History
History is fundamental to our curriculum vision for Southam St James. If children are to become reflective, critical thinkers, equipped to make their own mark as independent citizens of the world, they need to appreciate what has come before them. Historical enquiry offers a particularly exciting and illuminating window on the world that demands precise and coherent communication of ideas: effective historians imagine and construct other experiences, understanding and appreciating difference; they are creative, resourceful and analytical in identifying and evaluating evidence that is often incomplete; they apply their knowledge and understanding to build informed arguments that can be supported by witness testimony in all its rich and varied forms. History offers a unique context in which to identify connections in human existence: it rewards curiosity and resilience with discovery and understanding that promotes personal growth, confidence, and empowerment.
Our vision is that all children will develop:
- a lively curiosity about the past, exploring key people, events and innovations, as
well as an understanding of how ‘ordinary lives’ have changed;
- an appreciation of the skills of historical enquiry (what it means to be ‘an historian’), identifying, interrogating, interpreting and evaluating historical evidence from diverse sources;
- an understanding of how viewing the past from different perspectives creates multiple ‘histories’, how these may conflict, and how they might be reconciled;
- a secure understanding of chronology that will enable them to sequence key periods and events in British History and begin to place these into a wider world context;
- the confidence to construct historical arguments, interpreting evidence and accounts of the past independently and making connections between them.