Please read the extract on your tables
Things to consider:• What era is this about?• How do you know this?• Why does it matter?• Why might you use this?
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
What does it mean to have a sense of period?
Why you should care and how do you go about teaching it.
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
Why am I interested?
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
Sense of
period
Key features of period, e.g. basic
knowledge of social, political and economic spheres
Visual identity of a period
Make links across and between periods
Place periods into a wider historical
context
The exceptions to the rule -
understanding differences within
periods
Values and beliefs of the
period
Aids chronological understanding
Change and continuity
Contextualised thinking
What you know
How it helps
EmpathyDistinctiveness
General trends
Causality
Evaluating interpretations
Physical and mental aspects
Teaching sense of period
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
The key to success is finding and using RICH source material that epitomises a historical period
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
What is this Ancient Greek object?
What does it tell us?
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
“With objects…we have to add…a considerable leap of imagination, returning the artefact to its former life, engaging with as generously, as poetically, as we can in the hope of winning the insights it may deliver”
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
MacGregor, Neil (2010), A History of the World in 100 Objects, Page xvii
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
St James's Fair by Samuel Colman, 1824
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
St James's Fair by Samuel Colman, 1824
Can you find any evidence to prove:
• That this was a ‘nice’ place to live• That this was a ‘vile’ place to live• That there are different classes of
people
• How much wealth people had• How safe people were• How healthy people were
• What people were thinking at the time
• What people valued at the time
Even more powerful if you use local history
Advantages:• Encourages
comparison.• Makes the
abstract familiar
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
Matthew Boulton
Erasmus Darwin
Josiah Wedgewood
James Watt
Joseph Priestley
Embrace the obscure
Use these to create hypotheses to test in lesson
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
Consolidating sense of period
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
Egyptians. Real civilisations, not like prehistoric man. The Nile River at the heart of it all. Pyramids and pharaohs, a hierarchy to show who’s on top and who’s not. The sphinx and mummies wrapped in cloth. Medicine is advancing, but still caused by spirits and gods and supernatural forces, apparently. Organs preserved in canopic jars. Things being written down for the first time with hieroglyphics, passed on to the next generation and the one after that. Knowledge isn’t lost. They knew where the organs were (some of them, at least) but not what they did. Egyptian doctors said that ‘channels’ in the body carried blood, air water around. Just like the Nile. Your channels get blocked, you get ill. Apparently. Simple yet often effective surgery. Sort-of ‘hospitals’, with baths and a place to give thanks to the Gods. Not too bad for 3000 BC.
Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
Timelines – useful or not?Richard Kennett, Redland Green School, Bristol @kenradicalwww.radicalhistory.co.uk
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