Search

Intrigued by the wide range of pupils' responses to a sourcebased essay question, Jonathan Sellin decided to investigate why pupils were using sources in such different ways. Probing his own philosophical assumptions about history, and how they have changed over time, prompted Sellin to explore pupils' assumptions about how historians use sources to make claims about the past. By asking pupils to create drawings about the methods used by historians to analyse sources, Sellin arrived at tentative conclusions about why his pupils were approaching the same essay question in different ways. This investigation led him to reconsider how and where he uses sources in the classroom, and the language that he uses to discuss sources and evidence. His reflections on pupils' drawings and essays have made him more determined to tackle pupils' misconceptions more directly, and to model how historians use sources in their scholarship more regularly.

After reflecting on the difference between his study of source extracts at university and how he was using source extracts in the classroom, Jonathan Sellin went in search of a new way to help his pupils to situate sources in context. Finding inspiration in the work of intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, Sellin decided to show his Year 9 pupils that the meaning of words is fluid. After reading cabinet memos and opinion polls from the 1930s, Year 9 pupils explored the different meanings that Neville Chamberlain and his contemporaries ascribed to the idea of 'appeasement'. Sellin argues that examining differences between authorial intent and the contemporary reception of a text has the potential to encourage sophisticated evidential thinking.

Frustrated by his pupils' tendency to compartmentalise source analysis into two discrete parts of 'source' and 'own knowledge', Jonathan Sellin reflected that his use of scaffolds might be to blame. Inspired by recent work by teacher-researchers Hammond and King on the importance of secure substantive knowledge in the area of extended writing, Sellin theorised what might happen if he began with building pupils' contextual knowledge to answer a source question about usefulness before unveiling the source itself. In this article, Sellin explores how, by placing substantive knowledge first and foremost, pupils can be prevented from 'springboarding' in one direction from source into 'own knowledge', and instead begin to 'bounce' between them, allowing one to serve the other.