School of Education

Video features curriculum and instruction professor’s study of learning history formally and informally in Northern Ireland

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

A new video presented on the Teachers College Record website features comments from IU School of Education Professor Keith Barton and his co-author of a paper called “You Can Form Your Own Point of View”: Internally Persuasive Discourse in Northern Ireland Students’ Encounters with History (Teachers College Record, Volume 112 Number 1, 2010, p. 142-181). Barton co-authored the work with Allan W. McCully, a lecturer in the school of education at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland.

In the video, Barton and McCully explain why and how they studied the ways students in Northern Ireland sort out the conflicting views of the region’s history. They find the students have a very complicated understanding of history, recognizing the many viewpoints behind information they received about Northern Ireland’s violent past. The findings suggest developing methods of teaching history that might better serve the way students such as these are actively developing their sense of history.

The Teachers College Record is an education journal published by Teachers College at Columbia University. You can link to the video featuring Barton and McCully by clicking here.