Narrowing Interpretations

Eingeschränkte Interpretationen

Abstract:
This paper examines the concept of ‘historical interpretation’ in English secondary history education, exploring the meaning of the concept and how the concept’s meaning has changed in recent curriculum documents. How the concept is interpreted in assessment objectives and question-setting is explored by looking at examples from one English exam board. The paper’s findings point to a narrowing of the concept of interpretation over time and to a continuity in approaches adopted by exam boards, despite these changes – findings that need verification through further research.
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2020-16989
Languages: English, German


Public examinations involve a great deal of interpretation – teachers must interpret syllabus documents as they prepare their pupils for assessment, pupils have to interpret the questions they encounter in examinations and those who assess pupil answers have to interpret what pupils have said, assessing it for ‘quality’ – something which, in turn, can be widely debated and interpreted. How much freedom can the authorities who devise assessment frameworks have to interpret and reinterpret history? How much freedom do those who interpret those frameworks have when devising assessments? I reflect on these questions in the context of ‘historical interpretations’ in general. 

Historical Interpretations

‘Interpretations’ are a somewhat unusual feature of English history education. The concept does not figure in Canadian models of ‘historical thinking[1] or in constructions of reading and thinking ‘like a historian’ influential in the US.[2] ‘Interpretations’ has some affinities with German thinking about ‘deconstruction’, perhaps – a topic that I hope to investigate in a collaborative project soon.[3]

The concept was introduced explicitly in 1991 when we acquired a state-mandated ‘National Curriculum’ for the first time.[4] To sum things up neatly, and probably over-simplistically, ‘interpretations of history’ can be defined in contrast to other historical concepts such as ‘historical evidence’ (common to American and Canadian history education), as follows: (a) developing understandings of  ‘evidence’ involves working with the traces of the past and trying to work from these traces to state or to evaluate claims about the past; (b) developing understandings of ‘interpretations’ involves working with representations of the past, produced after the events represented, and we explore these to understand how people have made sense of the past in their present.

Why Interpretations Matter

All histories are interpretations – they set out to represent the past. They often set out to do much more. As Allan Megill has argued – in a deliberate analytical simplification – we can distinguish between four ‘tasks’ of historical writing.[5] Histories can focus on describing the past, explaining it, attributing significance to it and providing argumentation in support of these claims. There are many important understandings that we should aim to develop through history education, in order to promote historically literate citizens. We should aim, for example, to develop awareness that the past is not fixed – that it is fluid and changes with time as the present changes, as new questions are asked of the traces of the past, as new methodologies are developed to interrogate traces, as values change, and so on. Another aim should be to develop understanding of the plurality of the past – of the fact that there are often many different and sometimes competing representations and forms of representation of the past at any given moment in time: the search for a singular ‘ultimate’ history is a futile one.[6]

It is entirely appropriate, perhaps, that the educational meanings of ‘historical interpretations’ are themselves plural and fluid. If you understand history as being education in the academic practices of discipline of history, then you are likely to want students to understand and to be able to explain plurality and fluidity in the academic representation of the past. You might, for example, want students to study controversies between historians, such as the Goldhagen controversy about the actions of ‘ordinary Germans’ during the Holocaust.[7] You might also want them to study changes in debates over time, such as those caused by the rise of the ‘cultural turn’ and its impact on understandings of the Holocaust.[8] On the other hand, if you understand history education as being about the many ‘uses of history’ in the present,[9]  including but not limited to academic history, then you might expand your focus to help children not only understand that there are plural and fluid interpretations of slavery and the slave trade in the academy but also to understand that contemporary representations of that history are plural, fluid and contested. Statues rise and fall, and sometimes end up in the harbour.[10]

Assessing Historical Interpretation: Aims

The fluid and plural nature of educational understandings of historical interpretations can be seen by comparing understandings of the concept over time and in different levels of the curriculum in England. I will look at two levels of the curriculum to explore this – constraints of space limit what can be done. What follows focuses on the National Curriculum (for ages 11-14) and A Level (for ages 16-19). The documents below are government documents – issued as guidance that has to be interpreted by those who make history curriculum and examinations.

