Basic structure and terminology
Skills development: Working as an historian
The strands of the history curriculum

Basic structure and terminology

The content of the history curriculum has been delineated at four levels: infant classes, first and second classes, third and fourth classes, fifth and sixth classes. At each level, content has been presented in two distinct sections:

• a skills section entitled Working as an
  historian
  and
• a number of strands which outline the periods and subjects which may be included in the history programme. Each strand includes several topics called strand units, a number of which will form the basic sections of the content covered.

The presentation of content in these two sections is intended to help teachers in planning for the development of important skills and attitudes as knowledge and understanding of historical topics are acquired.

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Skills development: Working as an historian

This section describes the activities and skills which children will develop as they encounter historical topics. The skills and concepts included are related to the nature of historical enquiry and are designed to help teachers to plan for the development of a broad range of skills throughout children’s explorationof the past. These skills should not be taught in isolation: they can only be realised in the context of studies outlined in the content strands.

Time and chronology

At first glance, perhaps the most surprising element of the new history curriculum is the inclusion of material for the infant and junior classes. Young children have a very imperfect sense of time. They are interested predominantly in what is happening now, and an event or object which is the centre of their attention at a particular moment may be forgotten rapidly as a second event is encountered. Children often seem to be unable to conceptualise events which are not immediately visible and may describe all past events as having happened ‘a long time ago’.

Despite encountering and using the language of time – ‘in a moment’, ‘soon’, ‘later’, ‘hour’, ‘week’, ‘year’ – children have a limited understanding of the relative length of the periods of time in question. The difficulty may be compounded by the mathematical recording of time using clocks and numerals: most children begin to learn to tell or read the time and record dates by the end of second class, yet some eleven and twelve-year-olds can have difficulty relating the time recorded to the passage of time.

However, research and practical experience with children as young as four and five years old have shown that children’s sense of time can be greatly aided by early exposure to some carefully chosen history work. A sense of time may not develop automatically but it may be taught.

This curriculum does not suggest that conventional history (such as that which has been taught traditionally in the middle or senior classes) should be introduced to infants or junior classes. The curriculum proposes that through developing and using elements of existing good practice in infant classrooms a valuable contribution may be made to developing children’s sense of time.

By exploring elements and incidents in their own lives – their birth, aspects of their babyhood, the toys they used when young, their first day at school – and through listening to and discussing stories, children can take two fundamental steps along the road to developing an understanding of time:

• they can begin to recognise a sequence in events, for example that they learned to crawl, then walk, then run and later to ride a bike. This notion of sequence provides a basis for the development of chronological awareness and is crucial to historical understanding
• they can begin to develop some sense of a time different from their own, an understanding that things have not always been the same as they are now.

Children’s sense of time and chronology may be developed from these crucial beginnings. In first and second classes, slightly longer and more elaboratesequences may be recognised and discussed in elements of personal, family and local history, in many of the stories which delight children of this age and in seasonal and annual patterns. Objects, photographs and pictures can be arranged to record these sequences, which can then be discussed in terms of ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘then’, ‘next’. The past itself may still be undifferentiated, but children should be encouraged to explore how the lives of those known to them and the everyday items and places they encounter may have changed. They may, in this way, distinguish clearly the past from the present and the future.

The sequencing of objects and pictures and the use of timelines can play a major role in the development of chronological understanding and should be used at all levels in the primary school.
Top: Infants can order pictures to record the sequence of events in a story. These pictures can provide excellent opportunities for the introduction and use of the simplest vocabulary of time: 'before', 'after', 'then', etc. Later the pictures can be displayed in 'washing line' style.
Middle: A three-dimensional timeline recording the child's own history. Photographs, drawings, toys used at particular ages, items of clothing, birthday cards and any other evidence of the child's development can be sequenced. Again these lines provide excellent opportunities to develop the vocabulary of time and a sense of the child's own past.
Bottom: A class timeline should be a constant point of reference as work is completed on local, national and international history. The items on the line should be added as work is begun on each period or era so that the line develops as the year's work is completed. Through discussion, the child's attention should be drawn to what came before a period under study and what came later. Some teachers find it valuable to use one long line to represent the period from the Stone Age to the present and a second line on a different wall to represent a section from the main line, for example from AD 1 to the present, or from AD 1000 to the present, or the 18th to the 20th centuries.

