Developing History Teacher Subject Knowledge and its role in Curriculum Making

Developing History Teacher Subject Knowledge and its role in Curriculum Making

There is a growing expectation in professional and policy discourses that teachers in schools will act as curriculum-makers, rather than simply curriculum-deliverers. This repositioning provides important opportunities for teachers to achieve professional agency by designing curricula which enables students to access complex ideas by linking these to the social and structural conditions which obtain in specific learning contexts. In too many cases, though, these opportunities are missed, as factors such as workload, staffing structures and accountability pressures crowd the space that teachers might use to improve and refine curriculum.

Among these barriers to curriculum-making one factor has, perhaps, been under-represented in the research literature – teacher’s lack of confidence in their own subject knowledge. That this factor has been under-reported is not a surprise: secondary teachers are expected to be ‘subject experts’ and it may be professionally challenging to admit to gaps in subject expertise.

After discussing these broad questions, this webinar draws on the results of a project which connected practising history teachers from Scotland with academic historians working in the field of transatlantic slavery. Drawing on interviews with both teacher and academic participants, it explores both the challenges and affordances of translating recent academic scholarship to the school curriculum, and the effect of this work on teachers’ sense of agency and professional identities.

Joe Smith is Senior Lecturer in History Education at The University of Stirling, UK. His research explores written history curricula, history teacher epistemologies, and the intersections between these. He was project-lead on the 2025 Teaching Slavery in Scottish Schools Project.