This essay will discuss the ways in which junior schools encourage engagement with history, using James Bateman Junior High School as a case study. The essay must begin by discussing the history topics that pupils are being taught in junior schools, and how these choices affect their level of engagement. Arguments made by historians, most notably Margaret MacMillan, for specific types of history to be taught to encourage engagement with history in junior schools will be discussed in this. The essay will then move on to discuss the different ways that topics are delivered in junior schools, and how this adapts based on the audience. Following this, the importance of using technology to encourage history, and how this importance is continuously growing with the development of technologies, will then be discussed, which will be supported by the arguments made by Terry Haydn and Neal Watkin. This will lead to a discussion of how the students of James Bateman use technologies to create their own public history projects, for example producing videos about historical topics to be published on the school website. Other public history projects, most notably the …show more content…
Macmillan discusses the ways in which engaging with history can help you to understand yourself and make sense of your own life and how you got to be here. She argues that the past shapes our present-day institutions and thoughts and we rely on it for lessons, validation and advice. There are many reasons to study history and it is of the interest of students to take advantage of their learning. Teachers should encourage students that learning history is beneficial, in order to grab their initial attention. The importance of doing this is often neglected in junior schools, resulting in students feeling like they are being forced to learn something that bears little relevance to them, consequently resulting in disengagement with