By the time children are in third and fourth classes, they will encounter a broadening range of local studies and will begin to explore more extensive and more distant periods in the past. All these topics provide opportunities for the recording of sequences. Moreover, frequent reference to the relative position of these historical events along suitable timelines can help the child to place individuals, families, peoples and events within the broad sweep of the past.

This chronological awareness and differentiation of the past can be refined further in fifth and sixth classes. It may also be complemented by children’s growing mathematical ability, so that pupils should be enabled to place people, objects and events in a broad historical sequence. Gradually, children will begin to recognise some key attributes of life at particular periods and will begin to use phrases such as ‘Stone Age’, ‘Iron Age’, ‘the Norman period’. Some key dates will occur naturally in the context of studies – 1169, 1690, 1916, dates of personal, family and local significance, for example – and these should be recorded. However, chronological awareness is not fostered by rote memorisation of dates.

Should we use a chronological approach?

The teaching of historical topics in a strictly chronological manner is not recommended in the curriculum because:

• an awareness of the past is most relevant for the younger child when it involves his/her own experiences and the experiences of those known to him/her
• a strictly chronological study from the Stone Age to the present does not necessarily guarantee that children will acquire an understanding of the relative periods of history involved
• chronological treatments can create intractable planning problems, not only in multi-class schools but more importantly when schools wish to organise curricula using a topic approach and when they seek to maximise the use of local features. For example, a school located near a particularly important Norman castle might wish to use it as the basis of a detailed study in sixth class. This would be ruled out by a chronological approach and valuable opportunities lost.

The curriculum recommends that

• children’s historical work begins with their own past and that of their family and community
• children, particularly from third class and above, study elements from early, middle and modern periods in each year
• constant use is made of appropriate simple timelines so as to help children to place episodes studied in relative context and to make the important connections between a period under study and those that preceded it and followed it
• a chronological treatment of a number of topics, for example those treated within a period of several weeks or a term, may also be advisable.

Change and continuity

Change is a fundamental characteristic of the human condition, and its existence is an essential element in our interest in the past. Children’s concept of the past can be developed only when they realise that change occurs, and that things have not always been as they are now.

Pupils in first and second classes can become aware of change in the world around them through exploring their own growth and development, the changes which may be observed in the immediate environment and the past experiences of parents and older relatives. And just as important, exploring the past in this way can draw the child’s attention to aspects which have stayed the same: the people in a parent’s class photograph of 1970 will have changed but the school building in the background may be recognisable to the pupils in the school today.

As older children explore a wider range of topics and periods in the past, comparisons should be made constantly between life in the past and in the present. Children in the senior classes will be able to compare differing periods in the past. Gradually, children will become sensitive to the impact of change and should attach importance to the elements of the past which have survived to the present day: the eighteenthcentury milestone, the field boundaries, the estate wall, the trees planted over a century ago, the Edwardian post-boxes and other street furniture. An awareness of these elements and an understanding of the potential impact of change are essential in the development of children’s environmental appreciation and sense of responsibility.

Cause and effect

Establishing the reasons behind change, and the factors which may have caused or prevented change, are fundamental to history. This work demands some ability to step back from the events in question, to draw on a number of sources, and to make judgements about human motivation.

Within relatively simple historical contexts, children in third and fourth classes will be able to recognise change, to discuss some of the reasons for the development and to comment on the impact of the event on people at the time. Changes in roads and traffic flow, for example, provide excellent case studies.

Children may be inclined to view events in the past in simple cause-and-effect terms. Too often, some of the accounts we have presented to children have reinforced a simplistic understanding of the nature and impact of events in the past. Events and developments are often precipitated by a number of factors, they may take place over a prolonged period (rather than in a single incident) and they may have a number of outcomes, many of which may be completely unforeseen. This level of historical understanding is complex, but classroom discussions and debates can have a significant impact on the subtlety of children’s understanding. The experience of good historical fiction can often facilitate this process, allowing children to explore the various reasons which lie behind people’s actions.

Using evidence

We find out about the past through asking questions and making inferences about the evidence which we find of human affairs. Evidence encompasses all surviving elements from the past, including objects, pictorial sources (including drawings, carvings, paintings, photographs, film and video), maps, buildings, inscriptions, documents, electronic data, books, oral recalled accounts and the landscape which has been altered and shaped by humanaction. Despite this impressive range of evidence, few sources are complete and in some cases their origins and status may be unknown. So, historians have to make interpretations and deductions from the available evidence.

