Supporting High Achievement and School to Higher Education Transition Through Virtual Academies in History

Description

Round 6 Teaching Development Grant

The project aims to address a key problem flagged in the literature on school / HE transition in History, to provide opportunities for gifted and talented young historians in schools to enrich and enhance their experience of learning and to forge links between academics and school pupils and colleagues.

The problem that the project will seek to address is a mismatch between school pupils' and university teachers' understandings of historical interpretation (a mismatch reported in Booth (2005), Hibbert (2006) and elsewhere).

The project will address this by providing a virtual academy through which upper sixth / A2 school pupils will engage with interpretations problems and with academic staff in HE through on-line "e-debates". These debates will focus on problems of historical interpretation (e.g. the question "Did Chartism fail?"). Teams of pupils from participating schools will debate with each other and aim to win the debate which will be adjudicated by participating academics. The debate will be adjudicated against criteria for sound historical debate and argument that will be shared and clarified at the start of the project.

The project will provide two distinct types of outcome - for the participating students on the one hand and for the wider history community on the other. The outcome for the participating students will arise directly from their participating in the project and will be an enrichment of their educational experience that will enhance their understanding of historical interpretation and therefore ease their transition into higher education courses in history should they wish to pursue them. The outcome for the wider history community will arise from the publications and conference presentations that emerge from analysis of the project. The main data here is the pupil contributions to the debate which will reveal a great deal, once analysed, about (a) their presuppositions about historical interpretation and debate and (b) the ways in which pupil understanding of these matters can be enhanced through debates featuring intervention from moderators / adjudicators in HE.

The project will thus develop and research a specific area of historical learning - the pedagogy of historical interpretations. It will seek to enhance pupil learning in this area but it will also aim to provide a case study on ways of smoothing the cognitive transition from school to higher education in history.

In addition to the publications and reports that will emerge from this project, the debates are electronic and therefore easily archived. The intention will be to provide on-line access to this archive.

The project will provide a model of how to link schools and higher education institutions that can easily be replicated by other institutions (see above also regarding the archived debates).

It will also provide grounded data on pupil thinking in an important yet problematic area of historical learning (Booth (2005), Hibbert (2006)). This data will provide insights of universal relevance within the history education community in schools and HE and insights that can inform teaching programmes in both post-16 and HE contexts.

The project leader will aim to present the project findings as widely as possible at conferences for history teachers, history educators and historians as well as through publication in relevant journals.

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