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argue with that really because there are huge issues which are at the forefront of teenager’s
minds which the course ought to handle, and the most recent work I have done is to devise
some work on terrorism … It is an unfortunate feature that violence is what the Modern
World Study tends to focus on … the drift from Irish history towards Middle East studies
is because Ireland is less violent and the Middle East is more violent.
The interviewee also considered that a reduction in the weighting given to coursework in the
GCSE forced teachers to focus on the assignment rather than exploring the context of Ireland
more fully:
I do think the reduction to twelve and a half percent per assignment is a weak link.
Inevitably it is a little bit of background and then wack into the assignment … I think
people probably spend less than a term - probably eight weeks would be normal, on a
coursework assignment of which three maybe four would be taken up writing the
assignment.
This could reduce opportunities to explore adequately the historical context of the Ireland
Modern World Study. The interviewee moved on to argue that time constraints affected
opportunities to develop an Irish dimension at Key Stage 3:
I think the good intentions of the National Curriculum to have more non-British history
and more Four Nations [which included an Irish dimension] history hasn’t been as great as
it could be, is probably [due to] time … In the National Curriculum Working Party we
were talking about two hours per week for history, and the fact of the situation is that the
majority are on 60 or even 50 minutes per week.
Nevertheless, the interviewee countered these gloomy perceptions with examples of positive
developments which were taking place. Firstly, they indicated a growing interest in the theme
of Empire and indicated that the BBC would be producing a programme related to it within
their ‘Time-Lines’ series. Secondly, they demonstrated how it was possible to
integrate a multicultural dimension into mainstream history by reference to a textbook that
they were writing:
At the moment I am doing a year 8 book, and one of the topics is about wars in the
period 1500-1900, so I am going to do something on Trafalgar and I want to pick out
diversity of the crew of the Victory because we know that there were some Caribbeans
and some Indians and that there were people from about 20 nationalities on the Victory