Evidence is categorised as either primary sources (those created at the time to which they relate, for example contemporary letters, buildings, photographs, newspapers) or secondary sources (those produced some time after the period to which they relate, for example an account of life in the 1960s written in 1980). Secondary sources are historical interpretations of the past. For the most part, primary school children’s examination of evidence should be confined to primary evidence, as they will not have the level of abstract thinking required to compare and criticise contrasting secondary interpretations.

The history curriculum seeks to ensure that children will gain some experience of using historical evidence in simple yet valid ways: just as children are introduced to scientific investigation in the science curriculum, so they should learn to handle and treat evidence in the way which characterises the historian’s methods.

At all levels in the primary curriculum, children should encounter a wide range of evidence. Most documentary evidence and printed sources are probably best left to the last two years of primary school because of readability problems, but opportunities should be identified for the use of simple evidence in all classes. For infants and first and second classes, the emphasis should be on making children aware of the wide range of evidence available. Older children should be encouraged to ask increasingly detailed questions about sources, their origins, what they tell us about the past, how they may give us a biased perspective of the past and how they relate to other pieces of evidence about the period in question. The aim should be not only to give children experience of the process of drawing conclusions from evidence but to bring them to realise that accounts of the past are based on interpretations, many of which might have to be altered if further evidence became available.

Synthesis and communication

An essential element in historical work is the imaginative reconstruction of the past and the communication of this interpretation to others. This involves us in synthesising an account which draws on a number of sources, using imagination to reconstruct past events, and communicating our findings to others.

Children should have opportunities to use as many techniques and media as possible to record and tell about their historical findings. In doing so, they can be encouraged to use the varied pieces of information and the interpretations which they have accumulated to reconstruct imaginatively an element of the past. Often, as in the making of a model of a castle or in the staging of an historic event in role playing, the process of construction or re-creation will raise further questions. In this way the communication of historical knowledge and its interpretation in a variety of ways (particularly through non-written media) will provide an added stimulus for investigation and furnish the teacher with a means of assessing the level of understanding achieved.

The attractiveness and apparent permanence of reconstructions of the past in books, pictures and especially models, films and video can endow these interpretations with an extra authority. Many reconstructions in museums and interpretative centres are based on informed historical research and can make a major contribution to our understanding of the past. Yet children and adults can be lulled into accepting these interpretations of the past as definitive. Just as the storytellers of old adapted accounts for their audiences, so too do the authors, artists, actors and curators who provide us with accounts of the past today. Children will come to realise this if they themselves experience this diversity of presentation and use a wide range of these techniques to convey their own understandings to a variety of audiences.

Language and communication in history

The inclusion of ‘communication’ as an historical skill points to the close links which exist between history and language. Listening to, retelling and discussing narrative contributes to, and is dependent upon, the child’s language skills. It should also be remembered that history has language conventions of its own. Children will be introduced to terms associated with chronology (words such as ‘long ago’, ‘century’, ‘era’, ‘period’), and their understanding of commonly used words (such as ‘king’, ‘castle’, ‘house’, etc.) may be significantly different from that intended in historical contexts.

Empathy

Empathy involves the ability to appreciate how events in the past appeared to those living at the time. This is an abstract and difficult concept, but it is important if we are to make fair assessments of the actions of people in the past. It is all too easy for us to judge historical figures by the values of thepresent: the content of some of the reading lessons prescribed for children in nineteenth-century Irish national schools, for example, would appear patronising to the modern reader, but in the context of the structured and hierarchical society of the 1830s the lessons expressed little more than accepted norms.

Stories about people in the past, often those restricted to a relatively small number of main characters, can help greatly in introducing children to exploring the thoughts and feelings of others. By the end of junior classes, children’s discussions of stories should include questions and comments on how the characters felt in a particular situation. As children’s persona experience grows and their knowledge of the actions of people in the past expands, they should be able to speculate on the opinions, beliefs and motivations of people in the past. Good historical fiction will continue to be invaluable in this process, while engaging in historical reconstructions as detailed above will develop further children’s empathetic understanding.

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The strands of the history curriculum

Presentation of content

The historical topics and periods to be explored by the child are outlined in the strands of the curriculum. Through the study of the knowledge base of these topics the historical skills and attitudes described in Working as an historian will be developed.

How are the strands arranged?

