Table of contents for Vol. 57 no. 1 2022 in Agora

‘Ms Litvin, what are we doing today?’ one of my students asked at the end of our Middle Ages unit. ‘We are going to watch A Knight’s Tale,’ I replied. After watching the first 50 minutes, I stopped the film and we discussed what the film showed about life for a medieval knight and the character of Geoffrey Chaucer (who is based on the historical figure), and how and why the filmmaker had chosen to interpret this time in history. The students were able to compare what they knew about the different levels of medieval society, knighthood, and Chaucer to the film. They loved the film, and quickly recognised that there were several anachronisms in it. I pointed out that the filmmaker had done that deliberately for several reasons. Through…

The Victorian History Curriculum inadvertently communicates skill and knowledge progressions dichotomously. By presenting ‘content descriptors’ visually as separate checklists of domain and capability-based ‘must dos, the curriculum can be misconstrued as a tick-a-box framework of criteria for assessment.1 This drains away the incredibly rich source of inspiration that the curriculum can provide. Early in my career I remember staring at an A3 printed version of the junior Humanities Curriculum during a domain meeting. We were told that we needed to cover 80 per cent of what was in those little boxes. The accountability narrative had arrived, loud and strong. The curriculum was no longer our source of inspiration. It had become our measurement tool, a criteria checklist and, more insidiously, a perceived measure of our ability to teach. This is…

History is complex. The skills and understanding are complex, and even the names can be complex—I’m looking at you, Quetzalcoatl. Consider what we ask our students to do: analyse images from tens, hundreds or thousands of years ago; read professional pieces of writing about events from throughout history; and be able to write in a formal, academic manner at an extended length. Fortunately our students are complex, too. They are capable of incredibly complex thinking, and the views they develop on historical events never cease to amaze me. However, this complexity can become overwhelming. While our students have complex ideas, they are often unable to express them in the complex manner required to excel in their History education. I spent years as a Humanities Domain Head searching for a way…

Whether skills or knowledge deserve more prominence in teaching has important ramifications. A teacher’s instructional time is a finite resource, and it needs to be used efficiently. This article: 1. examines definitional issues regarding epistemology and teaching 2. discusses the proposition that both skills and knowledge are equally important in teaching 3. rejects the claim that content is more important than skills 4. argues why skills might be more important than knowledge 5. discusses whether the debate is a false dichotomy. 1. Definitions Some believe the debate over whether to prioritise skill development or knowledge uptake can be ended by defining knowledge in a way that incorporates both. Levesque avoids the dichotomy by stating that content can be split into substantive and procedural parts.1 For example, the boiling point of…

Dismissals of the importance of knowledge, and in particular of fact learning, have been part of popular educational discourse for a considerable period of time.1 Even Albert Einstein is alleged to have once claimed that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge,’ a phrase now used by those who argue against the importance of knowledge.2 Participants in the debate regularly create a strict dichotomy between skills and knowledge, with skills representing a twenty-first century education and knowledge the education of a bygone era. The skills v knowledge dichotomy is a false one. Skills and knowledge are inseparable and entirely reliant on each other. One of the key principles of Daniel Willingham’s seminal text Why Don’t Students Like School is that ‘factual knowledge must precede skill’.3 He makes clear that knowledge and…

Hearing the word ‘analysis’ can put students in a tailspin of worry. When mentioned in the History class, it often draws a chorus of groans. Analysis is daunting because students struggle to define or understand what it means or requires them to do. Definitions of ‘analysis’ suggest it involves studying or examining something in detail or breaking it into components. Yet when it comes to analysing sources in History, students are often wondering about which components they need to study in detail. This is where an acronym can really assist students to scaffold answers and identify the historical components that should be examined. Having taught widely across Humanities, I was aware how dependent Geography teachers are on acronyms. Whether it be to analyse maps (PQE), understand factors (SHEEPT) or create…

