[Dom_Giles]

I’m interested in how other IB History teachers feel about the syllabus.

I really like the structure of the syllabus. For standard level or Paper 2 pretty much anything in the 20th Century can be covered and it allows for more unusual or oft forgotten areas of world history to be covered. I’m sure most schools cover the core topics of dictators, wars and the cold war, but even within this it is possible to do alternative events and people. Yes, Hitler, Stalin and the causes of WWI are done, but it’s good to look at Castro, the Spanish Civil War, Mao, Nigerian Civil War, Korea, Mobutu etc. Given the resources I would love to tackle some of the other option groups in the future.

I have taught both Europe and Africa for Paper three and again I like the options and choice allowed here.

I also, generally, like the whole ethos of IB. The variety of subjects taught and the whole CAS, ToK thing is a good idea. I do think UK education would benefit from something like this rather than the AS, A2 disaster that has been inflicted upon post 16 education.

My main criticism is probably that Paper 1, sourcework, is hardly any different to the IGCSE Paper 2. I do think the IGCSE source paper is a little hard and the IB one a little easy. But at least it means that my clever IB students have little difficulty with it and don’t dread it.

I’m not a great fan of the extended essay. I appreciate the skills it is trying to foster but for History students it’s hardly covering new territory. But, I must admit, it has not been tackled with enthusiasm and excitement, as it should be. By the staff or students in the schools I have done it in. It’s always just been something that everyone has to do. I guess it’s also a useful tool for those (misguided) IB students who don’t do History.

But undoubtedly my biggest grip with IB is that History is optional. The whole idea behind IB and International education is crying out for History to be obligatory. Why do students have to study Maths and Science but not History!? If I ruled the world………

[Lou Phillips]

As a former IB student I agree with many of your points. I feel that I entered my degree with a much broader knowledge than many of my fellow history students. I was also more well equipped for theoretical "Discpline of History" courses due to my TOK. I could also bring in examples from the World Literature course and my CAS prepared me well for getting involved in extra-curricular activities such as sports teams and student politics, whilst balancing a heavy workload.

I would encourage anyone to do the IB, its a shame that many people perceive it to be too difficult or even expensive (I went to Swansea College, a pretty standard FE college where the IB has been going (for free) for over 10 years now). (I think the web address is http://www.swancoll....wfs/ib-home.swf for anyone who's interested).

[Richard Jones-Nerzic]

Dom_Giles, on Sep 20 2003, 08:07 PM, said:

I’m interested in how other IB History teachers feel about the syllabus.

Thanks for the invitation Dom. Just before I started teaching IB History the history course was undergoing a curriculum review. I had just come back from one of their week long training sessions and with a whole summer holiday in front of me I sat down to write my contribution to their review.

30 odd months later (whilst thinking about Richard's seminar about 'interpretations) I've just read my views again. Much of what I wrote (although deliberately provocative) I still agree with.

My main moans were about the narrow methodological approach of Paper 1 compared to TOK and the lack of temporal and subject balance in the European Higher Level. In general I think the IB needs to be more prescriptive with content and more imaginative in the assessment of skills. Neither things are likely to be popular with teachers in general. I was thinking of rewriting my original views here but I ran out of time this holiday. What follows is a cut a paste job that might interest IB teachers or anyone thinking of moving into IB. Just to make it clear, in general I think IB is better than A Level for the student (I agree with Lou) but not necessarily for the history teacher.


So what is wrong with IB History? It is difficult to know where to begin really, but perhaps central to my concerns is that IB History just doesn’t seem to be in keeping with what I understand to be the spirit of the IB. In terms of content and assessment I find it deeply conservative. Intellectually it is limited, very narrow and almost culturally specific. In a nutshell, I suppose I could say it is English History Advanced Level 25 years ago.

The strength of the IB in general as I see it, is the broad and balanced nature of the curriculum. But there is also the emphasis on relevance to life outside the classroom (CAS) and the integration of a self-reflective methodological approach to learning (TOK). As a whole it is an innovative, almost radical approach to learning, which is why the History curriculum seems so incongruous.

IB History inhabits a universe fixed in the third quarter of the 20th century; it almost completely ignores the developments in its own subject discipline of the last 30 years and categorically ignores the wider intellectual currents that have conditioned the development of the social sciences over that same time span. Let me clarify what I mean by highlighting two themes: firstly, the methodological requirements of IB History and secondly, the subject content.

