This article is written by Philip Arkinstall, Curriculum Leader for History at Hardenhuish School.

It compliments an earlier blog post about how to teach the Second World War (https://onebighistorydepartment.com/2023/04/25/cracking-the-enigma-a-new-approach-to-teaching-all-of-world-war-two/) Here I have reflected upon our department’s wider work on rewriting our Key Stage Three curriculum. It sits within a greater appreciation of diverse histories in the Tudor period, British Empire and the First World War. The aim for us was to challenge the old way of teaching the Second World War, which was through British eyes – effectively Dunkirk to D-Day.

Preconceptions

We found the way it had been taught at our school had become rather outdated. We began looking at Hitler’s actions in Europe, appeasement, Dunkirk, the Blitz, Stalingrad, D-day and the Atomic bomb. It didn’t sit right with us as a team that pupils had a western-only perspective of the war. Recently, academics writing about the Second World War are redrawing the balance of books on the global conflict. James Holland’s Burma ’44 and Jon Latimer Burma – The Forgotten War are useful examples. Some of this has been to look at the Far East and European campaigns. The new Second World War galleries at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) led to some inspiration. It had a great emphasis on individual stories and item from their collections which were associated with these people and what it could tell us about the war. Effectively, it was a personalised view of the war.

The Plan

Going back to the department and talking about it, we realised we wanted to create something bold that would allow pupils to gain a greater understanding that war can be experienced differently by different sides. We didn’t want our pupils leaving school thinking that Western Europe fought against Nazi Germany, were conquered until D-Day and then an atomic bomb was dropped to end the war. We aimed to consider how to address this. The war was huge and with so many stories, how should we narrow it down? The key was to focus on four phrases; victorious, occupied, collaborated, resisted. Each would be a case study that would look at events during the war from one country and then focus on getting pupils to uncover what this told them about that country’s experience.

The Lessons

Lesson one became an introduction to the war through a short video, outlining the sequence of events that led from the start of Hitler’s ambitions in Europe, to the invasion of Poland. Whereas before we would have focused on this for several lessons, a BBC KS2 video would outline these events for us. The next part of the plan was to get pupils building a timeline with the dates supplied. Their aim was to put key events from across the Second World into an order and then draw some observations from it, such as:

• Where was most of the fighting taking place?
• Which countries were involved?
• In which year was the war the most dangerous?

By the end of the lesson, we hoped that pupils had a deeper understanding that the war had a greater reach across the world and that lots of countries were involved. You could take this further and get different groups within the class to plot the journey of key countries like Britain, America, Germany Italy and Russia to see when they were involved and where.

Lesson two established the enquiry: “How was the Second World War experienced differently?” and pupils are given the four words (underlined above) to unpack with examples from real case studies across different regions of the world to learn how to make judgements about people’s experiences.

The remaining lessons looked at Britain, France, Hungary and Japen. Pupils began each lesson by analysing a smaller timeline of events for that country, with questions pinpointing what happened. We then looked at what happened to a mixture of people, with the aim of pupils working out how far citizens collaborated, resisted or felt occupied. The full sequence of lessons is below for ideas to help spark conversations in your own department.

In the end, the final assessment involved a question, where pupils draw upon their knowledge from the lessons to formulate an argument: “The experience of the Second World War was the same for all occupied countries”. To what extent do you agree?

Conclusions

Overall, the sequence of lessons has given pupils a greater understanding of Japan, Hungary, Britain and France. However, judging the experiences of people from a country is difficult due to the case studies and stories we choose to present to our pupils. In the case of Britain, we needed to broaden our stories out beyond evacuees, bombed out civilians and fighter pilots. This is still perpetuating the issue of what the experience was like. We are planning to look at smaller stories from across the country to see if we can build up a picture of what like was like across genders, ages, ethnicities, and regions. Another takeaway is delivering a broader awareness of the Far and Near East and looking at how was warfare here, different to Europe.

In essence, with such a rich tapestry of stories and breadth of regions we should be taking our Second World War schemes of learning in new and refreshing directions. The starting point could be a new book or a museum visit to refreshen our knowledge of events and help work out what we want our pupils to know about this event. The National Army Museum has an excellent display on Indian soldiers who fought in the Second World War for example. It’s time to look beyond the shores of Dunkirk and Normandy and look at the Arakan or Imphal and Kohima to tell the story of the experience of the Second World War.