It worked for me: key stage 3 cameos

Contents | How to integrate black and Asian British history into the key stage 3 schemes of work

Citizenship within history: have we always done it, or do we need to do more?

How can we integrate citizenship into our history curriculum in a way that is not simply tangential and superficial, not just a bolt-on, but in a way that makes history enrich citizenship and vice versa?

After discussions with Gary Clemitshaw, Sheffield University’s PGCE history tutor, the history department at King Edward VII School decided to take up this challenge by designing an investigation into Sheffield General Cemetery that combined aspects of local history with citizenship and ICT.

The local context

The school itself has origins in the social and economic developments at the heart of Sheffield’s nineteenth-century past. The growing non-conformist communities in what was to become a major industrial city had established the school in 1836 as Wesley College. These communities drew their wealth and social standing from the growing steel industry and the professional and commercial services that accompanied it.

This early nineteenth-century community had also established the botanical gardens in the school’s locality, and the General Cemetery Company, which designed and constructed a cemetery facing the school across a shallow valley. Free from the dominance of the Church of England, this cemetery was designed to celebrate the lives and achievements of individuals. It was to be a cemetery to rival, in its architectural ambitions, some of the famous cemeteries of the day such as Highgate in London and Pere Lachaise in Paris.

An etching showing the Sheffield General Cemetery in the 1840s. The buildings displayed are the gatehouse (bottom), the Chapel of Rest (middle), and the General Cemetery Company office (top)

The school and the botanical gardens have a continuous history of community use. The school was incorporated into the state system by the Education Act of 1904 and adopted the name of the then reigning monarch. The gardens have recently benefited from extensive investment courtesy of the Heritage Lottery Fund. However, the cemetery, encountering financial difficulties from the beginning and now hidden behind Edwardian and later development, is disused, significantly ruined and vandalised. It was left, since the General Cemetery Company went bankrupt, in the perplexed ownership of the city council, who did not know what to do with it, and apart from some local enthusiasts who have established a charitable organisation to try to preserve its historical integrity and promote community awareness, few people in the area know of its existence.

The history department decided that meaningful links between learning in history and learning in citizenship could be promoted through the use of the cemetery site as the focus of an investigation.

The learning sequence

Locating the teaching within a broad overview of national and international social and economic developments in the nineteenth century, the first lesson introduced the cemetery through a small number of visual images, explained the social context of its establishment, and set up tasks for pupils to explore this around the concept of ‘causation’. Different factors were defined on a set of cards, different types of causation question were posed, and different levels of relevance were ascribed to factors, changing as the questions were subtly altered. This emphasis on questions, on asking questions and developing complex answers to questions, was seen as a key link to the citizenship curriculum’s enquiry and communication strand.

A small area of the cemetery, showing the current state of ruination and evidence of vandalism

The second lesson involved a visit to the site itself. Despite falling into disuse, the site still has many interesting and impressive features. Rather than teachers giving the pupils a guided tour of the site or a set of prepared questions, they were taken to key vantage points and instructed to ask questions themselves and record them for later use. The pupils’ questions were taken in and reviewed by the teachers before the third lesson. A varied sample of the questions was selected including examples of simple questions, complex questions, closed questions, open questions, questions about significance, questions about causation, questions about the past, and questions about the present and the future. Reviewing this variety formed the introductory part of the third lesson, before the pupils were set the task of attempting to find answers from the Friends of the general cemetery website (www.gencem.org).

In addition to developing their questioning skills, the learning helped to promote the pupils’ knowledge of community-based voluntary groups and their ability to analyse information from ICT-based sources.

The fourth lesson presented an overview of the history of the cemetery, spanning nearly 170 years. Thirty cards were produced which told a story of rise and decline from 1836 to 2002. Pupils were given a card at random and they created a physical chronological timeline. Once the timeline was established, each card was read out by a pupil to tell the story. The next part of the lesson was to challenge the pupils to stick their cards to a wall-based ‘living graph’, which had the years from 1836 to 2002 on the horizontal axis, and a spectrum of the cemetery’s importance to the community, from not needed, via rising/declining need, to stable need on the vertical axis. Each pupil, in chronological order, had to place their card at the appropriate date and the position they thought it belonged on the vertical axis. Each subsequent pupil had to say whether their card should be at the same point on the vertical axis as the last one, or higher or lower, and explain why, with the rest of the class able to question the thinking. The final pattern revealed the rise and fall of the cemetery, a general pattern but with some interesting ups and downs along the way. It also supported a class discussion on when the cemetery was at its height, and when its decline became inevitable and terminal.

A recent view of the central avenue in the cemetery. To the right is a glimpse of the monument to Mark Firth, a nineteenth-century steel magnate, who was a benefactor to the city. The college that became the University of Sheffield was originally established as Firth College

The cards set up the next lesson by containing two contrasting descriptions of the site in 2002: one positive, about its importance and community use, the other negative, stressing the derelict and dangerous nature of the site and its use for antisocial behaviour. This controversy laid the foundations for the citizenship aspects of the enquiry.

For the fifth lesson the class divided into three groups for a role play. One group represented the Friends of the General Cemetery, one a local property development company keen to acquire the site and turn it into office and apartment units, and the third representing the city council’s planning committee. Each group was given a set of support materials to consider and discuss, so as to understand the interests and concerns of the three parties. They used this to take part in a role play where the Friends of the General Cemetery and the property developers made presentations of their cases for the future of the site. The council had to consider the presentations, come to its decision and explain it.

This gave the pupils an insight into local government responsibilities and powers – some pupils had to argue views that were not necessarily their own, and they all had to participate actively in a simulation of a focused and real community issue. It laid the foundations for future learning on local democracy, the work of local government and planning law in particular, and enabled an interview with a visiting local councillor, a visit to a council planning committee meeting, school contact with the local community group working to preserve the historic identity of the site and learning about the Heritage Lottery Fund and the kinds of project it is supporting, not just in the local community but across the nation. This was the essential step away from history learning and into citizenship learning; setting up pupil learning experiences within a participatory classroom, across the wider school environment and between the school and the wider community drew on their historical learning and supported engagement with citizenship learning.

This curriculum development project formed the basis of Gary Clemitshaw’s ‘Have we got the question right? Engaging future citizens in local history enquiry’ (Teaching history, The Historical Association, vol. 106).

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