Terry
Haydn, University of East Anglia, E-HELPSeminar,Toulouse February
2005
1. Influences on my thinking about history and ICT
Politicians’ misconceptions about the uses of
ICT
The importance of ‘impact’ learning
Pupil attitudes to history as a school subject
Feedback from history teachers and
trainees
Deficits in pupils’ ‘information
literacy’
2. Implications of these influences: how can we
use ICT to persuade pupils that history is: i) interesting and
enjoyable, and ii) very relevant to the lives they will live outside
the classroom?
‘Impact’ resources, not just ‘more
stuff’
Using ICT to build up powerful
‘collections’
Using ICT to ‘open up’ topics
Using ICT to develop pupils’ information
literacy
1. Influences on my thinking about history and
ICT
i) Politicians’ misconceptions about the educational uses of ICT
“Ever since Harold Wilson spoke of the white heat of technology,
politicians and decision makers have assumed that silicon offers a
hot-wired short-cut to voters’ hearts… A succession of
ministers from Benn to Baker embraced technology with photogenic
relish; when did you last see an education minister in the media
without a computer in the background?’ (Stephen Heppell,
Observer, 8 January 1995).
‘The psychologist Weigenbaum observed in the 1960s that
computers seemed to have a powerful delusional effect on some
people and should not be allowed near the weak minded or
gullible’ (Guardian, December 1996).
In the UK, insufficient heed has been paid to the views of
practising history teachers on what they want in terms of ICT.
Politicians have tended to view ICT as an unproblematic
educational miracle and as something that is principally about
training pupils to use computers for employment purposes (one of
my sad little hobbies is collecting quotes by politicians about
the educational uses of ICT). As John Naughton pointed out
(Observer, 22 March 1988) ‘It’s not every day you encounter a
member of the government who appears to understand the net. Most
politicians (Clinton, Blair, Blunkett, to name but three) see it
as a pipe for pumping things into schools and schoolchildren.’
ii) The importance of ‘impact’ learning
Philip Sadler’s research (Sadler, P., 1994, Simple Minds, QED,
BBC2, 19 September) had a big influence on my teaching. He found
that often, pupils understood less at the end of a series of
lessons than before they had studied a topic. What percentage of
what we teach pupils do they learn, know, understand and apply?
Often very little: in Fontana’s words, ‘we each of us receive
a constant and varied stream of experiences throughout our waking
moments, each one of which can potentially give rise to learning,
yet most of which apparently vanish without trace from our mental
lives’ (Fontana, D., 1993 Psychology for teachers, London,
Macmillan: 125). Sadler’s research made me aware that most of
what we teach pupils, they either don’t understand in the first
place, or they forget. My subsequent teaching made me aware that
ICT can provide teaching resources which enable us to make
particular points in a very vivid, powerful way, so that the
learning experience is seared across the pupils’ minds in a way
that they will not forget – ever.
iii) Pupil attitudes to history as a school subject
• Several studies over a period of time have shown that many
pupils find history ‘useless’ and ‘boring’ (Schools
Council, 1968, Aldrich, 1987, Haydn, 2002). Many pupils do not
understand why they study history; they literally don’t see the
point of it. In a recent survey, only a handful out of 1,400 year
nine pupils could give cogent reasons for studying history (Adey
and Biddulph 2001). Many facets of ICT offer powerful
opportunities for teachers to persuade pupils that history is very
important, and very relevant to the lives they will lead outside
school (see second section). If history teachers exploited these
opportunities thoroughly, it could make a very big difference to
pupil attitudes to history as a school subject.
iv) Feedback from history teachers and trainees
Over the past several years, I have surveyed approximately 300
history teachers about their use of ICT. The following points
emerged from the study, and I think they are worth keeping in mind
when we are thinking of ways forward for the use of ICT in school
history:
• The new technology application which has had most impact on
history teachers’ practice over the past decade is the use of
television and video. Most history teachers and trainees made
regular use of video/TV in their teaching. This was partly because
it was easy/convenient compared to using computers, and because
departments often had rich ‘archives’ of video extracts. But
it was also about the power of the moving image. Many history
teachers remarked that it enabled them to make a particular point
in a very vivid and powerful way, and in a way that influenced the
emotions of the pupils as well as their intellects.
