Which Revolution?

"Which revolution should the history curriculum include?" we were asked. Our team at Learning First were supporting a history curriculum writing project. This question gave me pause for thought. For a maths curriculum, we would not need to ask a question of this sort because there is a hierarchy of content, and that maths content, and its sequence, is fairly uncontroversial. But it is not necessarily so easy to think about what content to include in, say, a geography or history curriculum. In maths, you learn addition before multiplication. In history, there is no equivalent rule. Does it even matter which topics you choose?

In fact, there are a number of very useful curriculum design principles that can be used to help select the content of a curriculum in a subject like geography or history, where content is not hierarchical. We call these cumulative subjects. Before considering the role of concepts like revolution, the first basic question is one of scope. A full history curriculum, for example, will need to cover the world from ancient times to the present day. It will need to consider a range of different places and peoples, and cover themes which are political, social, economic, religious, technological, and so on. The hope is that this scope would be adequate to give students a narrative framework of the past. Whatever topics are chosen, the scope should be collectively sufficient: together, we want the curriculum to give students a coherent picture and story of the past, an adequate framework. A primary school history curriculum that only covers the national history (e.g Australian History for Australian schools, British history for British schools and so on…) Australian history, however well taught, is not collectively sufficient. Students would leave with no framework for understanding the wider world

When thinking of scope and collective sufficiency, key questions we asked ourselves were….

After discussing scope and collective sufficiency, we were still not quite ready to give an answer to the "Which revolution?" question. We needed to be clear about how concepts like revolution are actually learned. When we talk about students "understanding revolution" or "understanding empire," we tend to imagine this as a kind of abstract knowledge: a definition that becomes more sophisticated over time. Such thinking would lend itself to having a unit, say, on a revolution and students learn what a revolution is in that unit. But this is the wrong way to think about how to build students’ understanding of concepts such as revolution, that are, of course, related to several other concepts (e.g. to understand specific steps of a certain revolution, only really makes sense when you have built understanding of concepts like governance, military, chronology, social change, and, depending on the specific revolution, monarchy and empire).  

Cognitive science provides a much better way to think about how we build student understanding. What we call understanding of a concept is in fact a schema: a mental structure built up from specific details in specific settings that together give the concept its meaning. Think about how a young child learns what a 'dog' is. Not from a definition, but from meeting actual dogs: big ones, miniature ones, fluffy ones, spotty ones. The schema for "revolution" is not a written definition that may get more complex across year levels, but  an ever-richer web of knowledge about actual revolutions (and related Historical concepts) , with their contexts, causes, consequences, and characteristics. You cannot build that schema from a definition. You build it by encountering real cases in sufficient depth. The choice of which particular cases students encounter in a curriculum decides what their schema will actually be built from and therefore how understanding of revolution and other concepts forms. Doing this well can result in a rich understanding of revolution and related concepts. Doing it poorly results in a shallow understanding. 

Which brings us to the sequencing of the curriculum. Effective sequencing deliberately repeats the same conceptual themes through the topics of the curriculum. For example, in a social sciences curriculum, students build their understanding of society by learning about different societies in turn: the historical details of how society is structured in Polynesia, Egypt, Sumer, Greece, Rome, and so on. The curriculum deliberately revisits the same conceptual themes, around the structure of society in different times and places, through successive topics. A primary teacher covering the Ancient Egyptians is not just teaching children about Egypt. She is building their understanding of concepts like monarchy, belief, and trade, which will be revisited when the class later studies Ancient Greece or the Roman Empire. It is through a coherent and expanding range of planned contexts and topics that progression in understanding of a concept is actually built. 

This highlights an important common misconception about a History curriculum. Some people will look at content and think do children really need to learn specifics of trade in ancient Egypt, why do we need such historical facts? But it is the focus on isolated facts that is the problem, rather than realising that the reason students should learn details on say trade in ancient Egypt is to start to build a mental schema of trade and related concepts, that will then be reinforced and expanded into a rich web of understanding as these concepts are revisited in different places and time periods. 

