Collections: using ICT to teach the Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cuban Missile Crisis is a good opportuntiy to teach pupils about the nature of history- what 'history' is, as well as developing their knowledge and understanding of the substantive events of the crisis.

An important characteristic of traditional history teaching in the United Kingdom, was that history was essentially a 'received subject'. Richard Aldrich (1989) pointed out that it was seen as the task of the university historian to determine the historical record, and the job of school teacher, to receive such wisdom and convey it in simplified form to school pupils.

This form of history teaching was described by the novelist Penelope Lively in Moon Tiger, (1988: 14-15), where a dying historian recalls a history class on Mary Queen of Scots:

I put up my hand. 'Please Miss, did the Catholics think Elizabeth right to cut off her head?' 'No Claudia, I don't expect they did.' 'Please, do Catholic people think so now?' Miss Lavenham took a breath. 'Well Claudia', she said kindly, 'I suppose some of them might not. People do sometimes disagree. But there is no need for you to worry about that. Just put down what is on the board.'

One of the key breakthroughs, in terms of fashioning a history curriculum that is relevant, motivating and appropriate to the needs of young people has been the move away from just 'telling them what happened'. One of the most radical changes to school history over the past 30 years has been the move from seeing it as almost exclusively about developing pupils' understanding of the past as a body of knowledge, to being also concerned with pupils' grasp of history as a form of knowledge.

Lee and Ashby emphasise that this was not a retreat from the importance of pupils acquiring historical knowledge, 'instead "knowledge" was treated seriously, as something that had to be understood and grounded. It is essential that students know something of the kind of claims made by historians and what those different kinds of claim rest on'. (Lee and Ashby, 2001: 200)

Writing curriculum specifications in official documents is obviously no guarantee that the specifications will be delivered in practice, and inspection and research findings suggest that the teaching of interpretations has been a problematic area of history teaching over the past decade (Ofsted, 1995, McAleavy, 2000, Culpin, 2002). The teaching of interpretations is comparatively new to the history curriculum, and there is a need to disseminate good practice in this area. It is possible that there are still some history classrooms where pupils are told what happened and instructed to 'just put down what is on the board.'

ICT makes it easy to put together collections of resources on a particular topic which make it easier to 'problematise' the topic, and make pupils think - about both the topic and the nature of history. The following is a link to a collection of resources about the Cuban Missile Crisis which might help you to do this. Such collections can be particularly important wheh teaching about interpretations and significance, and also when in the territory of evidence and enquiry.

Resources on the Cuban Missile Crisis

References:

Aldrich, R. (1989) Class and gender in the study and teaching of history in England in the twentieth century, Historical Studies in Education, Vol. 1, No. 1: 119-135.

Culpin, C. (2002) Why we must change history GCSE, Teaching History, No. 109: 6-9.

Lee, P. and Ashby, R. (2001) 'Progression in historical understanding 7-14', in Seixas, P. Stearns, P. and Wineburg, S. (eds), Teaching, Knowing and Learning History, New York, New York University Press: 195-220.

Lively, P. (1988) Moon Tiger, London, Harmondsworth, (quoted in J. Slater, The politics of history teaching: a humanity dehumanised, London, Institute of Education, University of London).

McAleavy, T. (2000) Teaching about interpretations, in J. Arthur and R. Phillips (eds) Issues in History Teaching, London, Routledge: 72-82.

Ofsted (1995) Annual Report of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector for Schools, London, Ofsted.