‘How do ideas travel?' East meets west - and history meets science

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

Jamie Byrom is well-known to readers of Teaching History, not least for introducing us to the concept ‘professional wrestling' in the history department (Teaching History,133, Empire Edition). That article, authored with Michael Riley, focused on the challenges of planning engaging sequences of lessons and coherent sets of activities to build broad and coherent knowledge on the British Empire. The article suggested that wrestling was part of being a history teacher. Now Jamie Byrom has taken his talents in this area to a new level by introducing wrestling between disciplines, in this case science and history. If cross-curricular work is to be rigorous and learning is to be effectively scaffolded then thorough planning is paramount. This article sets out the details of a cross-curricular day that brings two subjects together in one place: Baghdad. However, this piece goes much further in problematising such cross-curricular planning and gives guidance on the detailed process that needs to underpin such initiatives.