If students are taught using isolated snapshots of content extracted from their period or geographical context, the content loses much of its illustrative power. By examining full historical periods where important concepts are revisited and explanded, rather than isolated snapshots, students are able to see how a concept exists within its context.

At this point in our discussion, I remembered Christine Counsell, a curriculum expert, and her advice on content choices. She said curriculum designers should always stop and think: "What is the knowledge doing here?" What purpose does that revolution serve in your curriculum?

Thinking about conceptual development and the build of rich mental schema requires clarity on the concepts and context of in each unit or topic or event covered in a History Curriculum. Studying the French Revolution and studying the Russian Revolution might sound like studying variations on a theme: a monarchy, a people's uprising and a radical new order. But even before we get to what each revolution unleashes, we are already in completely different worlds. France in 1789 is an agricultural society convulsed by Enlightenment ideas about reason, rights and liberty, with revolutionaries arguing passionately in public about how society should be organised. Russia in 1917 is a vast empire staggering under the pressures of industrialisation and a catastrophic world war, where a small, disciplined party with a precise ideological programme seizes its moment. These are not two versions of the same story. And what each revolution then unleashes makes them even more distinct: France sends ideas about democracy, citizen rights and nationalism travelling across the world; Russia produces communism, the Soviet state, and the defining conflict of the twentieth century. A student who knows one does not know the other. And if we add the Industrial Revolution into the mix, we are in different territory again: not a political upheaval at all, but a transformation in how people worked, where they lived, and how the modern economy was born. These are three completely different bodies of knowledge and three different sets of prior understanding students need to bring with them.

As a teacher dives into the detail of each event, the word "revolution" is doing almost no work as a category. What is actually being built in each case is a rich, specific schema: a web of knowledge about a particular time, place, set of ideas, and set of consequences. And once you see that, the Counsell question becomes very practical. You might include the French Revolution because you want students to understand where modern ideas about democracy and citizens' rights came from, and how those ideas then spread across the world. You might include the Russian Revolution because you want students to understand the origins of communism and the shape of the twentieth century that followed. You would not choose between them on the grounds that one is a better example of "revolution." You would choose on the grounds of what each explains about the past and unlocks for students further down the curriculum. The fact that these events are revolutions could be entirely incidental. 

This is why a common curriculum error is to treat a concept, whether revolution, empire, or any other, as the goal of the curriculum, with content selected merely to illustrate it. This gets things exactly backwards. A concept is only usable, only actually understood, when the student has a rich, contextualised schema built from specific cases. The substantive knowledge is not the vehicle for learning the concept. It is what the concept is made of.

So what does all this mean in practice for someone writing a history curriculum? It means that the question "which revolution?" is actually the wrong starting point. The right questions come in a particular order.

First, does your curriculum have adequate scope. Is it collectively sufficient? Does it take students across time and across the world, covering enough different societies, periods and themes to give them a genuine narrative framework of the past? Taken together, do the topics you have chosen give students an adequate picture of the past, one that will serve them as citizens and as learners for the rest of their lives?

Second, what is the knowledge doing in each topic? A revolution or an empire, or a religious movement may not earn its place because it is a good example of a category, but because of the specific body of knowledge it carries, the prior understanding it builds on, and what it unlocks for students in the topics that follow.

The primary teacher covering Ancient Egypt is building students' understanding of monarchy, belief, and trade. When those students later encounter Ancient Greece and then Rome, they are not starting again. They are expanding a schema, meeting those same concepts in new contexts, seeing how monarchy looks different in different societies, how beliefs shape how people live, how trade connects the world. By the time a secondary teacher introduces the French Revolution, students who have that foundation are ready to understand what is at stake: why the idea that ordinary people could overthrow a divinely appointed king was so explosive, and why those ideas then travelled so far. The curriculum is not a list of topics. It is a carefully designed journey in which each stop builds the knowledge students need to make sense of the next one.

Which revolution? It depends entirely on what the knowledge is doing there.

This blog is part 1 of a three part series on curriculum design in history. [One on components and one on disciplinary knowledge.]