ABSTRACT
At all stages, the subject expertise of the teacher is the most important factor
determining the work of the teacher in the classroom. (Ofsted, 1995)
Research shows that there is a close relationship between teachers’ subject knowledge
and the quality and range of learning experiences in their classrooms. The message is,
if you don’t know it, you can’t teach it. (Dean, 1995: 4)
Although some challenges for the history teacher are perennial or longstanding ones
(there have always been some pupils who ‘can’t see the point’ of history – see Aldrich,
1987, and there have always been claims in newspapers that young people ‘know nothing
about history’ – see Wineburg, 2000) – new ones are always emerging. There have been a
number of innovations and changes in the areas of teaching methods, ideas about
‘learning styles’, curriculum specifi cations and educational technologies, all of which have
impacted on pupils’ learning in the history classroom, as have ‘public’ and political ideas
about school history. It is an important part of your subject knowledge that you are aware
of these issues and developments, and that you keep ‘up to date’ with your subject. It is
your responsibility to be aware of the NC (or other appropriate) documentation pertaining
to school history, and the general debate over the purposes of school history over the
past decade or so. It can be immensely helpful to keep this debate in mind as you teach
history in the classroom. As the non-statutory guidance to the original NC for History
stated, ‘a strong sense of why history is being taught should pervade all curriculum
planning, infl uencing the selection of content and methods of teaching’ (National
Curriculum Council, 1991: 1). One of the most common mistakes made by student teachers
when faced with unfamiliar or intractable areas of content is to resort to treating the
topic as a slab of the past to be transmitted to pupils ‘neat’ or in simplistic form, without
thinking about what questions it poses, or why it might be helpful to pupils to know about
this facet of the past.
