Dr. Michael Riley started his session by showing a Key Stage 1 history reader called Orphan Mary. It told the story of a Victorian mill girl who injured her finger on machinery in a weaving shed. The story ended happily. Dr. Riley explained that when he had told the story to a Key Stage 1 class, and asked their opinion of it, a six year-old girl exclaimed: “That’s rubbish! The accidents were much worse than that — people trapped their hair and their arms!”

He asked the girl: ‘Why did the author write it this way?”

The girl replied: “Because he was writing for little children and didn’t want to scare us.”

Dr. Riley went on to list a series of questions which should be taken into account when planning an historical enquiry, which he defined as:

He then took the meeting through a Key Stage 2 history enquiry:

Step One

He showed the group a late nineteenth century painting of a country family meeting at harvest

www.victorianweb.org/painting/redgrave/paintings/7.html

The picture was painted by Richard Redgrave, a keen amateur artist who was the Keeper of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The students were given thirty seconds to invent a title for the painting. The following were suggested:

Dr. Riley revealed the title of the painting to be: ‘And The Valleys Also Stand Thick With Corn’, a quotation taken from the 23rd Psalm. He explained that the message was ‘Life in the countryside is good.’ In pairs, the students discussed the question: ‘What is there in the painting that suggests that life in the countryside is good?’ The students noted details such as the rich dresses on two of the girls; the leisurely, relaxed, cooperation of the family; the landscape bathed in golden sunlight; and the railway in the background, perhaps posing a threat to the rural idyll.

After this discussion, Dr. Riley posed further questions: “What was life really like in the Victorian countryside? How do we test this out?” Together, the group came up with a list of possible sources:

Each lesson in the enquiry then focuses on a range of such sources in turn. Dr. Riley gave an example of this process by sharing the following extract from a parliamentary commission investigating the conditions of Victorian children labouring in the countryside:

Resource 1

The group was divided into pairs and set a two-minute period of silent reading. The next step would be to turn the resource into a question and answer session, with one person in each pair taking the role of the interviewer (the commissioner), the other a witness. Each pair rehearsed the interview based on the evidence in the extract. Each roleplay was then performed in front of the class.

Film Clip 4 3 mins 19 secs

Afterwards, Dr. Riley posed further questions, such as: “What were the commissioners interested in?” It was concluded that the commissioners were concerned with health and safety, hours, ages, payments and possible mistreatment. Dr. Riley also stressed that the interpretation of the Victorian countryside within Redgrave’s painting is not an interpretation in the National Curriculum sense, because the interpretation pupils need to be focusing on should be subsequent to the time period being studied.

Film Clip 5 2 mins 18 secs

Step Three

The enquiry now reached its focus on interpretations by asking the question: ‘What makes the start of Michael Winterbottom’s film, Jude, so powerful?” The group were shown the opening minute of the film three times, and asked to discuss a different question on the film after each showing, as in the following pro-forma:

Resource 2

It was noted that the filmmaker used black-and-white film, muted sound, mist rolling across a lonely child in an empty landscape, and other details intended to evoke atmosphere. Dr. Riley led the discussion on sub-questions, asking: “How does the interpretation compare with the source? How typical was it that children worked alone? What does light work mean?” etc. He stressed the importance of building children’s knowledge about Victorian child labour in the countryside before analysing an interpretation itself.

He defined Interpretations of History in a school context as being:

‘When the main focus of children’s work is on how people in later times have reconstructed and presented the past.’

Interpretations can fall into some of the following categories:

Planning for enquiry work using interpretations should take into account the following:

Lastly, Dr. Michael Riley presented an enquiry written for Year 7 pupils that deliberately mirrored the pattern of the previous one for Year 6:

Step One

The starting point was Simon Schama’s popular TV series History of Britain. Dr. Riley said that Schama sees his approach to television history as entertainment as well as education. He showed a clip, lasting about a minute, from one of the programmes introducing the events of 1066 (with the pupils, two other similar clips were chosen). Each clip lasted about one minute. The children would be invited to analyse the clips in a similar way to the analysis of Jude in the Year 6 enquiry. One question posed was: ‘How do you stop people from switching over channels?’

The outcome of the enquiry was then introduced. This was to create a one-minute introduction to a programme on medieval peasants for Simon Schama’s History of Britain. Like the Year 6 enquiry on Jude, pupils would need sufficient background information on medieval peasants to complete the task. For this he used two sources, detailed below.

Step Three

Dr. Riley gave out a deliberately jumbled series of images from the Luttrell Psalter, 1320-1340, which showed peasants going through the process of making bread. In pairs, pupils had to put the images in chronological order. A class discussion followed as to what was the most likely order. This gave pupils some idea of a basic routine for medieval peasant life.

Step Four

With the group divided into pairs, Dr. Riley gave out the following extracts from the Somerset Coroner’s Rolls for 1314-1321 which recorded incidents of unusual deaths. Each pair picked a different incident. One person slumped over the desk pretending to be dead, whilst the other person explained from the record how that person had died. This lead to a discussion about what these incidents tell us about peasant life and provided memorable raw material for pupils to incorporate in the final task.

Resource 3

Step Five

Pupils used the following frame to plan their own one-minute introduction to the proposed programme for Simon Schama’s episode on medieval peasants:

Resource 4

‘Not Just instruction, but pleasure ...’

Dr. Riley closed the session by stressing the importance of the outcome of an enquiry on interpretations. It should really motivate and engage pupils. Dr. Riley suggested the following approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries:

Dr. Riley also said, teachers need to take into account the five following points when planning such work for pupils: