Learning in History

History is the investigative and imaginative discipline of interpreting the past based on the available evidence. In the Victorian Curriculum F–10, learning in History is the process of inquiry through which students learn about and develop interpretations of the past. Historical inquiry brings together 2 key forms of knowledge: the substantive and the disciplinary. In the History curriculum, the substantive knowledge is the content – the events, the people and the developments in the past – and is identified in the Historical Knowledge and Understanding strand. This is the knowledge that students learn about. The disciplinary practices of History, often described as historical thinking, are the techniques and modes of thinking that are applied to the substantive knowledge. In the History curriculum, these disciplinary practices are described as Historical Concepts and Skills. This knowledge is what students learn to do. The combination of the ‘knowing about’ and the ‘doing’ is historical inquiry, the process by which students build their interpretations and communicate their learning about the past.

The following sections introduce the substantive Historical Knowledge and Understandings and the disciplinary Historical Concepts and Skills that together make up the process of historical inquiry in the History curriculum. While the structure of the curriculum distinguishes between the 2 elements as strands, planning for learning brings them together as historical inquiry to support students to develop their interpretation of the past.

Figure 1: The past becomes historical interpretation through the creative investigative process of historical inquiry

Figure 1: The past becomes historical interpretation through the creative investigative process of historical inquiry

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Historical Knowledge and Understanding

Historical Knowledge and Understanding is the aspect of the past that students engage with as they progress through the History curriculum. It is the content that students learn about.

In the History curriculum, the Historical Knowledge and Understanding strand defines the content and context that students are to investigate. These topics reflect students’ social and cognitive development. At Foundation to Level 2, the focus is on students understanding their immediate personal and familial histories. This focus expands to community and national histories at Levels 3 and 4 and Levels 5 and 6. At Levels 7 and 8, students investigate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ histories and cultures in Deep Time and beyond, as well as the ancient and pre-modern worlds. At Levels 9 and 10, students learn about Australia and Asia in the modern era.

The content descriptions of the Historical Knowledge and Understanding strand identify the historical phenomena, such as events, individuals, ideas and developments, that students learn about. This knowledge details the facts of the past, the dates, the places and what occurred that are relevant to the topic of investigation.

The strand also requires students to learn about and apply the conceptual language of the discipline. In the History curriculum, students learn about historical periods, such as ancient and modern, and historical processes and developments, such as migration, colonisation, imperialism and social structures. These understandings are ways of organising and focusing investigations and should be modelled and taught explicitly.

There is considerable choice for topics within Investigations and schools should consider topics relevant to their school and wider context.

Australian history within a world history approach

Australian history should not be considered in isolation but examined as part of wider global processes. In Levels 7–10, students should study a balanced range of areas to develop an understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ histories and cultures, the foundations of the Western world, Asia, and Australian history. Students should consider the significant events, people, groups and ideas in Australian history. They should make links between how global events can shape and influence national events and ideas, and explore Australian developments in a wider transnational and comparative context.

Historical Concepts and Skills

In the History curriculum, there are 7 Historical Concepts and Skills. These skills describe what students learn to do with the knowledge they have learned about. Students apply these concepts and skills at increasing levels of cognitive demand as they progress in their learning. The level of cognitive demand is expressed in the content descriptions.

Figure 2: Historical Concepts and Skills are discrete yet closely connected disciplinary modes of thinking and doing.

Figure 2: Historical Concepts and Skills are discrete yet closely connected disciplinary modes of thinking and doing.

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Historical Concepts and Skills are closely interrelated and are often applied holistically. However, these concepts and skills need to be taught explicitly so that students understand the thinking involved in each. This will support students’ historical understanding and their construction of historical interpretation. The application of these concepts and skills is intrinsic to students’ historical inquiry. A single learning activity or assessment should provide opportunities for students to demonstrate understanding and application of more than one concept and/or skill at a time.

Historical questions

The Historical questions sub-strand involves students identifying, selecting and using a range of different kinds of historical questions to inform historical inquiry and interpretation.

When studying History, students’ curiosity and investigation are shaped by the questions asked about the past. Their questions drive the process of historical inquiry. Students use questions to focus their thinking about historical knowledge and understandings and their use of historical sources. The responses to their questions inform their interpretations of the past.

