Finally, and due in no small part to the help and guidance from my Supervisor, Anna Pendry, I have finished my PGDES portfolio and handed it in. Phew! Tell you what, writing in the same house as a three week old and a three year old was, well an interesting challenge. This challenge would’ve...
Read more →Although I never met him, I was really sad when I was told of the death of Donald McIntyre former head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education. I’ve been reading lots of Professor McIntyre’s work for my diploma, and it was his ideas about embracing the lack of consensus between school and university viewpoints...
Read more →It suddenly occured to me that I’d not posted what I planned to about mentors. In fact I was writing my lit. review (again!) today, and decided to look at the blog, to see what I thought about mentoring (it’s not so bad when you’re cutting and pasting from the internet, if you’re cutting...
Read more →When it’s merely a belief, according to Wilfred Carr, professor of Education at the University of Sheffield (where I did my law degree many moons ago). I’ve been having an interesting evening reading Carr’s lecture to the2006 Annual Conference of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (hey, it’s Saturday night, what else are...
Read more →I went to a great meeting with my diploma peers on Friday night and, as usual came home buzzing with ideas and feeling like anything was possible. One of my tasks is to think about what I need to do and by when in order to get the finished diploma in on time. In...
Read more →Introduction Chris Husbands, Alison Kitson and Anna Pendry, in their book “Understanding History Teaching” summarize the main trends in researching history teaching. They set out three broad strands; research into children’s understanding of history, research into the purposes of history teaching, and research into history teaching in the classroom. HE institutions will expect research...
Read more →There is a valuable body of literature that shows the value of research for trainee teachers, teacher trainers and established teachers. Emancipation A common justification for and aim of teacher research is that of “emancipation”. Hopkins reminds us that, “Teachers are too often the servants of heads, advisers, researchers, textbooks, curriculum developers, examination boards,...
Read more →Teaching history is a maddening blur. From class to class, keystage to keystage, year to year, through assessment and skills, to content, final levels and added value; the day to day concerns of a history teacher can often obscure the bigger picture. This bigger picture consists partly of why we teach history at all...
Read more →As we have already seen, for Peter Lee “The reason for teaching history is not that it changes society, but that it changes pupils” (Lee 1991: 43). Lee’s school history “changes what see and how they see it” (Lee 1991:43) This much could be said of any form of schooling and any form...
Read more →One of the most crystalline of all the purposes of school history is that of “for its own sake”. History for its own sake calls up a vision, or spectre, of a monkish student combing through an archive, or navigating piles of books, absorbed, transcended by the study of history. In school this implies...
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