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First order knowledge and understanding, relating to the 'stuff' of history, is, of course, absolutely fundamental to the development of children's historical knowledge and understanding. However, as Frances Blow shows, in a contribution to a series of articles exploring second order concepts in history published in Teaching History by Peter Lee and Denis Shemilt since 2003, second order conceptual understandings are crucial: we cannot help children make progress in history without paying close attention to how they conceptualise the history we ask them to learn. As Blow shows, through a systematic discussion of extensive research data, children's mastery of second order concepts such as change, continuity and development is fundamental to children's capacity to make meaningful sense of the stories that we teach them. Blow explores what understanding change, continuity and development means and proposes a research-based model for progression in understanding these concepts.
'Everything flows and nothing stays'1
Heraclitus' statement neatly encapsulates some of the challenges posed for students of history by change- related concepts. It is ironic that the inherent subtlety and complexity of these concepts tends to be obscured in a culture that celebrates whatever is new and novel. This matters because the complexities of change, continuity and development, of how they are perceived, measured and evaluated, are at the heart ot how we make sense of the past and its relationship to the present. The difficulties faced by students striving to apply change-related concepts lo factual content are regularly discussed in Teaching History and elsewhere.: Ofsted recently commented that in schools where the curriculum was only 'satisfactory' 'student[s'] ...understanding of developments across tune was hazy, and their ability to link together the topics and issues they had studied or to draw out themes and show how they had evolved, was poor.'3
Change, along with cause, evidence and accounts, is a second order concept but I have found that, like a poor relation, it can often be ignored in the classroom. There are (at least) two reasons why it might get overlooked. First, the distinction between teaching what changed in the past (e.g. 'The French Revolution was a big change in history') and teaching the meaning of change in history (e.g. 1If the French Revolution was a big change, does...