Historical questions may be descriptive, procedural, comparative or evaluative, and are used throughout the inquiry process. For descriptive questions, a student must identify or describe an event or development. For procedural questions, students need to recall knowledge, such as when an event occurred or what happened next. Comparative and evaluative questions typically combine historical knowledge and historical concepts and elicit higher-order thinking. Question types may also be combined so that a procedural question about a historical development becomes comparative or evaluative. For example, ‘Why did the British establish colonies in Australia?’ may be modified to ‘Compare 2 causes of British colonisation of Australia’ or ‘Explain the most significant reasons for British colonisation of Australia’.

Table 3: Formulating meaningful historical questions

Type of thinking

Type of question

Historical thinking concepts

Key knowledge and key skills

Identify

Describe

Compare

Explain

Analyse

Evaluate

Discuss

To what extent

Who…?

What…?

When…?

Where…?

Why…?

How…?

Evidence

Perspectives

Interpretations

Continuity

Change

Causes

Consequences

Significance

Historical arguments

Use key knowledge and/or key skills from the study design area when contextualising a question.

Chronology

The Chronology sub-strand involves students arranging events, ideas, peoples and developments in order of time to observe and explain patterns of continuity and change and causes and consequences.

Chronology is the organisation of content knowledge and developments in time order sequence. This chronological ordering lays the foundation for student understandings of the sequences of, and relationships between, historical events, ideas and developments and the lives of individuals. By ordering historical phenomena in time order, students recognise patterns of continuity and change, analyse causes and consequences and distinguish between short- and long-term triggers or outcomes. Understanding historical time requires students to engage with a range of time scales, such as days, weeks, years, centuries and millennia.

Students build explanatory narratives of the past based on the chronological sequences they create. It is in these narratives that students observe continuity and change, and causes and consequences.

Using historical sources

The Using historical sources sub-strand involves students reading, interpreting, analysing and evaluating historical sources so that evidence can be used to develop an explanation, interpretation or argument about the past.

The use of historical sources is an integral skill of historical learning. Knowledge and interpretation of the past is based on information that is derived from historical sources. In the History curriculum, there are 4 elements to working with historical sources:

features, content, context
perspectives
interpretations
evaluation as evidence.

Each of these elements develops across the continuum of learning in the History curriculum. The requirements are explicitly identified in the content descriptions and illustrated in the supporting elaborations.

Features, content, context

Historical sources take a variety of forms, convey information and come from specific historical times and places. The identification and understanding of features, content and context is the introduction to using historical sources.

At the simplest level, the feature of a historical source is the type of source. Broadly, historical sources can be categorised into 2 forms, primary and secondary, within which there is enormous variety.

Primary sources are from the time of, or shortly after, a historical event. They include oral and written accounts, stories, songs, speeches, laws, visual sources, such as photographs and posters, and objects, such as implements, tools, coins or buildings.
Secondary sources are interpretations of the past created after the historical event they examine or explain. They include the work of historians, textbooks, documentaries, fiction and some forms of artwork, such as commemorative statues and historical paintings.

When working with historical sources, students need to distinguish between primary and secondary sources and recognise the particular attributes of a source’s form.

The process of ‘sourcing’ also requires that students identify the content of the source. This is simplest in written sources, in which the explicit content can be readily identified. For example, a law is generally very clear and explicit. The information in other sources, such as illustrations, often requires wider knowledge, such as the meaning of symbols, such as crowns, swords or books, in medieval manuscripts. The content of material culture objects, such as tools, weapons or household objects, is not as literal, but such sources provide information about agricultural methods, military technology and domestic life. Identifying the content of sources also requires inference, the identification of what is not explicitly stated.

Students also need to know the circumstances of the source’s creation because this information can be used when evaluating the evidence in the source. Students establish the historical context of a source by asking historical questions, such as ‘When was a speech delivered?’ or ‘Who was the intended audience?’

Perspectives

When students engage with primary sources, the content can provide insights into the beliefs, values and attitudes of people in the past. These beliefs, values and attitudes are the mindsets of historical actors that shaped the ways they saw and acted in their world. Through engagement with historical perspectives, students come to understand that people in the past did not have or were not motivated by the same beliefs, values or attitudes that they might hold. Engaging with perspectives invites students to identify and understand the world from the perspective of the individual in their historical context. This is sometimes referred to as historical empathy. The imposition of a student’s own beliefs, values and attitudes onto individuals in the past should be avoided. Doing so risks presentism, which is the imposition of modern values or judgements on historical actors. Students should be encouraged to engage with multiple perspectives and explore the less-heard voices of the past, including those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, children, women, workers and people who were not literate, to create a rich narrative and inquiry. The identification and consideration of the perspective of individuals in the past supports students to critically challenge or corroborate sources, assess their reliability and develop interpretations of the past that are sensitive to the factors that shaped the experiences and motivations of individuals.

