The background influences and socialisation of twenty-one White-British and predominantly female trainee-teachers specialising in Key Stage 2 history (trainee teachers) are examined via a semi-structured questionnaire and semi-structured interviews, to understand how they come to their perceptions on the story of Britain’s migrant past and how that frames their practice for teaching and learning via the aims and contents of the Key Stage 2 history curriculum. Short personal narratives and transcribed conversation concerning experiences of migration to the British Isles from an Afro-Caribbean immigrant (my mother) and her British born child (myself) were presented as artefacts to three trainee-teachers for their analysis and evaluation of them as part of a focus group discussion. It was for them to consider the impact of the artefacts on their thinking about the story of migration to the British Isles over the ages for their future professional practice in planning, teaching and learning via the Key Stage 2 curriculum aims and contents. Overall findings from the study indicate that the socialisation of trainee-teachers from multi-ethnic British background influences lead them to discuss their awareness of multiculturalism and cultural diversity within the story of Britain’s migrant past, as opposed to their peers of mono-ethnic White-British background influences and socialisation who produced dominant White-British majoritarian thinking in their considerations. When the idea of viewing the story of Britain’s migrant past via culturally diverse minority-ethnic group accounts are presented (via the artefacts) and planted into the minds of trainee-teachers from mono-ethnic White-British backgrounds and socialisation, they become very much open to the possibilities of using them in their future Key Stage 2 classroom practice. The Key Stage 2 optional unit of study: ‘an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupils’ chronological knowledge beyond 1066 (DfE, 2013a, p.4) is considered by the majority of trainee-teachers as being their least important focus on teaching and learning. This study makes the case the story of Britain’s migrant past concerning cross-cultural and cross-ethnic encounters over the ages can provide trainee-teachers with a clear opportunity to connect that with the optional unit of study. This study emphasises the need for Initial Teacher Education to assist with developing the subject knowledge of trainee-teachers concerning a culturally diverse representation of Britain’s migrant past over the ages.

As the number of museums that employ theatre as part of their educational provision is increasing there is a need for the articulation of the theoretical framework and an in-depth insight into the children's "museum theatre" experiences. The aim of this empirical research is to examine how primary school children "make meaning" of the form and content of the experience in two forms of "museum theatre": a) a participatory theatrical experience in the heritage site of Clarke Hall and b) first person interpretation events in the Museum of London. Based on the principles of the constructivist qualitative paradigm, the research attempts to offer an insight into how the children understand the content and format of the "museum theatre" experience. The research focuses on the interrelationship between the children's prior-to-the-event agenda and their "museum theatre" experiences and examines the children's experiences as products of relationships between the involved parties: the museum's agenda and the schools' agenda. The constructivist paradigm and the interpretive sociological approach illustrate the epistemological position that underpins the formulation of the research questions and the methodological framework employed. The data generation methods derive from ethnographical research methods and mainly involve interviews, observations and children's drawings. The research attempts to elucidate the parameters that shape the children's "museum theatre" experiences. These include the museum's setting and objects, the children's willingness to suspend disbelief, the interactive/participatory aspects of the experience and the opportunities given to children for reflection and generation of new understandings. The research findings underline the subjectivity of the theatrical experience, as shaped through the various objectives and expectations of the involved parties. They suggest that interplay between the event's format/content and the experience's fictional/real context is evident in the children's interpretation of their "museum theatre" experience.

