This week I'm launching a new project on the website, Alternative Curricula. The aim here is to provide a number of more structured teaching resources for free, tacklinging bigger and longer-term teaching objectives, and challenging the stagnated and outdated ways that history is often taught to the public. Each section will include a number of previous blog posts, grouped together around a central theme, along with further reading and bibliographic resources - all free, all online, all for everyone.
The first of these, Approaching History, is ready and launched now in its first draft. The focus is on providing resources for the approaches and methods that historians use to conduct their craft. There is no specific focus on one historical timeframe or location, so it contents are useful if you're interested in any period of history, from ancient up until modern. It's very easy, studying history both at school and afterwards, to sink into a very repetitive pattern of history, dominated by dusty textbooks. But, of course, if we're to get a meaningful picture of the past, we're going to need a much broader approach. The resources here might therefore seem deliberately niche and tangential, covering approaches that are perhaps less obvious, but that's a deliberate aim to explore the people of the past in more complex and in-depth ways.
The resources here are aimed at everyone. There is no prerequisite for level of higher education, age, or location. If you're interested in history and how to become a better historian yourself, then you are most welcome!
You can access the Alternative Curricula via the tab above, or the link here.
These are working documents and will be updated and appended frequently over the coming months, so please be patient. If you'd like to be kept up to date, make sure you subscribe to the emailing list with the form provided on the home page. If you have any extra suggestions for reading recommendations, do get in contact.
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LATEST ARTICLE: The Ashmolean's Cast Gallery
Check out my previous articles on Anglo-Saxon (here), Viking (here) and obscene (here) nicknames. A new Deep-Dive article on Interpreting the Emporia can be found here.