Interpretations

Interpretations of the past, such as the works of historians, also contain information. Historians interpret the past based on their reading and evaluation and interpretation of primary sources, and the interpretations of others. History is an interpretative discipline, so explanations of the past can differ and change as new evidence emerges and new historical questions are posed. Even historians have a historical context and bring a perspective to their work. These differing responses to historical questions make the past contested. Students should engage with a variety of interpretations of the past to develop an understanding of the contestability of history. Doing so models their interpretative practice.

Evaluation as evidence

All historical sources contain content, but not all content is relevant or useful to the process of historical inquiry. Therefore, not all content drawn from historical sources is necessarily relevant to or useful in the development of historical interpretations. For information to become evidence, it must be evaluated. The process of evaluating information from historical sources as evidence requires students to identify the sources’ features, content and context, and compare and contrast the sources with others, making judgements about accuracy and reliability, and determining the relevance to the topic of inquiry.

Continuity and change

The Continuity and change sub-strand involves students observing patterns of continuity and change in events, ideas, peoples and developments, identifying turning points that contribute to change and describing the varying pace, direction of change and the extent of the continuities and changes.

Continuity and change are processes. Observing and accounting for patterns of continuity and change, and describing their varied pace, direction or extent, are keys to students developing an understanding of the past. Continuity and change occur across the levels of historical investigation. They may be personal, local, national or global, and social, political, cultural, economic, environmental and/or technological. Some continuities and changes are experienced differently between groups within societies. Change can occur over varying scales of time (a day, a month, a year, decades, generations or millennia), and with different orders of magnitude. Continuities in one aspect of a society may be observed at the same time change is underway in another.

Students develop interpretations of continuity and change by ordering historical phenomena chronologically, using historical sources, explaining causes and consequences and establishing historical significance.

Figure 3: Describing patterns of continuity and change

Figure 3: Describing patterns of continuity and change

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Causes and consequences

The Causes and consequences sub-strand involves students identifying long- and short-term intended and unintended causes and consequences of events by sequencing events, ideas, peoples and developments and analysing links between them.

Historical inquiry involves identifying the relationship between chains of events, ideas, people and movements and their causes and consequences. Causes and consequences may be short or long term. They can stem from or affect social, political, economic, cultural, environmental and/or technological factors, and can be intended or unintended. Students identify causes and consequences to examine why things happened and their impacts. In so doing, they identify different kinds of causes and consequences, including those that are social, political or economic, and short-term triggers and long-term trends.

Students develop interpretations of causes and consequences by establishing chronology, identifying continuity and change, asking questions, using historical sources and establishing historical significance.

Figure 4: Causes and consequences

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Historical significance

The Historical significance sub-strand involves students using questions and evaluative criteria to indicate relative importance of an issue, event, development, person, group, place, process, interaction or system over time and place.

Historical significance is an interpretation of the importance of a historical phenomenon. It is contextual and relative. Establishing historical significance involves making evaluative judgements, informed by the evidence of historical inquiry, using criteria and questions. An individual, a group, an event, a cause, a consequence, a trend, a building or an artefact can each be historically significant. This significance is dependent on the relationship between the historical phenomenon and the historical investigation. Questions such as ‘How important was it to people who lived at that time?’, ‘How many people were affected?’, ‘How were people’s lives changed?’, ‘How long-lasting were the consequences?’ or ‘What is the event’s legacy?’ enable students to establish historical significance.

Students establish historical significance by using evaluative criteria they develop and posing historical questions to establish the relationship of the historical phenomenon to continuity and change and/or causes and consequences.

Communicating

The Communicating sub-strand involves students communicating historical interpretations and arguments about the past using knowledge and evidence from historical sources in conjunction with historical concepts.

History creates and conveys meaning by communicating and sharing explanations and interpretations through argument. Students use historical evidence and apply historical concepts, historical significance, continuity and change and causes and consequences to develop their interpretations of the past as part of the process of historical inquiry. The presentation of their interpretation is creative and can be expressed in written, multimodal, oral and other modes. When communicating their interpretation, students use appropriate text conventions and substantiate their evidence using referencing.

Level 10A

Mathematics

Level description – Level 10A

Level description – Level 10A

Achievement standard – Level 10A

Achievement standard – Level 10A

Content descriptions – Level 10A

Number

Number

Algebra

Algebra

Measurement

Measurement

Space

Space

Statistics

Statistics

Probability

Probability