Methodology

Methodological reflection appears to be one of the central aims of Group 3 subjects and indeed the IB as a whole. But what does this mean in current IB History? Generally, there appears to be no attempt to move beyond a narrow, rather Rankean empiricism with its fetishist obsession with the “documents”. Spend ten minutes examining two sources and comment on their reliability. Confronted with such a question, I have often been tempted to ask “why?” What are we as teachers hoping to achieve? Are we hoping to imitate what real historians do or is it some sort of elaborate IQ test that has little to do with history? At an IB conference I attended the senior examiner seemed to delight in revealing that students could expect to achieve up to 17 or so marks out of the 20 available without having to know much of the historical context at all! I suspect, therefore, that quite a bit of IB History teaching time must be dedicated to teaching the “skills of source analysis” or as I prefer to see it, learning to jump through the very contrived and intellectually restricted hoops, in a limited amount of time.

Where did the idea of a document paper come from? I suspect it had something to do with developments in Britain. The Schools Council History Project in the 1970s and the GCSE in the 1980s attempted to address the perceived crisis in History teaching (a subject identified by students as boring and difficult) by reducing the assessment (and therefore teaching emphasis) on content recall and essay writing (or the boring and difficult). As John Slater once put it: “Skills – did we even use the word? – were mainly those of recalling accepted facts about famous dead Englishmen, and communicated in a very eccentric literary form, the examination length essay”. It was almost inevitable after its introduction at GCSE that document work would find its way into the A Level, as it universally had done by the end of the 1980s. When exactly did it make it into the IB? Perhaps IB was the innovator? Either way, the document paper is like the essay, a very eccentric intellectual form.

But it is not really the artifice or eccentricity that bugs me; it is the fact that methodologically it ignores intellectual developments in the social sciences over the last 30 years. A student doing IB History need never have to consider the implications for History of the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty et al. Yes, I know history was slow to adjust; historians have always had a healthy scepticism of abstract ideas. But for goodness sake, there will be people teaching IB History this year who were not even born when Hayden White’s Metahistory was first published (1973). It is now nearly ten years since Keith Jenkins began his campaign to bring post-modernism to the historian masses (Re-thinking History 1991) and now there is even an Access to History textbook for Advanced Level students that takes up the challenge. (History and the Historians, John Warren) As this last text recognises, although as historians we may not accept the arguments of the post-modernists who attempt to undermine our theoretical foundations, we cannot afford to ignore them either.

As it stands therefore, history at IB is in a sort of intellectual vacuum cut adrift from not only general intellectual developments but even more bizarrely (in its non-relationship to the TOK programme), IB History appears cut adrift from its own general academic programme. The student who has made a number of profound observations on the epistemological fragility of history in TOK, confronting questions such as “can we know anything about the past?”, will always have to return to a realistic down to earth acceptance of “whether I can know or not, I’ve just got to get on and do it” IB History programme. This amounts to a sort of intellectual resignation that is so out of keeping with the professed spirit of the IB.

Subject Content

Nobody who witnessed the bloodletting that accompanied the introduction of the National Curriculum in England will forget how divisive the question of “what content?” can be when developing a history curriculum. Still, we must examine what is currently on offer. So what, then, will the IB Diploma student know at the end of two years?

The first thing we need to recognise is that there is a big difference between what the student will know and what is contained within the History syllabus. In fact there are at least three levels of reductionism at work. Firstly, there is the selection made by the syllabus creators, e.g. a decision is made to study the theme of “War” rather than “Peace”. Secondly, there is the selection made by the teacher or subject planner in a particular school, e.g. teacher decides on “Cold War” rather than “state and minorities” (Does anyone teach this excellent subject?). And finally there is the choice made by the student on what to prepare for the examination and Internal Assessment. Both the second and third order selections are to a large extent determined by the content of specimen and past paper examination scripts. There is a pedagogic law lurking in here: teachers and students want to do as well as possible in the examinations, therefore they prepare as well as possible for those examinations. Perhaps you recognise it?

So does this three-stage selection process create a balanced history diet that gives the student the opportunity to experience the Group-Three requirements? The question, I apologise, is rhetorical because the answer is quite obviously, no.