• They wanted ICT for better teaching and learning in history,
not to help pupils become good at ICT.
• They wanted ICT ‘on tap’ in the classroom, not in ICT
suites, so that they could use it as a ‘component’ of a
lesson, rather than as an occasional ‘special event’ ICT
lesson, where you had to book the room weeks in advance and march
all the pupils down to the ICT room for the ‘event’.
• Overall, there was a preference for ‘straightforward’ as
against ‘cutting edge’/sophisticated applications. Also, a
preference for applications which were not too time consuming –
which would allow them to make a particular teaching point quickly
and effectively.
v) Deficits in pupils’ ‘information literacy’
Developments in new technology have had an influence on pupils’
views about the reliability of information from different sources.
One of my students, Matt Howe, surveyed all the pupils in an 11-16
school and found that three or five years of school history had
not apparently changed their ideas about the reliability of
information from different sources. At the age of 11, most pupils
thought that the internet, CD-roms and text books were the most
reliable forms of information. At the age of 16, they still
thought this.
This was a small-scale enquiry, conducted within one school, but
it nonetheless raises interesting questions for history teachers.
Given that one of the aims of school history is to help young
people to handle information intelligently, there is perhaps a
need to address the issue of ‘media literacy’ more explicitly,
and make connections between the reliability of sources ‘from
the past’, and the sources from which they derive information in
their day to day lives. Part of a historical education in the 21st
century ought to be to teach pupils that the internet is not the
ultimate repository of truth and wisdom.
• 2. Implications of these influences: how can we use ICT to
persuade pupils that history is: i) interesting and enjoyable, and
ii) very relevant to the lives they will live outside the
classroom?
i) ‘Impact’ resources, not just ‘more stuff’
One of my interests in history teaching is the collection of
resources that have a powerful impact on learners, that help
history teachers to make a particular point in a vivid, memorable
and effective way. This can be through the use of quotations,
pictures, cartoons, interactive exercises on the internet and (in
particular) short moving image extracts. Of my ‘top 100’ new
technology resources, probably over 90 are in the form of short
video extracts. The facility to put VHS video extracts into DVD
format, and into powerful ‘collections’ on, for example, The
Holocaust, Propaganda, War etc has further enhanced the potential
of such resources. There is no necessary correlation between the
sophistication of technology and the potential of ICT for
enhancing teaching and learning in history. One of my mentors
reckons that the purchase of a couple of speakers and really
‘big screen’ projection via the data projector has transformed
the impact of his collection of VHS video recordings. One or two
examples (there are dozens I could mention): the section on
‘Blast’ from the BBC QED documentary about a one megaton
nuclear bomb going off over London. No matter how good a
teacher’s skills of exposition and questioning, it would be
virtually impossible to get the scale of the atomic bomb over as
effectively without these moving images. Another memorably
powerful extract: the ‘blue eyes – brown eyes experiment’
shown as part of Channel 4’s documentary, ‘5 steps to
tyranny’. I had heard of the experiment, but it’s a different
thing seeing the moving pictures record of it. In terms of making
a powerful point about the creation of ‘outsider groups’, I
believe that most people who saw it would remember it for as long
as they lived.
So yes, ICT has brought us lots of new ways to make our teaching
effective, but don’t let us forget the power of the moving
image.