The strands have been chosen to help ensure that children experience a broadly balanced history programme. The strands reflect major historical periods (for example Early people and ancient societies and Life, society, work and culture in the past), important genres of historical enquiry (for example Local studies and Story) or particular methodological approaches (for example Continuity and change over time, which encourages line-of-development studies).

The arrangement of material within the strands has been designed to provide maximum flexibility for teachers and schools in the planning of SESE and history. The curriculum does not advocate a chronological approach to the teaching of historical topics. The strands provide a menu for teachers from which schools can select topics or strand units in order to suit he needs of pupils and to reflect the local environment and experiences of the local community in the past.

The number of strands, and hence the scope of historical enquiry, increases as the child grows older. However, it is an important principle of the curriculum that at each level children should experience material from a range of historical periods and in local, national and international contexts. It should also be remembered that the strands are not completely separate sections: work from the strand Local studies might involve tracing the history of housing in the area and so form an excellent line-of-development study in the strand Change and continuity over time; likewise work on the Celts might include material from local, national and international contexts and from the strands Local studies and Life, society, work and culture in the past.

Personal and local history

This strand appears at all levels in the history programme. The exploration of elements of personal, family and local history provides the child with his/her first and crucial opportunities to develop an awareness of the past and of its impact on the lives of individuals known to him/her.

The range of local studies for infants will be limited to elements of the child’s own past and that of his/her parents’ generation: ‘the story of myself and my family’.

Children in first and second classes will also explore their own past and that of their families. As they visit and explore an increasing number of places and aspects of the local environment in the SESE programme they will encounter a growing range of items which are the result of the actions of people in the past. These are not necessarily very old features: anything which has been in place since before the child’s remembered life begins is old in his/her eyes. Some objects and features will also show change and continuity. Children, for example, may recall seeing a new wall built outside the school when they were in infant classes or they will remember planting shrubs in the garden. They may also talk to older people about aspects of the locality which have changed or remained the same. In all of this, children will develop a sense of a time different from their own and a sense of time passing, even in the limited context of their own lives.

Children in the middle and senior classes should also engage in local studies. The planning of these studies is demanding, and at times it can be difficult to identify suitable topics and themes. Teaching resources for national and international topics are generally much more readily available, but the inclusion of substantial local studies is essential if the aims of the history programme and the wider SESE and SPHE curricula are to be achieved. Through local history children can readily acquire and practise historical research skills. They can become familiar with and learn to value the local environment and they can learn to appreciate the elements of the past which have given them and their locality a sense of identity.

The curriculum stresses that local studies need not generally involve particularly famous or distinguished sites, buildings or characters. Suggestions for both the middle and senior classes (the latter tending to involve a group of buildings or more extensive sites or more complex developments) will be found in the curriculum. Some schools may also find it useful to treat an element of local history in a simple way in the infant or junior classes and return to the topic for a much more detailed study in the middle or senior classes. The overlap in suggestions within the strand units is designed to facilitate this spiral approach to the curriculum.

Story

This strand also appears at all levels in the programme. Listening to, telling and retelling stories is of course a natural part of every child’s development and a fundamental part of history. It also helps to develop the child’s sense of sequence – an essential requirement for the acquisition of historical perspective. The range of stories will widen as the child grows older and they will be treated in greater depth. It will be important to ensure that the topics chosen represent as wide a range of human experience and endeavour as possible – not just the stories of political and religious leaders but the lives of people in all walks of life and from a range of social, cultural and ethnic groups.

Change and continuity

This strand appears first at the level of first and second classes and is recommended at all the succeeding levels. These studies involve the examination of one limited aspect of human experience over a prolonged period, for example ‘travel and transport through the ages’, ‘clothes through the centuries’, etc. These studies, often called line-of-development studies, can be an excellent way to explore how change comes about and can make children realise that, despite enormous changes, basic human needs remain the same.

Early people and ancient societies
Life, society, work and culture in the past

These strands are common to third and fourth classes and fifth and sixth classes. The strand units listed include some of the major periods in the development of human civilisation and studies of the lives of people in Ireland at different times in our past. The emphasis in these studies is on the everyday experiences of peoples, their homes, food, technologies, work, culture, art and social customs. It is an important principle of the curriculum that children should develop a balanced understanding of local, national and international history and of the contribution of different ethnic groups to human development. Hence, some of the strand units suggest the study of people from non-European contexts.

