A case study of the use of popular history magazines in history teaching in England

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Abstract

The paper reports the outcomes of one strand of the EHISTO Project (http://www.european-crossroads.de). The EHISTO Project is an EU funded collaboration which explores the use of popular history magazines in history education in schools with the aim of developing pupils’ critical and media literacy.
The baseline study at the start of the project found that although many history teachers in the five countries involved in the project believed that popular history magazines had the potential to be a useful resource for history teaching, only a minority of teachers made regular use of them in their teaching.
The paper looks at attempts to use the EHISTO website to encourage teachers and student teachers to explore the use of popular history magazines in their teaching. The outcomes of the study provide some insight into the potential of popular history magazines as a useful resource in history teaching, the ways in which teachers and student teachers made use of the magazines and the EHISTO website in their teaching. The conclusion also reflects on some of the limitations, problems and mistakes which were made in the execution of the project. There is some evidence to suggest that in spite of these problems, many teachers did find popular history magazines and the EHISTO website to be useful resources and there was a substantial increase in the proportion of teachers and student teachers involved in the study who read and made use of the materials, compared to the outcomes of the baseline study conducted at the start of the study.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCommercialised History: Popular History Magazines in Europe
Subtitle of host publicationApproaches to a Historico-Cultural Phenomenon as the Basis for History Teaching
EditorsSusanne Popp, Jutta Schumann, Miriam Hannig
Place of PublicationFrankfurt
PublisherPeter Lang Publishing
Pages353-70
Number of pages18
ISBN (Print)978-3-631-65779-9
Publication statusPublished - 2015

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