladesh was intended both to bridge a divide between 'home' and…

How can we help students understand the Holocaust in its full historical complexity, particularly when they often come to class with misconceptions arising from the representation of the Holocaust in popular culture? Over a three-year period, Sam Ineson set out to integrate the historical Holocaust into his school's formal and informal curriculum,…

In this article, Jessica Phillips returns to a theme explored in the Historical Association's publication "Exploring and Teaching Medieval History in Schools"--the challenge of teaching about the medieval past in ways that acknowledge its vibrant complexity and create a genuine sense of resonance rather than condescension or blank…

Confined to his home during lockdown in 2020, teacher Josh Mellor became eager to explore the history of the physical environment on his doorstep. After reading about different approaches to using environmental history in the classroom, Mellor decided to design an enquiry to explore the changing landscape of the Fens in Cambridgeshire from 1600 to…

The Secondary Education and Social Change (SESC) research project team at the University of Cambridge collaborated with four secondary school history teachers to produce resource packs for teaching Key Stage 3 pupils about post-war British social history through the history of secondary education. In this article, Chris Jeppesen explains the focus…

Neil Bates and Robert Bowry have chosen to tackle the issue of curriculum coherence by including local history, both as starting point for new students joining the school in Year 7 and as a golden thread running throughout their Key Stage 3 curriculum. In this article they explain the rationale for their plans, focusing not only on the powerful…

Concerned by the growing tendency of politicians and press to revive the moral balance-sheet approach to British imperial history and by some evidence of its resurgence in schools, Alex Benger set about devising a framework which would keep pupils' analysis rigorously historical, rather than moral and politicised. In this article, he sets out his…

Should we, and how do we, develop in our students a sense of period -- or a series of senses of period -- in a thematic study spanning a thousand years? This was the problem faced by Matthew Fearns-Davies in preparing for the GCSE 'Health and the People' paper. He shows in this article the ways in which he considered the problem of chronological…

Making a passionate case for teaching Black British history in the secondary school curriculum, Hannah shares here the personal journey she has travelled in planning for Black British history in her curriculum. She cites her inspirations and offers striking examples to illustrate her rationale and approach to teaching this history. Hannah…

Much has been written in recent years about how historical scholarship can be used to shape practice in the classroom. As an historian of the medieval period now working as an history teacher, Dhwani Patel offers a fresh perspective on these debates. During her PGCE year, Patel found herself reflecting on how the lenses and methodologies that…

Dissatisfied by her previous enquiries on medieval kingship and inspired by Helen Castor's "She-Wolves," Elizabeth Carr sought to incorporate the stories of powerful medieval women such as Empress Matilda and Eleanor of Aquitaine into her Key Stage 3 curriculum. Carr used these stories to highlight to her pupils the crucial substantive…

Eliza West and Emily Toettcher explain how a partnership between school and museum has evolved into a four-year enquiry into local history. The article focuses on the successful introduction of an oral history element in the GCSE syllabus and how the investigation into 'remembered' history helps students to appreciate the complexities of truth and…

In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department's efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He reflects on…

Michael Bird has a longstanding interest in the power of classroom dialogue, not only as a means of eliciting students' prior knowledge or checking their understanding of new ideas and information, but also as a powerful tool for generating new knowledge through a collective process of meaning-making. In this article, he first uses two extracts of…

Alex Benger asks whether the mode of enquiry adopted by cultural historians, the construction of webs of past meaning from past perspectives, is underexplored in school history. Benger used a cultural history approach in his building of an enquiry for Year 9 around one man's experience of the First World War. Here he examines his pupils' efforts…