Table 1: Interpretations in the National Curriculum (Ages 11-14)

The Current National Curriculum (2013)
The Previous National Curriculum (2007)
The national curriculum for history aims to ensure that all pupils…

understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed.[11]

Interpretation

a) Understanding how historians and others form interpretations.

b) Understanding why historians and others have interpreted events, people and situations in different ways through a range of media.

c) Evaluating a range of interpretations of the past to assess their validity.[12]

 

Table 2: Interpretations in the Advanced Level (Ages 16-19)

The current GCE AS and A level subject content for history (2014)
The previous GCE AS and A level subject criteria for History (2006)

 

Knowledge, skills and understanding

AS and A level specifications must require students to…

comprehend, analyse and evaluate how the past has been interpreted in different ways, including in historians’ debates.[13]

Historical interpretation

A level specification should require students to:

comprehend, analyse and evaluate how the past has been interpreted and represented in different ways, for example in historians’ debates and through a range of media such as paintings, films, reconstructions, museum displays and the internet.[14]

 

What these tables show, I think, is a shift in the understanding of interpretations between 2006/7 and 2013/14 that narrowed the reference of the concept from (a) one that explicitly included public history and historical culture as well as academic history to (b) one that only mentions academic history explicitly. Reference to other forms of historical representation might be possible in the 2014 National Curriculum – it is not ruled out – but neither is there any recommendation to make such reference. By contrast, the National Curriculum for 2007 talked explicitly of ‘historians’ and ‘others’ and, like the A Level document, it spoke of “pictures, plays, films, reconstructions, museum displays, and fictional and non-fiction accounts… writers, archaeologists, historians and film-makers” in the additional ‘Explanatory Notes’ provided.[15] It is worth pointing out, however, that the 2006 AS and A level subject criteria only listed examples – it did not explicitly say that those constructing exams were required to go beyond the example of historians’ debates. There are no public examinations assessing the National Curriculum – it is assessed through teacher assessment. We do not have national data but, anecdotally, there is good evidence that teachers use ‘interpretations’ as an opportunity to explore popular cultural representations of the past and to explore the past in public history in Key Stage 3 (students aged 11-14 years).

Assessing Historical Interpretation: Practices

In England, public examinations, which exist in history at the ages of 16 and 18/19, are provided by a number of competing ‘examination boards’. These are mostly commercial operations who interpret the documents we have analysed above. They do so by specifying ‘Assessment Objectives’ and, then, by designing examination assessments. Teachers then have to interpret examination systems in their practice, devising lessons that will enable children to pass those exams, and, perhaps, to do more.

I will take two examples, from the same exam board – Oxford, Cambridge and Royal Society of Arts examinations (OCR). The dates of the exams roughly correspond to the different guidance regimes illustrated above. Looking at these examples will allow us to explore the freedom with which it is possible to interpret official guidance.

Table 3: OCR A Level Assessment Objectives (Ages 16-19)

Current version (2014)
Previous version (2008)
Analyse and evaluate, in relation to the historical context, different ways in which aspects of the past have been interpreted.[16]  

…explain and evaluate, in relation to the historical context, how aspects of the past have been interpreted and represented in different ways.[17]

 

We can see, from the above, the change between to the two sets of learning objectives is minimal. With the exception of the word ‘represented’ in the earlier document, the texts simply present the same words in a different order. If we map the objectives through to the questions asked in examinations we can see that the wider emphasis on public history and different forms of representation, present in the government specification of what Advanced Level study could be, was ignored when it was present in the 2006 regulations.

A question, aiming to implementing the assessment objectives from 2008 read as follows:

Using these four passages and your own knowledge, assess the view that the most important element in maintaining Hitler’s regime in power between 1933 and 1945 was the consent of the German people.[18]

The question was accompanied by four passages of around 300 words each from the work of historians each labelled as exploring a different issue (e.g. “Interpretation B: The historian argues that economic conditions and force were important in explaining how Hitler maintained power.”)[19]

An equivalent question, aiming to implement the 2014 regulations is the following:

Evaluate the interpretation in both of the two passages and explain which you think is more convincing in explaining the extent to which the Mercian supremacy from the eighth to early ninth centuries has been exaggerated.[20]

Again, the question is accompanied by passages from published historical works that the students are supposed to use to ‘evaluate’ the interpretation. The task is broadly similar. Students are to examine passages of academic writing extracted from history books. They are then to link these passages to a view – about the relationship between the German people and the Nazi regime or about the extent of the kingdom of Mercia’s supremacy in a given time period.