There are two types of curriculum balance that IB History conspicuously fails to deliver: temporal and typological. The twentieth century world history course, as delivered to students, is unlikely to give students a balanced understanding of the whole century or the various historical perspectives (social, economic, cultural, etc.).

Compare what IB teachers teach and what our students prepare for examination, to Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, his highly acclaimed history of the short twentieth century. How do they measure up? Most of Hobsbawm’s 600 pages are divided into convenient 30-40 page chapters, split into three sections dividing the century into three broadly equal time frames. So, for example, Hobsbawm gives one chapter of about 30 pages to the rise of fascism but he also has a chapter of similar length on the Social Revolution 1945-1990. Similarly, he dedicates a chapter to the causes and consequences of the Russian Revolution but he also has his 30 pages on the “End of Socialism” covering the late 1980s, early 1990s. In other words he recognises (as I am sure we all do) that a meaningful and coherent history of the twentieth century requires just this sort of balance that the IB programme fails to deliver. In all honesty, if we were only concerned with content balance, students would be better off watching each episode of the BBC’s Peoples’ Century a couple of times rather than studying IB History for 150 classroom hours.

So how does IB History go so wrong? The simple reason is that at each of the three levels of content reduction the curriculum fails to ensure balance. The relatively arbitrary list of six “topics” of the common core (the pre-1998 curriculum seems more logical) makes no requirements for students to experience temporal or typological balance, because any attempt at balance is appended within the six broad themes and allows the teachers and students to opt out of studying them. And judging from the examiners Subject Reports this is exactly what they do. In May 1999 the Subject Report concluded:

…in spite of the demand for less political and more social history, social and economic questions are neither popular nor answered well.

But the important point is this: students may not be able to answer these questions well but it doesn’t prevent them from achieving a grade 7 (the top grade) for History. They do not prepare for them because they do not have to. To prepare for them properly would require time away from working on the Political types of questions they know they are also going to be asked about. Examinations are serious things and when university places are at stake, teachers and students stick to the traditional forms that the textbooks and teachers’ expertise allow for.

At the second and third levels of subject reduction, therefore, schools are making a decision not to study social-economic-cultural history. Now, the examiners in their reports may bemoan how “sad” this is, but I can’t help feeling that they (and therefore the IB as an institution) feel, that as long as they provide the option to study and be examined on the other types of history then they have done their job. Not true, if your system cannot ensure balance, then the system is wrong.

Let’s look at an example of why the system needs to change. Surely the weakest link in the IB History syllabus is Paper 3, the so-called “Higher Level”. Apart from the fact that it is in no sense “higher” (a senior examiner at a recent workshop admitted it was easier!) does it least allow for the sort of balance I have been describing?

The Europe option identifies 22 subject areas, three of which are discrete social-economic-cultural histories: hardly a balance, but at least a choice. Now what happens at the second and third levels of content reduction? On the basis of past exam papers the teacher makes a decision to exclude the vast majority of the syllabus from their teaching. Typically this might mean leaving out the whole of the 19th century because the 20th century generally overlaps with the Eurocentric 20th Century World History core (what do the other Regions make of this I wonder?) or I go from 1848 to 1945 concentrating on Germany and Italy alone. This second option might seem rather too reductionist but it guarantees me five essays on a three essay exam paper where I also have a range of back-up questions based on the common core knowledge of Papers 1 & 2.

But let’s assume I want to do more than prepare my students for the exam and I want to ensure a Hobsbawm style balance. Lets say I decide to teach “Twentieth century European society”. How does the IB encourage me in this honourable pursuit? The IB guarantees me one question! But more than that, it gives my students one question that might cover any of the following: education, the arts, leisure, sport, media, urbanisation, transport, technology, work patterns, gender issues, pressure groups, peace movements and terrorism in the whole of the twentieth century. In other words, it amounts to the best part of an Advanced Level Sociology course with a significant portion of Advanced Level Geography and Politics thrown in for good measure.

