Talking with the ‘enemy': firing enthusiasm for history through international conversation and collaboration

Richard Kerridge and Sacha Cinnamond explain how their history department built a culture of international dialogue and collaboration that enriches their students' historical learning. Videoconferencing is at the centre of these activities. Their story begins with an initial, moving encounter with the First World War battlefields that soon turned into a remarkable collaboration with a German school. This experience then fostered many other projects, each involving video-conferencing. It has become a cliché to say that we now live in a global community, with modern technology making it easy to communicate instantly, around the world, yet it is rare for learning in the history classroom to incorporate an international collaboration or for a history departmental culture to embed it so fully.

Kerridge and Cinnamond explain how their use of international collaboration built rich enthusiasm for history and new kinds of historical understanding, especially at GCSE, taking their students well beyond the narrow confines of typical 14-16 courses and securing many other benefits...