This paper seeks to examine a specific development in the history of teacher education to explore whether it might illuminate and inform contemporary debate. It offers a historical/comparative analysis of the contribution of teachers' centres to the professional development of teachers in England and Spain during the late 1960s to the early 1990s.…

This paper presents the main findings of a qualitative research project. The aim of the research was to explore undergraduate students' perceived knowledge acquisition and awareness of the Holocaust, after visiting Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The qualitative study (focus groups & semi-structured questionnaires) involved three…

Amid a growing national debate regarding the current health and future direction of the history curriculum in Britain, there have been numerous calls for an examination of its roles and purposes, and questions have been raised as to how far it engages an increasingly diverse student body. This article examines the perceptions and attitudes of…

The title for the project, "Eloquence in Talke and Vertue in Deedes," comes from educational theorist William Kempe's claim that the early modern humanist educational system was guaranteed to produce eloquence and virtue. It is, however, my argument that the educational failed in its promises. This project seeks to dissect the…

Elizabeth Marsay wanted to ensure that her students were not hindered in their causal explanations of the abolition of slavery by being exposed to overly categorical, simplistic, and monocausal narratives in the classroom. By drawing on both English and Canadian theorisation about causation, Marsay outlines how her introduction of competing…

Convinced of the value of a good textbook as a teaching and learning resource, Alex Diamond set out to understand teachers' thinking about Holocaust textbooks and what it would be for a textbook to represent Holocaust history adequately. As Diamond's discussion shows, this is a multi-faceted issue. Evaluating textbook representation involves…

It is generally agreed that learning about the Holocaust has some impact on students. However, discussions about the nature and magnitude of impact tend to be intuition-based rather than evidence-based. This is exacerbated by studies giving insight into how Holocaust education is related to salient variables rather than studies which demonstrate…

This article explicates the idea of conversation as the primary opening for learning to occur in all domains of society. The "age of conversation" emerges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This historical analysis is followed by a discussion of the features of "good conversations" to create benchmarksfor creating…

Building on research by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, Matthew Duncan was concerned that his students were drawn to simplistic explanations of Holocaust perpetrators' actions. As well as the UCL Centre's research, Duncan drew on history education research from Canada and history teachers' theorisation in England for inspiration in his…

Walzer insists that his supreme emergency argument morally legitimises Churchill's 1940 decision to bomb German civilians. We contend, however, that it is morally deficient. We contend, further, that if Walzer's argument had been presented to the leaders of the Church of England in 1940 as justification for the bombing of German civilians, the…

Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives, which took full account of the chronological diversity of people's…

Frustrated by the generic statements that her Year 12 students were making about sources, Jacqueline Vyrnwy-Pierce resolved to undertake a research project into how her students were approaching sources about the French Revolution. Fascinated by the research of American educational psychologist Sam Wineburg, Vyrnwy-Pierce decided to use Wineburg's…

This paper empirically re(dis)covers a moment of conjuncture within Leicester when an opportunity opened up through multicultural/anti-racist education for schools and colleges to develop their 'multicultural capital'. It does this through the thematic analysis of the key proximate document "Report of the Working Party on Multicultural…

The raising of Henry VIII's warship, the "Mary Rose," from the sea bed set in train an extraordinary programme of interdisciplinary research, relentlessly pursuing the clues to Tudor life and death provided by the remains of the ship, its cargo and crew. In this article Clare Barnes offers fascinating insights into the way in which this…

'New people create new buildings, but new buildings also create New people', so wrote the German art critic Fritz Wichhert in "The New Building: Art as Educator" in 1928. The social and psychological legacy of the First World War was deeply profound and affected how people thought about the future. Children were seen to symbolise a new…