Developing a Key Stage 3 History Curriculum: Part 3— Why we included what we included (and why we didn’t include what we excluded)? Year 8 Version
So this is the third part of my short series of blogs on how we’ve developed the Key Stage 3 History curriculum at my current school — please follow the links for parts one and two. In my final post in this series I’ll explore our next steps for the curriculum in light of the aborted (due to coronavirus) experience of rolling it out this year and how we are going to move it forward for 2020/21. This post, however, will continue on from part 2 (which looked at our Year 7 curriculum) and focus on some of the thinking behind our Year 8 curriculum.
Again it’s important to note some key points — we follow a 2 year KS3 with 2 hours of History teaching per week. I also make no claims to being a specialist on everything and I am certain that there are lots of ways we can improve the questions we ask and the content we deliver for students. Given the shortcomings of a two year model, we’ve been keen to ensure that our curriculum does not duplicate the GCSE options, but does provide grounding in core content that would support that learning. We have also sacrificed depth for breadth to an extent as well — particularly in Year 7 where we are covering a much broader period of time. I’ve explained some of the other context previously if you want to check that out.
A reminder below of our initial outline for the whole of Key Stage 3 (each topic should take roughly 4–5 weeks)…
As you can see, our Year 8 focus was going to be looking at the period from approximately 1700 to the present. I felt it was important that we lead off with the British Empire because this is a topic that I think our students had not really encountered so much prior to these changes and before I took up post in 2018, and because it feeds in to so much of the other topics that come later. I teach in a virtually (but not exclusively by any means) all-white British school, and I think it’s really important that they get that really nuanced picture of British history, ‘warts and all’, to counter some of the more popular narratives of British history that they may hear externally. I’m not an Empire expert at all so this is probably why we went for a broad overview type approach for this topic. We looked at how the Empire emerged (touching on work we’d done on Elizabeth I and overseas exploration the previous year) and then explored the impact of Empire on ‘rulers’ and ‘ruled’ using the excellent spread in the classic Minds and Machines book.
I love this resource because it allows students to engage with the ‘traditional’ Empire narratives on the ‘rulers’ page (that the Brits brought civilisation and railways and whatever) before then flipping that by enabling them to see the rather brutal exploitation of the people and the resources of the areas they colonised. Unfortunately some students were still stuck in a bit of a ‘both-sidesism’ mindset and that’s something we need to think again on for next year. I do think it’s important that students engage with the idea that many people (including people in high political office and the media) currently think that the Empire was a ‘good thing’ because it brought civilisation to the developing world and so on, but I need to be more effective at ensuring that the students can think really critically about that idea as well because it obviously doesn’t really hold up.
We then look at a couple of examples of Empire in more depth, looking at the development of the Trans-atlantic slave trade as well as the story of the British in India (up to about 1900). I think next year what we need to do is break down the Empire topic into smaller chunks that are dispersed more broadly through the curriculum, so looking at the ‘birth of Empire’ as a Year 7 unit perhaps following on from looking at the Tudors, with a unit solely focused on the Transatlantic slave trade and its’ impact on Britain and West Africa, as well as giving attention to the role of the Empire in other events such as the industrial revolution and the First World War. We can then use our homework tasks like Meanwhile, Elsewhere to explore smaller case studies of the Empire’s reach into parts of the world like India or Australia. It’s not perfect but I think will make more effective use of the time that we have.
Our next unit then touches on the industrial revolution. Again I’m not convinced we’ve got the right question here — it’s the perils of trying to rattle through a lot of content in a short space of time and that feeling of not wanting to miss things out. This is where we try to weave in some local context by using examples from Leeds and the surrounding area to get the sense that this was an important time for the locality as well as the nation more broadly. We try to look at how the changes in this time were experienced by ordinary people by looking at the developments in work, living conditions and transport — but also getting a broader sense of the period by using the excellent opening section from Peace and War to give students that big picture.
Following on from this it seemed logical to look at the campaign for women’s voting rights in the twentieth century. We use the story of nineteenth century protest as a bridge here — the double page spread on political reform in Robert Peal’s Modern Britain textbook was invaluable here before then feeding into the story of the campaign for voting rights for women. I think current events around the Black Lives Matter campaign will be useful to help students think about the role of civil disobedience and breaking the law in advancing a just cause which we can then relate back to the story of the suffragettes. We don’t do anything particularly revolutionary here — the resources from the likes of John D Clare’s website and Ben Walsh’s seminal Modern World History for GCSE textbook have been invaluable.
After that we move on to one of my favourite topics to teach which is the causes of the First World War. Any opportunity to bust out the source below is one I’m going to take…
I used to teach the old Paper 3 Controversies on the Edexcel A-level (2008) where we did the causes of the First World War as a debate (and I also taught the old AQA Modern World course at GCSE as well with this topic) and that’s been useful to bring in here as a way of helping students to consider different interpretations of the past in order to move beyond a MAIN causes approach. We do not, however, cover the First World War itself (as we do the Western Front Historic Environment topic at GCSE) which is a bit of a shame and I’m thinking about how to bring that back in, in very short form, for next year. It was around this time that I started experimenting with Jo Facer’s two-page lessons from her excellent Simplicity Rules book (highly recommended — although this one ended up being a ‘four-page double lesson’). This was helpful to navigate through the complicated story of the diplomatic machinations between 1900 and 1913. The picture below gives you a flavour of that resource and I found this approach, of having the information clearly laid on a single document, read through using a whole-class approach, with straightforward comprehension questions for students to do, as an effective approach with my mixed Year 8 class that I was teaching. :
We’d just started our work on the Holocaust before the coronavirus intervened. Here I want to make sure we don’t overly duplicate the story of Weimar and Nazi Germany that we cover at GCSE, so instead I do much more of a foreign policy/war focus to explain the development of racial policy, and I also go into the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe (to try to provide students with some answers and context to the age-old question ‘so why did Hitler hate the Jews so much). This tremendous video from the US Holocaust Museum really helps push that explanation along.