It has been argued that the Educational Reform Act 1988, with the introduction of the National Curriculum (NC), effected changes in museum education (Hooper-Greenhill, 1994d: 240-241 Hein 2006:6). This study looks at the relationship between schools and museum education, and how it is mediated by the NC for History in Wales. The majority of existing museum data derives from studies that collect visitors' and children's views either during or after their visit. This study tries to bridge this gap by combining these two institutional settings, using history in the NC as a lens in order to study the relationship between these two social settings: schools and museums. The study takes two epistemological grounds into account. The first examines cultural policies, the NC, and the ways in which they represent or promote history. The second considers the ways in which people directly involved with these policies put them into practice. Simultaneously, it looks at how children respond to their visit to St Fagans: National History Museum (henceforth St. Fagans: NHM). The research data derives from classroom observations, before, during and after children's participation in the history workshops and activities offered to schools by St Fagans: NHM as well as from interviews with museum professionals, teachers and the history advisers for Wales. The findings show that the ways in which history is taught at the participant schools and through the history activities for children at St Fagans: NHM reflect the general direction of neo-liberal approaches to knowledge and learning. History teaching and learning appears to take an instrumental form, which places more emphasis on activities rather than knowledge and understanding. Learning through activities was a central demand of the progressive voices that demanded child-centred curricula in Britain during the late 1960s. Nevertheless, this shift is now taking place under different political and economic goals, which are in line with neoliberal directives that emphasise the learning of transferable skills through each NC subject. Additionally, the findings of the study suggest that workshops for history at St Fagans: NHM fail to equip children with analytic skills of knowledge and understanding. History is mainly restricted to the enquiry of superficial relations of objects and material expressions of social history, which do not allow children to grasp further the social relations and processes of the historical period studied. Moreover, with few exceptions, the workshops for history do not raise awareness of the particularities of Welsh history and its relations to the history of the other nations of Britain during the periods studied. Nevertheless, the analysis of the interview data shows that there is a certain level of unease about the directions of the NC as well as the character of St Fagans: NHM, as part of the National Museum of Wales. The participant teachers, museum professionals and history advisers are satisfied with the 'active' and enquiring character that school history seems to be taking on board, but there are some concerns about the ways in which these could be balanced out with historical knowledge and understanding, chronological awareness as well as the complicated social and political implications of the historical period studied and its connections to the present.

This inquiry seeks an understanding of the experiential meanings of primary school children's encounters with ancient Egyptian objects by using a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology. To demonstrate how this methodology is practised, adult experiences of an exhibition of ancient Egyptian sculpture and contemporary art are analyzed and interpreted. A survey of ideas from theoretical and phenomenological literature follows, focusing on the visual, tactile and verbal dimensions of children's awareness, {itself a problematic term). The physical and social aspects of the teaching and researching context are then investigated, to discover how they impinge upon the children's experience as a whole. To consider the philosophical ideas which underpin hermeneutic phenomenology along with their application to educational research, the ideas of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Gadamer, van Manen, Bolinow and Vandenberg are discussed; with particular reference to bracketing prejudices; collecting and analyzing observational and interview data; and interpreting the children's experience through writing and rewriting. A narrative description which aims to recreate the immediacy and complexity of the experience is then included, using composite verbal statements from the children's letters and interviews, as well as insights from my own teaching experience. The four phenomenological existentials of lived-space, lived-body, livedtime and lived-human relations are then utilized to create a structure for interpreting the common themes of this experience. These comprise the fear of disorientation, entrapment, death, 'real' objects, being under surveillance, and experiencing alternate feelings of fear and excitement; wonder, stunned amazement and curiosity; being imaginatively transported to an ancient time; and empathic/empathetic feelings of being 'in touch' with the ancient Egyptians. Findings suggest that children's embodied responses which emanate from their visual and tactile experiences, can inform not only a deeper understanding of how their feelings, imagination and memories interact, but also how this interaction has relevance for primary pedagogy, primary history and museum education.

This research focused on the teaching of the Holocaust in Israeli middle schools. It explored, in particular, teachers' backgrounds and the opinions of history teachers in relation to teaching about the Holocaust and the ways in which they taught the subject. Seventeen teachers took part in the research: 14 Jewish-Israelis and three Arab-Israelis from five different schools spread across Israel. Four schools were Jewish-Israeli and one was Arab-Israeli. All schools were state schools funded by the local authorities. The principles of a grounded theory approach were used to analyse the data, which consisted of interviews with teachers, observations in classrooms and school documentation. It emerged that the most important factors that influenced teachers in their approach to the subject were their personal connections with the Holocaust, their political affiliations, the extent of their knowledge of the subject and their knowledge of their students' motivation to learn about the Holocaust. The research concluded that although the Israeli National Curriculum (1995) stated clearly that teaching the Holocaust is compulsory and indicated what teachers should focus on, teachers nevertheless displayed a range of approaches to the subject. The research recommended that teachers who teach about the Holocaust should reflect on how they teach the subject and should engage in understanding how their backgrounds shape their thinking about the Holocaust and subsequently the way they teach young people about this complex and important subject.

