The Chronicle, Spring 2019

12 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Change and Continuity The problem became immediately clear to History teacher Anna Fielding several

and Warlords. Many of the changes he instigated took place gradually . For example, when Mao came to power, farming techniques were very basic but, over a period, agriculture was transformed through the gradual application of the policy of collectivisation; a policy which modernised the country yet had disastrous implications for many.’ Fellow History teacher Huw Thomas has built on this work by creating a useful checklist of words to aid historical writing which is now always on display in History classrooms. Beyond the words, visual imagery has a big role to play. Another of Anna’s techniques is to construct a visual metaphor to capture the rate of change, such as the reading on an exercise treadmill as the runner speeds up and slows down. Another is to create a ‘living graph’ – a simple way to capture the fact that change affects people in different ways. For example, to help pupils appreciate that collectivism helped those in the city, by providing sufficient supplies of food, but caused suffering for those who worked in the large agricultural communes.

‘If you think about it,’ says Anna, ‘young children aged 13 or 14 haven’t experienced historical change, they haven’t been alive long enough, so it’s understandable that they struggle to understand and describe it.’ Through practical research in the classroom, Anna identified a number of techniques to help pupils write about change. Simple though it sounds, a lesson focused on identifying relevant vocabulary is a good foundation. ‘History is so much more, and so much richer, than simply a list of Kings and Queens, and battles and dates,’ she says. ‘Historical events can be big, sudden or cataclysmic; they can be triggers for subsequent developments, or they can exacerbate underlying tensions; they can be long-term, short term – or even scary.’ Historical developments can also be a number of things simultaneously. ‘When Mao came to power in October 1949,’ Anna continues, ‘it was a moment in time, a turning point in political leadership: Mao was a new leader and a Communist, after around 50 years of political instability under Emperors, a Republic

years ago during a simple classroom task. She had asked a Fifth Form class to construct a timeline of the historical period they had been studying. With most of the pupils fresh from the dates, facts and figures approach to History required by Common Entrance examinations, Anna was struck by the fact that their timelines simply left out anything that couldn’t be distilled into a specific moment in time. And so the seeds of her 20,000-word Masters’ research project were sown: History and Change: how to help pupils write effectively about the concept of continuity and change in History . Her research and recommendations quickly reached a wider audience through a piece in the journal, Teaching History , at the British Educational Research Association Conference in Belfast, and in a recently published book, Classroom-based Interventions Across Subject Areas , edited by Gabriel J Stylanides and Ann Childs.

Anna Fielding