The dichotomy that separates historical knowledge (substantive knowledge) from historical skills (disciplinary knowledge), and devalues the former, was called out more than twenty years ago by Christine Counsell. While ‘new’ history had introduced new priorities around ‘skills’, ‘concepts’ and ‘attitudes’, knowledge was left sitting ‘rather uneasily alongside other objectives’; while it ‘never goes away’, it ‘moves awkwardly in the professional language of many history teachers’.1 ‘Awkwardly’ understates the degree to which, for some educators, historical knowledge can be relegated to a ‘lower order’ afterthought, tainted by association with outmoded ‘rote learning and regurgitation’ pedagogies, separated from historical skills, and given a low priority in the pursuit of historical thinking. Counsell has since written and presented extensively on the need to recognise the vital role of knowledge in history education. Despite…

Walk into any History staffroom anywhere in the world and you will hear the dilemma of how much content there is to cover. History teachers often find themselves having to work out how much emphasis they place on the teaching of historical skills relative to their coverage of curriculum ‘content’ (or historical knowledge). This well-rehearsed dichotomy of skills versus content has a long history, and some good work addressing it has already been done.1 In Australia, concerns over the balance of skills versus content arguably go back at least to the Commonwealth curriculum reforms of the 1970s, when a new emphasis was placed on teaching ‘critical appraisal’ and ‘interpretation’.2 This focus was then intensified by the British Schools Council’s systematic attention to historical reasoning processes in the early 1980s.3 These…

There is a strange debate that takes place in schools, History and Humanities faculties, and in our professional discussions across the profession. Consider the following interaction and whether you have encountered it or a version of it. Teacher 1: I just feel that my students are not remembering enough of what we are studying! Teacher 2: Don’t worry, as long as they are developing the skills then it doesn’t matter if they don’t remember all of the things you are teaching them. You may be familiar with this line of thinking and the unspoken position that ‘skills’ are what matter while knowledge is merely the delivery vehicle to develop these skills. Knowledge is often portrayed as disconnected facts, dates, events and occurrences that bore students and stand as curricula islands…

History will never change—there will only be more of it. History teachers face the challenge of choosing from this vastness the knowledge that we should pass on to our students. To add to this complexity, we know that our students need enough knowledge to bring forth ‘skilled performance’ of the discipline. We are assisted in this by the curriculum, which neatly fences off fractions of that vastness for students to explore. By doing this, however, are we accepting that the content we have must be the best content for teaching—that if there was better content we would already be using it? We can resolve this by understanding how to use content to achieve skilled performance. The Modern Student of History The demands placed on History students today are immense. They…

‘Dead happs’ (slang): An expression indicating little or no interest in something. There are three things you should know about my Year 10 student Neville (not his real name): he’s hostile to History, he’s a passionate Richmond Tigers fan, and he’s serving time in youth detention. I’m a second-year teacher at Parkville College, a specialist school within Melbourne’s maximum security Parkville Youth Justice Precinct. While History is not formally part of the school curriculum, I impress on students its importance in their lives—for understanding and negotiating the present, and as a tool for creating a better future for ourselves and others. My students’ typical thoughts on History may sound familiar: ‘It’s all dates and dead people’ or ‘I’m sick of learning about racists’. The majority of my students consider History—to…

History teaching has been the subject of debate in recent times.1 The review of the Australian Curriculum has raised questions about included and excluded content in the teaching of Australian History, leading to robust debate and advocacy from a variety of interested parties.2 While much of the debate has centred around the prescribed content, History has a lot more to offer than merely knowledge of historical ‘facts’. How is History Represented in the Victorian Curriculum? The Victorian Curriculum represents the learning area of history via two strands: historical concepts and skills, and historical knowledge.3 In addition, the Victorian Curriculum outlines ‘capabilities’ that are developed implicitly through learning across all of the curriculum. The four capabilities are: • critical and creative thinking • ethical capability • intercultural capability • personal and…