ABSTRACT
Sometimes it is snatched conversations between student and teacher that prove the most illuminating, and the most challenging. Danny was a Year 9 student and an able historian, yet he was adamant that history wasn’t for him and planned to drop it at GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education). I was disappointed and wanted to find out why, hence our brief conversation at the end of class. I found his comments troubling: how could a student spend three years studying history and not realize that argument is central to the discipline? To my mind, my lessons were full of argument: in the quick paired discussions where students argued about the status of a piece of evidence, or tried to decide how far they agreed with a particular claim; in the whole-class plenaries where they debated the relative importance of causes; and in their writing, where I had spent a term trying to teach them how to write analytically about the causes of World War I. But it seemed that Danny didn’t see the argument in the same way that I did. Our discussion seemed to encapsulate a concern that plagued me as a history teacher – how to move students beyond simple narrative or formulaic structure into writing that was more analytical; in other words, a better argument. It was from this concern that my experimentation with the use of academic history in the classroom originated. My instinctive response as a historian was that the only way to help Danny to see the argument inherent in history would be to expose him to a genuine historical argument. But to do this would mean introducing Year 9 to academic history – a daunting prospect for me as a teacher, and for a class that had never read academic history before.
