Multi-voicedness, ‘oral rehearsal’ and Year 13 students’ written arguments

Jim Carroll was concerned that A-level textbooks failed to provide his students with a model of the multi-voicedness that characterises written history. In order to show his students that historians constantly engage in argument as they write, Carroll turned to academic scholarship for models of multi-voiced history. Carroll explains here how he used small-group debates to provide his students with the opportunity to rehearse multi-voiced arguments. He shows how this strengthened their written work and gave them a more sophisticated understanding of history as a discipline. On this basis, Carroll argues that the value of group-work is a function of the curricular and disciplinary purposes that it can fulfil in a given context.