McLaren, Mary-Rose (2013) Owning History: Building historical understandings through creative engagement. Curriculum Perspectives, 33 (1). pp. 63-73. ISSN 0159-7868

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the purpose and the pedagogy of teaching History in schools, primary and secondary. It asserts that History is a unique subject in the curriculum. History, more than any other area of study, requires an intuitive understanding of relationships and human complexity, as well as the academic processes of inquiry, analysis, and evaluation. It requires students to empathise with cultures and experiences very different from their own in space and time, and also to recognise and understand difference in value systems and rhetoric. As such, history is ‘a form of consciousness’.1 But above all, the study of History at school asks students to make sense of, and find relevance in, the learning of History itself.2 The reality is that many of our students are disinterested in, or disengaged from, the experience of History.3 Yet, as teachers, we are acutely aware that the Historical worlds, the social worlds and the creative worlds of students interact and co exist in the formation of identity.

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