Is 'new history' still being taught in Maltese Secondary Schools?

Abstract

During these last thirty years, in Britain and in other countries, the methods used to teach history have changed drastically. 'New history' methods are being used. During my course at University, we have been encouraged to teach through these methods. But what is the current situation in Maltese Secondary schools? The study has been carried out in schools from the three different sectors in Malta, that is, State, Church and Independent schools. To carry out this study interviews and classroom observations were used, as discussed in Chapter 2. The first chapter deals with how 'new history' influenced the writing of history. This helped to observe how this change affected the teaching of history. To have a better analysis of what the classroom realities are today, the analysis was divided into three chapters. Thus Chapter 3 investigates if teachers are giving more importance to the content or to the skills and the concepts that are very important in teaching history with the 'new history' methods. Chapter 4 deals with how the teachers are using different resources to motivate their students while teaching through this method. Chapter 5 is about the student-teacher interaction during the history lesson. The study shows that history teachers are not any more teaching the subject by going into excessive details and dates but are teaching the skills and concepts together with the most important content. Various resources, from those of a traditional nature to others being less traditional, are used by the teachers to motivate the students more. Students are involved in the lesson by answering the questions of the teachers, by putting their questions and discuss their ideas, while they are encouraged to get sources to class themselves. Furthermore, especially for Chapter 6, the NMC was consulted to see what is the position of history in it, to compare the similarities between the 'new history' method and the NMC, and how history is useful to put into practice the NMC.