Responding to SHP 2025: Part 2, Claire Holliss on Stories at A-Level

The 2025 Schools History Project (SHP) conference was, as ever, a highlight of the teaching year and a stimulus for all sorts of thoughts.

Inevitably, the best workshops at such an event are those that leave you with more (interesting) questions than answers.

In these two posts (including my last one, on Arthur Chapman’s presentation on stories and narratives), I’m going to try to formulate some coherent thoughts in relation to two really excellent sessions in particular, both of which sent me away with a number of very interesting questions. The second post, here, discusses Claire Holliss’ workshop on stories at KS5.

 

Sometimes, new directions in pedagogy develop their own momentum and give rise to new orthodoxies and (near-)universally accepted wisdom. When this happens, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate the evidence to establish how sound that wisdom actually is.

This is what I understood Claire Holliss’ fantastic SHP 2025 workshop to be honing in on.

In her very clear-minded, critical, but open discussion of using stories at KS5, Claire gave a well-deserved nod towards some very interesting and valuable work done on integrating stories into classroom teaching. She then asked how far doing so would actually benefit teaching History at KS5.

Claire’s work links to an ongoing research project, involving the selection and use of specific stories in her own teaching. This was also of interest to me, as our department has also been starting to develop stories in our own KS5 teaching of Russian and Soviet History (I’ll explore this a bit below).

Responding to SHP 2025: Part 1, Arthur Chapman on Narratives

The 2025 Schools History Project (SHP) conference was, as ever, a highlight of the teaching year and a stimulus for all sorts of thoughts.

Inevitably, the best workshops at such an event are those that leave you with more (interesting) questions than answers.

In the following two posts, I’m going to try to formulate some coherent thoughts in relation to two really excellent sessions in particular, both of which sent me away with a number of very interesting questions. The first post, here, discusses Arthur Chapman’s workshop on stories and narratives.

What is a story? This deceptively tricky question lay at the heart of Arthur Chapman’s workshop.

Here, I want to pick up on one issue in particular which was discussed during that workshop. It’s an issue which has prompted a number of very interesting questions and got me thinking again about stories, narratives, and arguments.

That issue is: narratives as historical interpretation.

Language and Substantive Concepts: Part 1 – Weighty Conceptual Terms

This is the first of a three-part post focusing on what I term, following Caroline Coffin, the “language of history” and substantive concepts.

It aims to set out an approach to teaching substantive concepts by explicitly engaging with the linguistic structures of the historical discipline. I’ll be presenting on this topic with colleagues at the upcoming Schools History Project (SHP) conference in Leeds in July 2025, so this is also a first attempt to set out and develop a broad methodological approach to this work.

Questions, comments, and criticisms are very much welcome!

Spoken Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide

“Saying it right” is a particular challenge for teachers of Russian and Soviet History.

However familiar we are with the content and concepts of this area of study, the language – from people and places to the names of individuals and organisations, belief systems, and ideas – can often seem alien.

The purpose of this spoken dictionary and pronunciation guide is to provide teachers with accessible and accurate pronunciations for that language.

It comprises over 200 words, giving a brief definition and anglicised and Russian pronunciations for each.

How does a historian read a book? They gut it!

Arriving home after their mysterious and deadly car crash, Barabara and Adam, protagonists of the film Beetlejuice, find a copy of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased lying waiting for them. Keen to find out more, they inspect the cover, the title, and the publisher before beginning to delve into the text.

They might have also taken a look through the table of contents, index, and bibliography. But it's a good start – and it points towards an approach which experienced readers of History books will follow, whether they know it or not, quite regularly.

In this post, I’d like to argue that we need to think carefully about how we read books in History and, more importantly, how we instruct students to do so, too. Reading books might come so naturally to us, as teachers and experienced readers, that we simply assume students will be able to do the basics. We have to assume, on the contrary, that they can't - and I'm confident that, if we do, we will most likely find that the vast majority can't. Therefore, the key preliminary steps to reading book-length academic texts have to be taught explicitly.