ii) Using ICT to build up powerful ‘collections’
Phillips’ (2002: 22) has argued that the key ICT skill for
history teachers in future will be ‘integration literacy’,
meaning ‘the ability to use computers and other technologies
combined with a variety of teaching and learning strategies to
enhance students’ learning’ (in the words of Ben Walsh,
building up powerful ‘learning packages’). It will not be
about whether they use application A more than application B, but
the skill with which they exploit the potential of a whole range
of ICT resources to achieve real ‘impact’ learning: quotes,
pictures, cartoons, newspaper articles, video extracts, high
quality active learning activities from the web which makes pupils
have to think and which disturb their preconceptions. One
collection which I am currently trying to build up is an archive
of quotes about the usefulness of studying history, which might be
used to make it easier for teachers to be explicit about why
history is relevant and important to pupils’ lives, even if they
are just printed off and used for classroom display. Another is a
set of resources aimed at developing pupils’ understanding of
democracy (i.e. that it’s not just about having the right to
vote). Other collections are simply collections of images on
particular topics. I am also trying to build up a collection of
resources which help history teachers to develop pupils’
internet/media literacy (see for example, the ‘spoof’ Oliver
Cromwell website at http://freespace.virgin.net/susan.inwards/index.htm,
the world’s shortest political quiz at http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html,
and the Dave Birch article at http://search.guardian.co.uk/search97cgi/s...ltArchive%2Ehts
(this last example shows the advantages of hyperlinks).
iii) Using ICT to ‘open up’ topics and provide overviews,
connections over time and links to the present
This relates to Richard Aldrich’s idea of the usefulness of
‘historical perspectives’. Is there any problem, issue,
question into which one cannot gain more insight by looking at
what has gone before? Too often we ‘pull up the drawbridge’
instead of linking the past to the present. If we use ICT to do
this, it can mean that potentially ‘dry’ topics like roads and
canals in the C17th, Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny’, the Agrarian
Revolution, can be opened up and made relevant to the parallel
problems of the present. If we are going to get pupils to examine
and analyse portraits of Elizabeth I, shouldn’t they also
explore contemporary iconography? A combination of a Google images
search and the scanner makes it very easy to put together a
collection of pictures of Elizabeth II which shows how attitudes
to the monarchy have changed over the past 50 years, or pictures
of contemporary politicians which show how the visual image can be
manipulated. If we are trying to teach pupils about the meaning of
‘right’ and left’ as political concepts, from the French
Revolution to the present, the interactive exercise at
www.politicalcompass.org can be a powerful resource. History ought
to contribute to the political literacy of young people, and ICT
can make a significant contribution to this aim. In particular,
the newspaper archives provide some fantastic examples of high
quality writing which can get pupils beyond the emaciated sources
which some text books provide. A few examples:
iv) Using ICT to develop pupils’ information literacy
A recent report by the Historical Association argued that
‘History is an essential component of the values that underpin
democratic societies and as such should be central to the
compulsory years of education’ (History 14-19: Report and
recommendations to the Secretary of State, Executive summary,
London, Historical Association, 2005: 2.4.1).
ICT could play a valuable part in developing pupils’ democratic
‘vocabulary’, their understanding of political concepts, and
their understanding of different views about the pros and cons of
democracy (democracy is not unproblematically ‘a good thing’
and many societies, including our own, are not ‘perfect’
democracies). At the moment, how many young people leave school
with an understanding of the ideas of, for example, Eisenhower,
Lamartine, De Toqueville, Fukoyama, Chomsky and Hobsbawn, on the
subject of democracy ? How many of them understand words and
phrases such as ‘realpolitik’, ‘demagogue’,
‘plutocracy’ the manufacture of consent’, ‘playing the
race card’?
As well as providing pupils with a body of knowledge and a mental
map of the past, and a sense of identity and heritage, school
history should provide pupils with an understanding of history as
a form of knowledge, so that they can handle information
intelligently, and so that they can ascertain the validity of
claims about the world that they are going to live in. In the
words of Norman Longworth, ‘It does require some little
imagination to realise what the consequences will be of not
educating our children to sort out the differences between
essential and non-essential information, raw fact, prejudice,
half-truth and untruth, so that they know when they are being
manipulated, by whom, and for what purpose.’ (‘We’ re moving
into the information society- what shall we teach the
children?’, Computer Education, 1981, June: 17-19).
ICT can play a big part in helping history teachers to achieve the
4 aims outlined above, and to teach history more powerfully and
more effectively.
