History teachers know film is a great way to hook students in, but is the book better than the film?

Round about late November, it's only natural that teachers' thoughts turn to the format of the end of year quiz and, more pressingly, to the film that can be shown in the last week of term.

Well aware of the slog to reach the finishing line that is the Christmas holidays, teachers always tend to have a stash of subject-appropriate films up their sleeves. For history teachers, usually It's a Wonderful Life, with its links to the Depression in case anyone from SMT wonders in.

Whilst I firmly believe that films have their place in teaching, I've recently been experimenting with using fiction in the classroom. For history students, it's a great way to engage with the past, opening up avenues to lesser studied aspects of the subject such as social and cultural history.

It promotes literacy through reading and discussing novels with a peer group, which ideally will continue beyond the classroom. And, as an added incentive, the book is invariably always better than the film.

The lesson I designed was based on the impact of the First World War and concluded an AS History scheme of work on Warfare in Britain. I've posted my lesson plan up on the Guardian Teacher Network so you can check it out here.

Students were divided into five groups, with each group working on a different extract. In their groups, they read and discussed their extract, based around one key question: What can we learn from novels about the impact of the First World War? To help students focus their discussion, the following were provided as areas to consider:

a. title and publishing date

b. focus of the extract

c. what it suggests about the period (eg attitudes towards warfare, class, gender...)

d. type of language used

e. utility of source and limitations

f. similarities and differences between extracts, with possible reasons

These prompts were deliberately open, allowing students to pick up on a range of themes and adopt analytical source skills; rather than dismissing the source along the lines of "unreliable because s/he wasn't there", students can probe, asking questions along the lines of what motivated the author and questioning what they were trying to achieve, adopting the more sophisticated skills of interpretation and representation. It also allows them to engage with historical periods in a potentially more empathetic way by exploring socio-cultural areas such as class and gender.

I was delighted with the response and buoyed by the level of engagement and analysis. It has definitely encouraged me to build extracts from fiction into other schemes of work and made me mindful of the opportunities for using literature rather than simply bunging on Blackadder Goes Forth. Ultimately it was (hopefully) clear to the students that reading novels need not be something exclusive to the English literature syllabus but have an important place in the history classroom.

Bibliography of my Impact of First World War lesson plan

Pat Barker, Regeneration, published in 1995, pp. 218 – 223

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, published in 1960, pp. 94 – 97

Enrich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, pp. 46 - 51

Rebecca West,The Return of the Soldier, published in 1918, pp. 8 – 13

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, pp. 58 - 63

• Debbie Bogard teaches History and Politics at City and Islington Sixth Form College in London.

A lesson plan to accompany this blog can be found here: What place does fiction have in history lessons?.

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