Hands on History: An active approach to creating oral historians in the secondary classroom

History is a discipline like few others; one of the greatest challenges teachers face is not in generating an interest in the past, but in developing in students the mindset and skills to actively do so. Seeing learners evolve from passive students of history to active historians is immensely rewarding, but the how of such a goal is readily forgotten in the why and what of curriculum design. The perception that rote-learning of dates, people and places is the core requirement of history students is an ongoing hurdle to overcome with students, parents and indeed other key learning areas at a whole-school level; balancing the historical knowledge essential to understanding the modern world with the skills to 'do' history is the real goal of the classroom history teacher.