The titles of the units in these strands are almost identical for the middle and senior classes. This does not mean that children will repeat work. Rather, it is to provide flexibility for the school in planning. Some units will be taught during the middle classes only, and some will be studied in the senior classes. In other cases units examined in third or fourth classes may be revisited and explored in greater depth in the senior years. Compare and contrast the strand units for the middle and senior classes reproduced on the following pages, for example. The content objectives and exemplar material (in italic type) suggest more complex and demanding work for the senior classes.

This flexibility places an onus on teachers to plan a history programme that reflects the needs and organisation of their school and ensures that children will study elements from early, middle and modern periods and from local, national and international contexts.

Strand: Life, society, work and culture in the past

A selection from:

Life in Norman Ireland
Life in mediaeval towns and countryside in Ireland and Europe
Life in the 18th century
Life in the 19th century
Life during World War II
Life in Ireland since the 1950s

The child should be enabled to

• become familiar with aspects of the lives of these people
  homes of people
  clothes
  farming, foods and cooking
  technologies which people developed
  and used
  people at work
  tools and weapons
  language(s), culture, art and music
  leisure and pastimes
  stories of individuals from this era
• examine and become familiar with evidence from the periods studied, especially evidence which may be found locally
• record the place of peoples on timelines.

Strand: Life, society, work and culture in the past

A selection from:

Life in Norman Ireland
Life in mediaeval towns and countryside in Ireland and Europe
Life in the 18th century
Life in the 19th century
Language and culture in late 19th and early 20th-century Ireland
Life during World War II
Life in Ireland since the 1950s

The child should be enabled to

• become familiar with aspects of the lives of these people
  homes of people
  settlement patterns and urban developments
  clothes
  foods and farming
  technologies which people developed and their influence on the lives of people
  people at work
  culture, art and music
  language(s) and literature
  leisure and pastimes
  faith, beliefs and religious practices
  migration and emigration
  relationships of different groups of people to one another (e.g. landlord and tenant in the 19th century)
  simple treatment of some of the social, economic, political or religious issues of the time (e.g. fear of plague in mediaeval towns, penal laws, decline in use of Irish in the 19th century, life of workers in 19th-century industrial towns)
  long-term contribution of people and events at this time to the development of modern Ireland
• examine and become familiar with evidence which informs us about the lives of people in the periods studied, their thoughts and concerns, especially evidence which may be found locally
• record the place of peoples and events on appropriate timelines.

Eras of change and conflict
Politics, conflict and society

These two strands appear only in the fifth and sixth class programme, as they involve some understanding of abstract concepts which would be beyond the grasp of younger children. In the strand Eras of change and conflict, for example, children may encounter the notion of artistic, scientific and cultural change in the Renaissance or have to grapple with the concepts of tenancy and land ownership in 19th-century Ireland. Some understanding of these and other concepts will be needed, but the emphasis of the studies, as the exemplars make clear, should be on the effects which these new ideas had on the lives of people at the time and the long-term effects which these changes have caused.

Even more difficult ideas are involved in Politics, conflict and society. The language of politics and many of the concepts involved are only vaguely understood by children. However, history has to answer the child’s need to comprehend the world in which he/she lives, and it would be almost impossible for a child to understand contemporary life in Ireland without some basic notion of a number of key periods in Irish history. The coming of the Normans and the plantations of the 16th and 17th centuries introduced new settlers to the country just as the earlier Celtic, Viking and other migrations had done. Each new wave of settlers brought their own contribution to the rich diversity of Irish culture, but the repercussions of the later colonisations, and more importantly the various interpretations placed on them by different people, are still at the root of many issues in contemporary Ireland and Britain.

Likewise, an understanding of the origins, progress and aftermath of the 1916 rising, the foundation of the state and the history of Northern Ireland since 1969 is an essential element in the education of all Irish children. These periods need to be handled with great sensitivity. Complex issues are involved, and while these have to be simplified for the child, care should be taken not to leave him/her with a simplistic understanding of the past.

The central aim of the lessons should be to enable the child to explore, discuss, compare and develop an understanding of the attitudes, beliefs and motivations of differing groups of people in the past and to examine how people today can interpret incidents in the past in very different ways. If children begin to appreciate the power which people’s interpretations of the past can have on their perspectives and actions today, then history will have achieved one of its fundamental purposes and will have contributed towards the resolution of many of the issues facing present and future generations of Irish people.

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