Dr. Michael Riley started his session by showing a Key Stage 1 history reader called Orphan Mary. It told the story of a Victorian mill girl who injured her finger on machinery in a weaving shed. The story ended happily. Dr. Riley explained that when he had told the story to a Key Stage 1 class, and asked their opinion of it, a six year-old girl exclaimed: "That's rubbish! The accidents were much worse than that - people trapped their hair and their arms!"

He asked the girl: ‘Why did the author write it this way?"

The girl replied: "Because he was writing for little children and didn't want to scare us."

Dr. Riley told of a meeting in a setting at the other end of the history education community, with Dr. James Sharpe of York University. Dr. Sharpe was exploring using film as an interpretation of history. Both examples demonstrated how interpretations of history can be analysed at all levels of the study of history as an academic discipline and school subject.

 

 

Dr. Riley went on to list a series of questions which should be taken into account when planning an historical enquiry, which he defined as:

 

‘A planning device for knitting together a sequence of lessons, so that all the learning activities - teacher exposition, narrative, source-work, role-play, plenary - all move toward the resolution of an interesting historical problem by means of substantial motivating activity at the end.'

1. Is this area of content significant?

    

2. How can we turn this area of content into a rigorous and motivating enquiry question?

    

3. Can we focus the enquiry on individual people?

    

4. How will pupils communicate their understanding through an engaging end product?

    

5. How will we hook them in at the start of the enquiry?

    

6. How will we sequence the learning for maximum motivation?

    

7. How can we help pupils to choose and use information?

    

8. How can we create learning activities which appeal to different intelligencies?

    

9. How will we create ‘mini-hooks' to engage learners with particular tasks?

    

10. How will we create rich resources rather than grubby gobbets?

 

He then took the meeting through a Key Stage 2 history enquiry...