Curriculum, learning and teaching
Teaching history across the continents Overseas history teachers must understand how important they are, says Mark Sunman Many articles, including some in this magazine, have been devoted to the teaching of English in a second language context. Less attention, however, has been given to the teaching of history by overseas staff, despite the massive growth of this phenomenon. Our school (San Silvestre, a well-established girls’ school in Lima, Peru) has been entering students for Cambridge history examinations (formerly ‘O’ level and now IGCSE) since the 1940s, and for IB Diploma history since the 1990s. As a recent arrival to Peru from the
Autumn
Spring |
| 2017
UK in 1993, I can still remember my shock as I launched into a lesson on the British Agricultural Revolution of the eighteenth century (Turnip Townshend inter alia) at the end of a Lima summer, as humming birds hovered outside the window. Was the sense of anomie I was experiencing shared by my students, and was I in fact imposing an alien cultural history on bewildered recipients, just as French teachers in Saharan Africa used to teach African boys that their ancestors had blonde hair and blue eyes? There are, in fact, many
45
