6.2 Debates about the nature of history

History has always been a more or less contested subject. In the post-modern age, debates on the nature of the discipline have become more self conscious and intensified. Historians and philosophers of history have contested, sometimes heatedly:

• The possibility or impossibility of attaining objective knowledge in history
• The nature of an historical fact
• The similarities and differences between history and social science
• The nature and distinctiveness of historical methodologies
• The idea that history is a series of discourses perceived through the lens of the writer and reader

The history and impact of different views about the nature of history are set out in Richard Evans’s In Defence of History (1997), which also contains useful suggestions for further reading. These debates may seem distant from issues of classroom practice but the inclusion in the National Curriculum of requirements to study interpretations of history, to use a range of sources and to study different types of history can all be linked back to changes in the study of history in universities. Activity 6.2.2 shows how early work on teaching about causation by the Teaching History Research Group (THRG) was influenced by that of E.H. Carr. Many of the members of the THRG were examiners and the ideas fed through first into examining practice and subsequently informed the structure of the statements of attainment (SOAs) in the 1991 National Curriculum (DES1991). Textbook writers drew upon the admittedly shaky notions of progression embedded in the SOAs to produce classroom activities that moved from identifying to classifying and ranking causes. Subsequent revisions of the History Order and developments in thinking about effective classroom practice have taken thinking and practice further but the influence of that early work is still evident.

As historians, our own explicit and implicit views about what history is have been formed in the context of debates about historical methodology and by how we have been taught history. Exploring trainees’ understanding of history is a common starting point in a training programme. This can be done in a number of ways. One option is to enable trainees to explore their own understandings of the nature of the discipline (see activity 6.2.1) Another is to use the classic debates by historians about the nature of the subject, for example E. H. Carr (1961) and Geoffrey Elton (1967) or Arthur Marwick (1995) and Hayden White (1995.) Teasing out what these historians see as central to the subject can be a springboard to identifying what is central to school history (see activity 6.2.2). Another alternative is to look at the ‘What is History?’ unit of the old SHP course or a similar approach based on the hypothesis that the work of the historian is similar to that of a detective (see Activity 6.2.3). Assessing the strengths and weakness of the analogy can provide a starting point for looking at the structure of the discipline and for what should be taught in schools.

Activity 6.2.1 What different understandings of how history works might trainees have and how might this influence their views of history teaching in the early stages of their training?

Activity 6.2.2 How have debates on the nature of history influenced classroom practice?

Activity 6.2.3 How far should we replicate the historian’s methods and tools in the classroom?