Thread with some bits from my @researchEdhome talk today in which I thoroughly indulged myself & talked endlessly about history, with special mentions to brill work of @SuzanneLPowell @jcarrollhistory @whitburn_robin @Justice2History @PaulaLoboWorth @mrwbw @kenradical @histassoc 
This is where we finished up: a guide for better (curriculum- centred) conversations betw senior & middle leaders. It is #notachecklist. Repeat: NOT a checklist! Not an audit tool! Use it as a short cut to a bureaucratic management exercise, & it self-combusts. @researchEdhome
So how did we get there? I celebrated the published work of 5 teachers & did my best to get at just a tiny bit of WHY they had become so productive in their curricular theorising, so useful to others & producers of such quality curricula. What is the significance of their work?
We started by looking at this extraordinary blog that blows me away every time, both for quality of historical & curricular reasoning, and for the account of how the work was developed, how they were nurtured, the support, the CPD, & the reading: anotherhistoryispossible.com/a-level-enquir…
The author writes of the amazing experience of being with historians, hist teachers & other hist ed experts for exceptional weekend's CPD that was challenging, inspirational, transformative, courtesy of @Justice2History @histassoc, and then there was the reading, oh the reading:
We learn why change/continuity was settled on, over causation; because it problematises 1807 abolition & 1833 emancipation: because it opens up Qs rather than shuts them down; it asks what happened after & before? The story's shape came from the scholarship. @researchEdhome
The blog details the important stuff: the way the texts and sources interacted, Michel-Rolph Trouillot's work on the silences in history, the care & intellectual nurture from @Justice2History @histassoc & others over the personally challenging, sensitive task of teaching slavery.
The choice of change/continuity over causation for the EQ, the choice of the 2 dates, the sources, the historiographical framing, the scope of openness for students, slowly came into view. A determination to ask new kinds of Qs: about economics, about language of racialisation:
History's hard. No teacher shld be left to plan & teach this stuff without intellectual & emotional nurture, without community, without knowledgeable & supportive peop around to give challenge, without an #SLT that gets why a hist teacher MUST have this @researchEdhome @histassoc
So then we went to Example 2. Quite different. But oh so similar. @SuzanneLPowell's terrific work that contextualised empire in entirely different (but compatible) ways, using vast sweeps of time. We examined what underpinned her Year 8 planning, all available in @histassoc TH170
A key impact of @SuzanneLPowell's use of historical scale, was her students' ability to tackle a Q about why Britain began to establish an empire in the 16thC & not before (@KerryKitsch klaxon). The wide global & temporal reach was transformative. And just look at her knowledge.
Example 3: #slavery again but now a different type of 'big' history: 30,000 yrs of slavery. It yields different Qs, different challenges, different perspectives. What did @jcarrollhistory do? Why the Haitian Revolution? Read about it in @Curriculum_Jrnl tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…
What knowledge did @jcarrollhistory bring to the task? Heaps of it. Much from his original training, much he had to acquire afresh. His article in @Curriculum_Jrnl details the conversation of a history teacher with historical scholarship, & history educ writing by other teachers.
Example 4: Different content. Medieval Africa. The work of @Justice2History @whitburn_robin @Abdul_Mohamud is so vast & I can't do it justice. We looked at just one enquiry, and I used to it illustrate breadth of knowledge & profound ethical commitments that underpin their work:
Why Timbuktu as the focus? I explained why this is a big deal. (remember: @researchEdhome is a mostly non-history audience.) What was it @Justice2History @Abdul_Mohamud @whitburn_robin had to get their pupils to see? Why does it matter? What perspectives did they have to shift?
A very different conceptual focus was chosen by @Abdul_Mohamud @whitburn_robin from all the above: Interpretations of the past. As they switched to Great Zimbabwe, why was this so appropriate? How did they show changing interpretations over time?
In choosing interpretations, what traditions were they tapping into that wld resonate with other hist teachers? #SLT need awareness of such shared ref points that frame debates, drive renewal and define curricular entitlements. @histassoc summarises here: history.org.uk/publications/r…
Final example. More medieval Africa. And who else but @PaulaLoboWorth and her amazing blog. What I can say? Well nothing. So I just let Paula's blog speak.I can't think of a better way to show the careful wrestling process a history teacher goes thro in wording enquiry questions.
Teaching medieval #Africa to Year 7 requires a lot of reading. @PaulaLoboWorth read both broadly from scholarship about world dynamics by @peterfrankopan and from Toby Green about medieval Africa itself. But that's not all ......
To read @PaulaLoboWorth's blog is to understand history teachers' conversations at work. Paula was influenced by @CatPriggs who had recently begun to teach much more medieval Africa, & by @mrwbw @kenradical with their 'Meanwhile, Elsewhere', now used by 1000s of history teachers.
What matters for my focus on how curriculum & teacher development interact is the way @PaulaLoboWorth refused to give in to the impulse to go with most obvious, the easiest, the most Y7-friendly enquiry Q. No, she dragged herself away from it. Her blog details how. Some extracts:
Thus one history teacher charts her journey from one EQ to the next, from a cheaper, easier Q to one that took her pupils further into respecting the distinctiveness & complexity of African society. Here is @PaulaLoboWorth's journey simplified, but it belies the expertise at play
And so it concludes. @PaulaLoboWorth not short on ambition, uses @peterfrankopan to change life, the universe and everything.
Whole blog here: lobworth.com/2019/09/08/are…
Whole blog here: lobworth.com/2019/09/08/are…
Lest my mostly non-historian audience was about to wander off with all this history, I got to the heart. What do these teachers have in common? What kind of nurture, values, professional activities make a history curriculum alive, vibrant, rigorous, worth having? @researchEdhome
And what does this mean for a school's senior leadership? What can senior leaders do in order to *see* this, never mind nurture it? What can they to bring it life when it is absent?
For a much fuller account of how SLT can 'see' curriculum more clearly and how to transform senior-middle leader conversation to make the above visible, with practical illustration across the whole curriculum, see my chapter in @ClareSealy's @researchED1 book. Fin!
