History
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Head of Department: Mr N Pollard
The History department at Herne Bay High School is a very well-equipped department with a dedicated ICT suite, a variety of textbooks, historical artefacts and video footage available for teacher and student use.
A variety of methods are used to learn the subject including:
- Group work
- Academic scholarship and the study of up-to-date research from historians
- Debates and discussion
- Videos
- Presentations
- Essay writing
- Research
- Examination skills and technique
- Card sorts
- Role play simulations
- A variety of home based learning tasks and projects
Teaching Staff
- Mr N Pollard - Head of Department
- Mr Cox
- Miss D'Angelo
- Mr Lyden
- Mr Smith
- Ms N Taylor
- Dr Taylor-Prince
- Miss West
History Clubs and Trips
Year 7 – visit Canterbury Cathedral to get a sense of what life was like in Canterbury through the ages and supports our comparison unit between mediaeval Canterbury and Baghdad.
Year 8 – to support our unit on power and protest, students will visit the physical manifestation of Henry II's power - Dover Castle.
Year 9, 10 and 11 – to support the GCSE units of study students will have the opportunity to:
- Year 9 will visit the Imperial War Museum to supplement their learning on WWI, WWII, the Holocaust and the Cold War
- We aim to visit France and Belgium where students have the opportunity to visit the graveyards, trenches and monuments to commemorate those who lost their lives in WWI.
- The Globe Theatre and Golden Hind II are visited to support learning of Elizabethan England.
- Year 12 will go to the Tower of London and enjoy an immersive workshop experience with historians to support their learning of the Wars of the Roses.
What do our children study?
Year 7 – We follow a historical enquiry titled - What were people’s lives like? (A social history unit studying what everyday peoples’ lives were like in different time periods.) We look at how the Saxons, Vikings and Normans shaped the lives of people after the 5th century up to the mediaeval period. We then have comparative units that looks at a city in England and compares that to a city from around the world. These include Canterbury and Baghdad, London and Tokyo, and Manchester and San Francisco. We look at lives in industrial London in 1888 at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Lastly, we study the British Empire to get a sense of how Britain has impacted societies around the world.
Year 8 – Power and Protest from Mediaeval times to the 20th Century. (This is a more political study of the power of monarchs and the fight for democracy). We look at the rivalry between Henry II and Thomas Becket, John and his barons, and Richard II and the peasant revolt. We look at revolutions that had an impact on British society and look at how ordinary people fought for their own representation, such as the Chartists and Suffragettes. Finally, we look at how the civil rights movement in the USA fought to award basic freedoms and rights for their black American population.
Years 9 – Historical enquiry- Twentieth Century Conflict. This encompasses World War One, the Rise of Dictators, WWII, the Holocaust. We look at how the Cold War changed the world. We then look at the changing of nature of warfare focussing on the attacks on 9/11 and terrorism in the 21st century.
Years 10 and 11 - GCSE History studied follows the AQA Examination Board Specification. The two-year course will follow four topics:
Thematic Study-Shaping the Nation: Migration, empires and the people: 790 to the present day.
Depth Study-Shaping the Nation: Elizabethan England, 1568-1603 with an in-depth site study.
Depth Study-Wider world depth studies: Conflict and tension 1894-1918
Period Study-Wider world depth studies: Germany 1890-1945: Democracy and Dictatorship