Werner Herzog, the acclaimed German film director, reflects on the perils of modern football coverage. “There are too many camera angles” he complains. There is a particular beauty to seeing the ever so subtle shifts in the patterns of movement of a team. The tactical brilliance of a manager and how a team of eleven players execute are quite something to behold. There is a certain rigour and depth, a plane of sporting enjoyment that is hidden from view behind an excessive focus on the moments that attract more immediate focus. The disputed penalty, the fracas with between two team mates or an exciting diagonal pass.

And so it is with history. Students are left with a fragmented view of our past and no real sense of what each of their individual history lessons amount to. This is not a particularly new observation. OFSTED’s history subject reports have documented the problem in 2007 and 2011. History teachers have theorised on the problems in supporting students in forging connections across lessons and units of work, mostly in the columns of Teaching History. Jim Carroll, who has since turned his focus to the language of history teaching, published the most recent and thorough study on how teachers might support students in the British Curriculum Journal.

That said, the problem remains under theorised and the history teaching community is some way from reaching a consensus on how to help students construct meaningful big pictures of the past. Indeed, there is a fragile consensus at best on what students’ big pictures might look like. One of the more promising approaches revolve around Shemilt’s ‘frameworks’ of the past.[1] These have looked at providing students with some chronological and thematic organisation to all of human history. Students are given a provisional overview of human development, in socio-political and economic groups, with the past divided up into chronological chunks. In this way, students have something to slot new learning into and can question the original generalisations that they are taught. However, this ‘big picture first’ approach is fraught with difficulty, and Carroll has noticed an unsurprising lack of take up among history educators.

The Usable Historical Pasts project adopted a similar approach.[2]  Their conception of a ‘big picture’ was for students to be able to offer a chronological narrative of British history in the previous two thousand years. This is a more manageable temporal dimension, and therefore perhaps a curricular goal around which more of a consensus can be built. Their research is fascinating in demonstrating the problem of too many camera angles. When invited to offer a narrative of the past, even university undergraduate students were drawn towards “event like” narrative of the past, simply listing the more eye-catching and significant events of the past. Students’ selection of events appears to be far more intuitive than strategic. We need to provide students with the tools for constructing narratives that stretch across generations. Without it, students are left with mere episodes of the past. Without these extended narratives, how are students to see the true intricacies of the past? How might students, or citizens, truly relate the present to an unfolding past? If students are not taught to develop the skill of managing large amounts of information, why do we bother? If students assemble their own big picture narratives, might these be destructive and come into conflict with narratives driven by the evidence? At risk of asking one too many questions, if students big pictures are dominated by events that instinctively stick out to them, surely they are building their historical knowledge simply using experiential knowledge. Surely students need deliberate reflection and practise at selecting events, to see what’s really going on. We might focus on the penalty incident, because it speaks to our existing interest in the drama of the game. But what are the real issues of the game, of which this was just one fleeting moment.

What’s more, there’s a beauty to a bigger picture which every student is entitled to see. It is therefore great to see Dr Lindsay Gibson speaking at the Institute on the 9^th April on this subject. Hopefully further dialogue among history educators ensues. What do history’s big pictures look like, and how can we support students in constructing them?

[1] Shemilt, D, (2000) ‘The Caliph’s Coin: The currency of Narrative Frameworks in History Teaching’ in Stearns, P., Seixas, P. et al (Eds.) Knowing, teaching and learning history: national and international perspectives, New York: New York University Press.

[2] Lee, P. J., & Howson, J. (2009). “Two Out of Five Did Not Know That Henry VIII had Six Wives:” History Education, Historical Literacy and Historical Consciousness. In L. Symcox & A. Wilshcut (Eds.), National History Standards: The Problem of The Canon and The Future of Teaching History, Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing, Inc.