Next, if none of that puts you off, the examination paper is likely to ask you the sort of open-ended question more suited to a Masters dissertation rather than a 50 minute exam essay: “Assess the importance of the changes in either the media or working conditions and patterns, in twentieth century Europe”. Finally, imagine the student has (against the odds) prepared to answer this difficult question. As the student reads through the exam paper she encounters the question “How and why was Hitler able to become dictator of Germany?”, a question she has prepared countless times since IGCSE and has read a dozen model textbook accounts about during the previous two years. With your university place depending on it, would you chance the Masters dissertation?

The examiner’s subject reports are highly revealing. In the first three reports after the new syllabus began virtually no students attempted the open-ended non-political history questions. And this was true not only of the Europe option. The only comment from the examiners on this problem was “candidates who attempted the ‘general questions’…lacked adequate historical knowledge and tended to write vague, unfocused answers” (May 1999). I wonder why?!

The Group Three aim is that students have a syllabus that is relevant to them, that helps them come to terms with the world in which they live. It is also, in the spirit of the IB, supposed to encourage internationalism and co-operation. In contrast, the History syllabus as it exists encourages, in the range of ways outlined above, a study of Europe of the dictators before 1945 and international rivalry since. I imagine that that is all most centres in Europe teach and if they have any sense and care about their students exam results, that is all they should teach.

So what should the IB do?

Revolutionise not review

Start from scratch. There are too many hidden assumptions built into IB History that need to be challenged. We should begin by identifying priorities and asking fundamental questions. What is the purpose of studying History? Is our syllabus representative, reflecting a balance between the different histories that make up the discipline? Does History integrate with the holistic goals of Humanities in the IB? And most importantly, how do we make sure that History (as it is experienced by the students) actually delivers on all our fundamental objectives?

Resource

Perhaps the most powerful objection to any fundamental curricular change is that resources (either human or physical) do not currently exist. Clearly one of the priorities of the new syllabus (and this is bound to appeal to those who run the finances of the IB) will be provision for an ongoing and comprehensive workshop programme. The other need will be for textbooks to support the course. The current absence of any suitable textbook for the IB History core is nothing short of a disgrace. It is hardly surprising that IB History fails to deliver on so many of the Group 3 objectives when our students have to rely on hand-me-down texts from various national syllabi. In setting up IB History at my school this summer, I have been in the fortunate financial position of buying more or less anything that I require. I have bought class sets of 20 different textbooks and multiple copies of about another 20. How many other schools could afford to do this? Yet, in the absence of textbooks (or at least a core textbook) designed for IB History, richer (English language?) schools will continue to have a significant advantage. A new course will require an innovative textbook, custom made to support the specific skills and content of the syllabus. The same text can then be made available in the three languages, as an annually updated CDROM and supported by student centred website.

Create Syllabus Choice

Teachers are an interest group and like any other interest group with a stake in the status quo, they will resist change. Resources, libraries and expertise are assembled over many years. Therefore the IB needs to allow the majority of examination centres to carry on with the current syllabus if they wish, but to create an innovative minority curriculum for those of willing to accept the challenge. This has to be much more than the alternative school-based syllabus (SBS) that allows for innovation, but hardly encourages it. The SBS is an abdication of responsibility on behalf of the IB and is a massive burden of responsibility for any individual institution. Moreover a new institution like mine has to do two years of the traditional syllabus (with all the inertia that IB house training will inevitably create) and then will not allow it to stand as a Higher Level option. There are plenty of examples from the British Advanced Level boards of a multiple syllabi approach. The A Level boards have to appeal to all types of teachers because if they do not, they lose business to a rival exam board. Ideally the two syllabi should not be mutually exclusive but allow the traditional institution to test the water by taking selected components. I predict that opposition to change will diminish when the new syllabus proves itself popular. Again the British experience bears this out. (London syllabus E for example)

So then, in conclusion, I am asking for too much?! Perhaps. Let’s not forget the good things in IB History: Internal Assessment that allows students to produce digital multimedia presentations (since I wrote this the board have withdrawn this option) or Extended Essays where students engage in challenging, often quite original research. This is what I mentioned earlier as my understanding of the spirit of the IB. Thirty years ago the IB was pioneering, radical and consequently innovative. In some curriculum areas it still is, the TOK questions exemplify this. But in history generally, the syllabus is too old, intellectually lazy and carrying too many surplus pounds in all the wrong places.

July 2000

This post has been edited by Richard Jones-Nerzic: 01 November 2003 - 08:18 PM