In my teaching of the Holocaust and Nazism more generally I’ve been hugely influenced by Adam Tooze’s essential Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. This provides an economic explanation for the development of the Holocaust and provides answers to obvious questions such as ‘why, when the Nazis suffered from labour shortages in the war, did they murder six million people?’ That has been helpful when teaching this at A-level, but at Key Stage 3 it’s helped move me on to try to teach the Holocaust as a historic phenomenon (much like I would other events), rather than wade into ahistorical ‘empathy’ type work that demeans the experience of those involved and verges more into the territory of PSHCE or English or whatever. In addition, Tooze’s work on aspects of the Holocaust such as Generalplan Ost and the ‘Hunger Plan’ enable us to make links with the American West topic down the line at GCSE where there are clear parallels between Hitler’s attempt to depopulate Eastern Europe with the consequences of American settler-colonialism and the eradication of large swathes of the Native American population in the nineteenth century (Hitler as a child of course was a lover of the work of Karl May, a turn of the century German novelist who wrote many works situated within the context of the American ‘Old West’).
Tooze’s website, by the way, has tonnes of good stuff that would be of use to History teachers. He’s put the slides from his lectures at Columbia on there and this slideshow from his intro lecture to his course on War in German History I’ve used both with A-level and Year 8 kids (in adapted form). In there, for example, I found this fascinating photograph which resonates well with students…
The figure marked with the ‘X’ is Otto Frank, father of Anne, serving in the Imperial German Army in 1917.
Back to my bigger point — instead of a ‘empathy/PSHCE’ type approach I’ve found it useful to consider the story of particular individuals. One example of an individual we’ve looked at previously is Mordecai Rumkowski, the Judenrat leader in the Lodz ghetto (this resource from Yad Vashem is very helpful). His story helps students to see the complexity of the Holocaust and the impossible positions that many people were put in, as well as the challenge of the victim/perpetrator dichotomy. I’m also keen to ensure that the students see the Holocaust as more than just ‘Auschwitz’ or ‘gas chambers’ which is where the link to foreign policy proves helpful. The development of foreign policy from, say, Anschluss to Czechoslovakia to Poland to the USSR intrinsically links with the radicalisation of racial policy as well with developments like Kristallnacht, the Madagascar Plan, the ghettos and the Einsatzgruppen all being discussed along the way. As a side note, it also means we provide good grounding in aspects of Nazism that are not covered by our GCSE spec, which only goes up to 1939 and does not cover Nazi foreign policy (yet, bizarrely, does consider it for the Weimar Republic).
I’m not usually a big fan of ‘project’ work (or Mode B teaching as Tom Sherrington puts it) as I’ve never been a terribly creative sort even as a child, but this topic to me lends itself to allow students to go off in different directions. So for our end of topic task the intention was (and this is what we did the previous year) to provide students with a series of questions or issues of varying degrees of difficulty that they could research to further enhance their knowledge and interest in this period. The image below shows you in basic terms how this would work:
The final three topics were aiming to give students a good sense of the postwar world. In reality we would not have got through all of that — but I was concerned to ensure that students did cover the world post-1945, which often gets forgotten at Key Stage 3. These topics had also not been fleshed out at all by the time we finished so the following thoughts are subsequently a bit hazy (‘pie in the sky’ if we’re being critical). The first enquiry would cover the impact of Communism, which would also set up our work on Germany at GCSE. The aim here was to use that topic as a way in to the Russian Revolution and then the Cold War. We also teach Communist States (Russia and China) at A-level so there was that link as well. The topic on racial injustice was aimed to go beyond the Civil Rights Movement in the US (also covered at A-level in our coursework) to consider, perhaps, the issue of decolonisation in Africa and the struggles of black people in Britain since the Second World War.
The final topic idea is very much influenced by my reading of David Edgerton’s work (which itself followed on from reading Tooze’s stuff mentioned earlier and as both historians have pointed out, their works are joined at the hip with Edgerton’s argument that we underrate Britain’s strength during WW2 complementing Tooze’s that we generally overrate Germany’s strength) on British history and the challenges that he’s made to the idea of ‘declinism’ as a school of thought both from left-wing and right-wing historians in the writing of British history in the twentieth century (check out this excellent podcast from Politics, Theory, Other if you want an overview of that). I liked the idea of starting this period in 1940 — modern Britain’s Year Zero — and finishing with the Brexit referendum in 2016 as the logical conclusion to that. Unfortunately I’ve not got much further than that in my thinking and I’m probably going to abandon that for next year to do a proper study of post-war Black British history instead. I think it would make a fantastic lens for a GCSE or A-level unit in the future though and Edgerton’s Britain’s War Machine and The Rise and Fall of the British Nation are essential reading.
That’s a bit of a whistlestop tour through Year 8 — I hope it’s of some help if you’re in the process of adapting your curriculum too (especially if you’re on a two-year KS3). Please drop me a line on twitter @HistoryKSS if you have any comments or questions or whatever.
Next time in this series I’ll look at the thorny question of ‘where next?’ — and go through our plans for 2020/21 including how we’ll address the issue of remote learning if we need to next academic year. I also have a post cooked up on ‘what should the next History GCSE look like’ so that one may come first.
