No More Playing Tricks with the Dead: Year 9 Use Sources to Explore Contemporary Meanings and Understandings of Appeasement

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.