The thesis addresses a relatively under-explored area in this field of study within the socio-constructivist paradigm. The main aim is to investigate how 9-year-old school children visualize habitat dioramas to build a mental model, how they make sense of the dioramas to understand local flora and fauna, and how previous knowledge influences the way they visualise habitat dioramas. Data collected included a first drawing done in class, a second drawing done at the Natural History Museum before and a third following the viewing of the habitat dioramas. Each pupil was interviewed after the respective task to allow for a comprehensive description of the content of the drawings. The children we also asked to produce a web (mind map) and they were also observed as they interacted with the dioramas. Data was mainly analysed qualitatively through direct examination of the drawings and with the aid of the computer package Atlas.ti. Some general trends emerge in the findings such as animals being more present in drawings than plants. Animal diversity ranks in decreasing order from birds, mammals, arthropods and fish to reptiles, while plants are mainly seeded and ornamental. Generally drawings progress from imaginative in class and before seeing the diorama, to increasingly drawing from observation in the diorama drawings. More significantly, pupils undergo a transformation through their drawings, which may show a change from isolated organisms on a sheet of paper to greater elaboration or better accuracy in placing organisms in habitat. However, others show an opposite transformation or no significant change at all. To a certain extent, children seem to interpret the diorama through the lens of their previously held mental model. What children already know partly influences what they choose to represent, but they also accommodate new knowledge they obtain from the diorama. Dioramas that help recall familiar environments are more likely to capture attention and afford a longer viewing time, thus imparting new knowledge and moulding the child’s mental model. Habitat dioramas have the potential to serve as models for learning in Biology and Environmental Education at primary level. An interpretative model for museum settings is proposed, while its potential applications in other areas of science education and limitations are considered.

The ultimate goal of the thesis is the construction of a text, appropriate for student use, on South Africa's social and spatial formation. The first part of the thesis is the most lengthy. It is a sophisticated account of South Africa's historical geography since 1652. This is written in an academic style, not for students, but for a learned readership, and contains some original insights. In itself, it represents an innovative contribution to the literature on South Africa's social development. The second part is a review of existing texts on South Africa's history and geography, written purposefully for students. These texts are subjected to a critique with content and coverage being the main criteria. The third part is an investigation of theoretical issues concerning the relationship between readers, particularly student readers, and texts. It seeks to formulate guidelines for the writing of a student text and the devising of learning activities which are appropriate for learners. In a brief conclusion, attention is paid to the ways in which the original aims have been manifested in a student text, included in the thesis as an appendix. Although this text is another lengthy treatment of South Africa's social and spatial formation, this time it is written for an intended student readership. It draws on the content deemed appropriate in the sophisticated text of Part One, seeks to overcome the weaknesses identified in current student texts in Part Two, and is written in a style, appropriate for students, suggested by Part Three. It also contains student activities devised in the theoretical context introduced in Part Three. The text is deemed to be a significant advance on previously published History and Geography educational materials.

This thesis seeks to explore history teacher engagement in debates surrounding the 2013 draft National Curriculum for History and locates these in the wider context of English history teacher identity. The 2013 draft curriculum, which was announced in February, was withdrawn in August 2013 following complaints of political bias (see Smith, 2014). This “curriculum war” might be interpreted – as others have been (e.g. Crawford, 1998; Taylor & Guyver, 2011) - as an attempt by both the left and right to frame a curriculum which furthered their political metanarrative, but this research shows that such views are oversimplifications. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight history teachers in the north-west of England who actively opposed the draft curriculum and their responses were analysed using van Dijk’s (2009) sociocognitive approach to critical discourse analysis. These responses uncover a complex nexus of motivations in which political opposition is only a small strand. Instead, the strongest motivation was a deep loyalty to the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of their subject (Bernstein, 1999). In opposition to the narrow nationalist conception of school history, the interviews indicated strongly the existence of a social realist (Young, 2008) counter-hegemonic discourse which informs and underpins a vibrant history teaching community. This shared discourse argues that historical knowledge is constructed and contested, and that it should be taught as such (Lee, 1991). In this paradigm, the draft curriculum was opposed not because it advanced a rightist narrative, but because the concept of a single narrative was itself considered inherently unhistorical. The epistemological unity of the history teaching community contributes to a project-identity of resistance (Castells, 1997) which is further bolstered by the research activities of the Schools History Project and the Historical Association. A Gramscian (1971) analysis is used throughout, but history teachers are not found to be, in the main, Marxists. Gramsci’s work instead provides the framework for understanding the nature of the history-teaching community and the mechanics of its resistance.