From novice to effective teacher: a study of postgraduate training and history pedagogy

This is the final version. Available from Institute of Education Press via the DOI in this record. The question of what makes for effective initial professional development of teachers is both complex and contested. From 1992 in England there have been major changes to the pattern of initial teacher training [ITT], changes that have been centrally imposed with minimal or no consultation with the Higher Education Institutes' [HEI] teacher training community involved. The revolution has seen initial professional development move its locus from HEIs to schools and colleges, with a downgrading in both the role and status of HEIs in the process. The study reported below is a longitudinal one from 1996-2000 into the factors that affect the professional development of teachers of history to 7-11 year olds. Because of the disruption caused by changes in government policy towards both schools and HEIs the research adopted a case study approach, examining the career paths of 18 initial trainees within the context of developing their professionalism. The findings are accordingly tentative but suggest that professional development in terms of the teaching of history is a highly complex long-term process that has two dominant influences: the students' prior experience of both learning and being taught history and the Initial Teacher Training within the HEI. The paper examines within the ITT course the affect that an Intervention Strategy for the teaching of History had upon the student teachers. The conclusion is that where students have a well developed and syntactic understanding of the discipline prior to the course that the Intervention Strategy builds upon and complements, they are able to develop many of the features of proto-expert teachers of history. Where their prior experience of history as an academic discipline is limited, both the overall college course and the Intervention Strategy have a relatively superficial impact upon their development as teachers of history

The role of government in determining the school history curriculum: lessons from Australia

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Curriculum debates as public history: Australia

This is the final version. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record

Revisiting the case for history in the New Zealand curriculum

This is the final version. Available from James Nicholas Publishers via the DOI in this record. Some of the arguments for keeping ‘history’ as such out of the school curriculum in New Zealand can be challenged on the grounds of both international research and public interest. There is increasing acceptance of the value of a disciplinary approach to the teaching and learning of history, including examples of where this has been converted into historical thinking and historical literacy. Another justification for the exclusion of history from schools has been a perception that the subject can be manipulated to support a particular and politically-motivated view of the nation and its trajectory. However, history can be defended against this if teachers and teacher educators hold to a position which presents history as a fundamentally contestable subject allowing for multiple narratives which reflect plural identities. Nevertheless, there is still room for debate about the kind of civic society and model of citizenship that any nation, including New Zealand, would wish to promote for its schools. Within any history curriculum there must be opportunities for deep history and correspondingly deep understanding, and an acknowledgement that as New Zealand has the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) as its founding document, there must be a commitment, when seeking to contextualising New Zealand’s historical development, to empower teachers to become partners in what is essentially a hermeneutical enterprise, in which there can be engagement in ‘live’ historiography involving negotiation between sometimes conflicting narratives with deep knowledge, honesty and openness. Thus any pedagogical methods which include dialogic teaching and learning are to be encouraged as they run parallel with the aims and objectives of inclusive, participatory, representative and democratic citizenship, as well as the community co-construction of local histories

History teaching, pedagogy, curriculum and politics: dialogues and debates in regional, national, transnational, international and supranational settings

This is the final version. Available from UCL Institute of Education Press via the DOI in this record.

The Whig Tradition and Commonwealth History

This is the final version. Available from de Gruyter via the DOI in this recordBritish and Commonwealth history are deeply entangled. A fresh approach is not to look at British action, but at the Commonwealth’ own agency and decisions

Sharon Macdonald (ed) (2000) Approaches to European Historical Consciousness - Reflections and Provocations, Eustory Series: Shaping European History, Vol 1. Hamburg: Körber-Stiftung. ISBN 3 89684 015 0.

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Patriotic celebrations in educational commemoration practices in Ukraine

This is the final version. Available on open access from JSSE via the DOI in this recordPurpose: This study aims to provide information on the main tendencies across the transformation of the official holidays calendar in Ukraine over the last decades and to demonstrate its influence on school celebrations. Also discussed here is the role of these factors in the parallel but sometimes contradictory processes of the students’ civic identity formation. Design/Methodology/Approach: The article is based on documentary analysis, an interdisciplinary literature review and an examination of current practices with regard to national holidays in Ukraine. Patriotic rituals are analyzed through examples and evidence of school celebrations of the main calendar dates, including audiovisual materials in different school settings. The authors’ observations have been corroborated with evidence from Ukrainian students and teachers as seen in the results of the questionnaire. These reflect their perception and experience of school celebrations. Findings: The results demonstrate that the transformation of the official holidays calendar in Ukraine has had an impact on school commemoration practices. This in turn has become a factor in the formation of students’ civic identity. School patriotic rituals reflect a contradiction between the discourses of citizenship, patriotism and national upbringing in an emergent democracy in the continuing context of military conflict. Key words: Ukrainian holidays celebrations, commemoration, patriotic rituals in school, civic identity, patriotism, citizenship education, democratic values

Michael Gove’s war on professional historical expertise : conservative curriculum reform, extreme Whig history and the place of imperial heroes in modern multicultural Britain

Six years of continuously baiting his opponents within the history profession eventually amounted to little where it mattered most. UK Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, finally backtracked in 2013 on his plans to impose a curriculum for English schools based on a linear chronology of the achievements of British national heroes. His ‘history as celebration’ curriculum was designed to instil pride amongst students in a supposedly shared national past, but would merely have accentuated how many students in modern multicultural Britain fail to recognise themselves in what is taught in school history lessons. Now that the dust has settled on Gove’s tenure as Secretary of State, the time is right for retrospective analysis of how his plans for the history curriculum made it quite so far. How did he construct an ‘ideological’ conception of expertise which allowed him to go toe-to-toe for so long with the ‘professional’ expertise of academic historians and history teachers? What does the content of this ideological expertise tell us about the politics of race within Conservative Party curriculum reforms? This article answers these questions to characterise Gove as a ‘whig historian’ of a wilfully extreme nature in his attachment to imperial heroes as the best way to teach national history in modern multicultural Britain