Top School Trips 6

History beyond THE CLASSROOM Patrick O’Shaughnessy details how extracurricular activities can work in tandemwith the history curriculum to take your students’ research skills and thought processes to new heights... I t will come as very little surprise to anyone reading this that teaching and history are the raison d’être for history teachers. It’s in the name, after all! The history curriculum, taught during regular timetabled lessons each week, is the primary vehicle through which history teachers deliver this and seek to inspire, enthuse and transmit their passion for the past. The curriculum is the spine of a school. Schools are very busy places and the people within them– both teachers and students – spend the majority of their time in timetabled lessons, working through the stipulated curricula. As Matthew Evans put it in a 2020 essay for The researchEDGuide to Leadership , “ The school year, the timetable and curricula place learning within temporal boundaries. ” Links between strands However, extracurricular activities offer history teachers and students genuine opportunities to engage with and explore the history beyond the boundaries of the core curriculum, outside of timetabled lessons. These can take many different forms, including trips, projects, clubs, specific activities and much, much more besides. In short, extracurricular history activities offer students and teachers the chance to further connect with, and immerse themselves in, history-related learning while promoting history as a subject and the history department within the school context. This is the mindset and approach our history department has taken when planning such extracurricular opportunities. As a history department, we decided that we wanted to offer a programme of extracurricular activities to our students that allowed them to take their studies beyond the history curriculum studied in lessons. We wanted to ensure that the relationship between the two strands – the core history curriculum and co-curricular – was clearly outlined, so that students could understand the inherent links between them if they made the decision to engage with our portfolio of history extracurricular opportunities. Added incentives We began planning our initial extracurricular initiative during the logistical complexities of the pandemic, with all the difficulties that this entailed. With teachers and students in school, and while sometimes working remotely, we wanted to offer structured opportunities for our post-16 historians (both A level and IB) that would see them select an appropriate historical topic of their choice (with the support and guidance of a history teacher), research said topic, and then deliver a presentation on it at our dedicated History Symposium – an event recorded and later streamed via the school’s social media channels to showcase their work. This provided an added incentive and benefit for the students to take part, in addition to the history-specific learning, since the symposium (viewable via bit.ly/ts133-H1 ) could be used to celebrate their achievements beyond the classroom, as well as contribute towards university applications and their growing digital portfolios. Supplementing this was a formal letter of recognition for each student from the school in a digital format, to further buttress those students’ digital portfolios. The choice of whether to work independently or as part of a small teamwas up to the student volunteers to decide, eventually resulting in an approximately even split between individuals and small groups. A tonic to the tyranny One key observation from the initial iteration of our sixth formHistory Symposiumwas the way in which it facilitated wider student historical reading and engagement with historical research, ranging from the academic to popular interpretations of history. With the guidance of a history teacher as their mentor, students were able to conduct their own academic research, citing a broad range of historical works, which helped to frame their thinking. “The possibilities for extracurricular involvement in history are huge” 58 | www.teachwire.net/school-trips