Welcome to The Camel’s Back. I hope that, in time, this blog will have things to say about history, historical thinking, history education, and related matters.

The site is maintained by Arthur Chapman, a history educator based at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society in London. To contact me about this site please email thecamelsbackorg@googlemail.com.

The blog’s title is a homage to a strategy I developed to help students reason about causes in history some years ago, that has been widely adopted and adapted in England, America and elsewhere (Chapman, 2003).

My intention is to use this site to share information about that strategy and a number of other history teaching approaches focused on historical argument, historical explanation and historical interpretations. No strong empirical claims are made for the efficacy of any of these approaches – there’s enough snake oil in education already. They are offered in the hope that they may be of some use as positive (or negative) inspiration, and / or as positive (or negative) models to adapt and / or take apart, and so on. Such warrant that they have arises from two sources: first, the fact that I and, in some cases, other history educators have found them useful and, second, the fact that they have a principled rationale.

Education is a collective endeavour and progresses through dialogue and collaboration. I hope to facilitate some small contributions to both of those processes through this blog also, when I’ve learned enough about blogging to manage that.

None of the claims (or evasions) contained in this site represent or claim to represent the views of any institution but are posted here entirely in a personal capacity.

All materials posted on this blog, that are not already subject to copyright, are shared on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis. This means that others may remix, adapt, and build upon these materials non-commercially, as long as they credit these materials and license any new creations drawing on them under identical terms.

Page last edited: 9th October 2022