A Revealing Narrative

The narrative I have outlined above is a revealing one. It tells us that the key aspects of historical learning are subject to very variable constructions in government documents in relatively short spaces of time. It also tells us that these documents are themselves capable of being interpreted in quite divergent ways – to the extent that, were you only to look at the examination questions, there would be little to suggest to you that government guidance had changed.

We began with an expansive and important concept – historical interpretation – vital, one might expect, to methodological awareness of the complexity of historical enquiry and vital to understandings of both historicity and of the plurality of historical culture. The examination specifications we have examined suggests that the concept is itself in history – varying widely over time in the range of historical forms to which it is held to refer. Exploring how these filter through into assessment practices tends to suggest – if this preliminary investigation is any guide – that it is possible for assessment practices to filter out much of what matters about ‘historical interpretation’ and to continue to focus on academic history only and, even then, to do so quite narrowly, with minimal consideration of genre and method in historical representation.

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Further Reading

  • Chapman, Arthur. “Historical Interpretations.” In Debates in History Teaching, ed. Ian Davies, 100–112. London & New York: Routledge, 2017.
  • Lee, Peter J., und Denis Shemilt. “’I Just Wish We Could Go Back in the Past and Find out What Really Happened’: Progression in Understanding about Historical Accounts.” Teaching History 117 (2004): 25-31.

Web Resources

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 [1] Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts (Toronto: Nelson Education Ltd., 2013).
[2] Sam Wineburg, Daisy Martin and Chauncey Monte-Sano, Reading Like an Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle & High School History Classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013).
[3] Andreas Körber, “German History Didactics: From Historical Consciousness to Historical Competencies, and Beyond?” in Historicizing the Uses of the Past: Scandinavian Perspectives on History Culture, Historical Consciousness and Didactics of History Related to World War II, eds. Helle Bjerg, Claudia Lenz and Erik Thorstensen (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011), 145-64.
[4] David Cannadine, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
[5] Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge/Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
[6] See the discussion of ‘ultimate’ history in Arthur Chapman, “Relativity, Historicity and Historical Studies.” Public History Weekly 6, no. 9 (2018), https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/6-2018-9/relativity-historicity/ (last accessed 26 June 2020).
[7] John C.G. Röhl, “Ordinary Germans as Hitler’s Willing Executioners? The Goldhagen Controversy,” in Historical Controversies and Historians, ed. William Lamont (London & New York: Routledge, 1998), 15-22.
[8] Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
[9] Kenneth Nordgren, “How to Do Things With History: Use of History as a Link Between Historical Consciousness and Historical Culture,” Theory & Research in Social Education 44, no. 4 (2016): 479-504.
[10] David Olusoga, “Why Has a Memorial to Slaves Quietly Been Dropped?” The Guardian, April 10, 2015; David Olusoga, “The Toppling of Edward Colston’s Statue Is Not an Attack on History. It Is History,” The Guardian, June 8, 2020.
[11] Department for Education, National Curriculum in England: History Programme of Study – Key Stage 3 (London: Department for Education, 2013).
[12] Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, History: Programme of Study: Key Stage 3 (London: QCA, 2007).
[13] Department for Education, GCE AS and A Level Subject Content for History (London: Department for Education, 2014).
[14] Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, GCE AS and A Level Subject Criteria for History (London: QCA, 2006).
[15] Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, History: Programme of Study: Key Stage 3 (London: QCA, 2007).
[16] OCR, A Level Specification. History A. H505 For First Assessment in 2017. Version 1.4 (Cambridge: OCR, 2019), 109.
[17] OCR, AS/A Level GCE. GCE History A. OCR Advanced Subsidiary GCE in History A H106. OCR Advanced GCE in History A H506 (Cambridge: OCR, 2008), 96.
[18] OCR, OCR A2 GCE History A F965/01 Historical Interpretations and Investigations. January and June 2013 (Cambridge: OCR, 2013), 151.
[19] OCR, OCR A2 GCE History A F965/01 Historical Interpretations and Investigations. January and June 2013 (Cambridge: OCR, 2013), 152.
[20] OCR, A Level History A Unit Y301 The Early Anglo-Saxons. Specimen Assessment Material (Cambridge: OCR, n.d.).

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Image Credits

 © 2020 Arthur Chapman

Recommended Citation

Chapman, Arthur: Narrowing Interpretations. In: Public History Weekly 8 (2020) 7, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2020-16989.

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DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2020-16989

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