On Saturday 7th March 2020 I went 'up North' to Sheffield to @TMHistoryIcons for the first time. Luckily this managed to happen before coronavirus got in the way. I've been trying to go since it started but unfortunately it was always scuppered by acute morning sickness, then grappling with motherhood, then my own nerves about heading to an event on my own. I finally bit the bullet to go and even put myself forward to present, which I was lucky enough to do.It turned out to be one of the highlights of my History teaching career so far. It was fantastic to meet so many fellow teachers who I've known for years on Twitter and have influenced my practice, and they were just as wonderful and crazy as I'd imagined!
I took so many ideas and food for thought (not just the great buffet!) away from everyone's presentations, and I really appreciated the warm feedback I received from my peers on my little presentation too. I've decided to type up my presentation to talk through for those who want a recap or couldn't make the event. Also, realistically I've got time in lockdown and need to stay occupied!
Embedding local history into the curriculum
So why did I decide to focus on local history? When I became Head of Department in 2018 I, like many of us, wanted to review our KS3 curriculum. There has been such interesting discussion about what should be included in our curriculum, and a part of what I wanted to consider was how we included local history. I am also currently doing my Masters which has a local history focus. The reading and assignments I have done so far have highlighted the place of local history in the discipline and I wanted to bring this to a school level.
The main hope in why we were to focus on local history was that students can link their own knowledge of the local area to the history being studied, but we therefore needed to extend beyond our school town due to our wider catchment area across Wiltshire and Somerset. Local history features in the National Curriculum too, and whilst not all schools follow this it remains a useful guide. Local history also can bridge that gap between sufficient breadth and depth in topics. I didn't want it to be a bolt-on to a lesson, but to be incorporated into the examples used in a topic.
There are two really useful thoughts from historians on local history which have underpinned my own thinking:
"The greatest interest in a specific locality is felt by those who live there" (John Tosh)
"Microcosm of wider and more significant trends" (John Becket)
This means that local history has a certain niche to your school's locality. When you think about it, that's really why local history is important. Students in Wiltshire are not going to necessarily relate to Manchester in the Industrial Revolution, many of them will never have even been there today! However, finding out that Trowbridge was known as the 'Manchester of the West' due to its cotton industry is a much more specific but engaging link for students. Indeed this also compliments Becket's view that local history gives us a way of examining all of these massive overarching historical concepts or big events in relation to a smaller-scale version in their own area.
Why pre-1066?
The example I talked through at the teach-meet was what we have done with Year 7 by considering a unit that has a local focus on prehistory and pre-1066. I admit that my subject knowledge is basic by the time we go back to prehistory. Anything from the last 200 years, I'm your woman, but I think like many History teachers our subject knowledge tends to get shakier the further back in time we go (apart from peaks on Tudors, Normans for example). I ran a Twitter poll where out of 432 respondents, only 12% included any example of prehistory in their KS3 curriculum. The poll showed that 88% didn't teach anything before the Romans. So arguably in looking locally anywhere in Britain, we are only considering local history since 43AD(ish). This to me seems to limit students' understanding that History is a ginormous thing, and that the history of mankind is far greater than they may have learnt about. We created a 10 lesson unit for Year 7 on 'How did civilisation grow in Britain before 1066?'. This would allow us to build the complexity of knowledge that some students have learnt on this at primary school. It also confronts students with a substantive concept early on (this is the second topic for Year 7) of civilisation, and we were also considering the sources of evidence available to historians.
How did civilisation grow in Britain before 1066?
When working out what I could include for this scheme of work with my limited subject knowledge (and I come from Hampshire so not a 'local' to where I live and work), I mapped out some local examples of history from before the Normans. In part this was relatively easy due to the plentiful examples from Neolithic Wessex and Salisbury Plain, but I am sure across the country you will know of ones local to you too. This mapping meant we could start to link some lessons we already had to specific local examples, for example finding out that there was a Saxon church in Bradford-on-Avon. Then myself and my colleague whose degree in is archaeology looked at how we could link the somewhat daunting thousands of years of prehistory from our local area.
During the topic, we borrowed Ordinance Survey Maps from the Geography department and students were so excited and curious to just spend time seeing what they could spot from history in the local area. For example, gothic writing on maps showed the hundreds of 'tumuli' or burial mounds that were nearby. (see this link for help on this: https://getoutside.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/guides/how-to-spot-history-in-your-map/ )
We also encouraged parental engagement in our newsletter, suggesting that they could visit places we had looked at and get their child to 'be the tour guide'- we gave them questions they could ask them. Again, the local focus really helped here. They weren't going to pop up to Hadrian's Wall or Skara Brae, but they could visit some of these places even on the way home from the shops.
What's next?
My aim now is to look at embedding local history in the same way for one Year 8 and one Year 9 topic. There is so much we all want to include in our curriculum that we thought that this tried to do justice to local history, but also meant we would have space to include other areas of focus. Whilst some resources are shareable, in particular the 'bigger picture' elements of lessons, but then the local aspect means specific examples are only relevant to schools near to you. Therefore, sharing these ideas locally can be hard. I feel like we need some 'grassroots' History hubs for teachers on Twitter or something that is easier to get involved with. (This is an idea I am pondering at the moment, so any thoughts please get in touch!)
Use local history as a lens to illuminate the bigger picture
I really believe that local history is undervalued in our history curriculum, and hopefully I've shown that including it does not mean you have to get rid of topics to plonk a local history one in. It's perhaps more worthwhile to look at what you already have and find those local examples to help students make more sense of the history, engage with it deeper and arguably enjoy learning about their local area, using it as this lens to demonstrate the wider view.
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