This site is maintained by Arthur Chapman – a history educator and history education researcher. I taught history and a number of humanities and social science subjects to 16-19 year-olds for 12 years in Surrey and Cornwall, and history to adults in summer schools in Oxford for 11 years. Since 2005, I’ve worked as a full-time history educator at the universities of Cumbria, Edge Hill and London and I am currently Professor of History Education at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, where I work on doctoral education programmes, on IOE’s MA Education (History), and where I supervise doctoral students. 

You can hear me talking with Humera Iqbal about my work and aspects of its development overtime in this UCL Institute of Education Research for the Real World podcast:

• Why do we need to focus on knowledge and the curriculum? Research for the Real World, 18th January 2021

I am the managing editor of the History Education Research Journal (HERJ), a series editor of the International Review of History Education and of the Knowledge and The Curriculum book series. I was a regular contributor to  Public History Weekly, in 2016-23 and stood down as Deputy Director in 2024. I was an editor and then associate editor of Teaching History between 2007 and 2015, I edited the September 2022 edition of the journal, and I subsequebtly rejoined the Teaching History editorial team as an associate editor.

In addition to my university teaching and editing work, I have acted as an education consultant in England: for NAGTY, on high achievement in history;  for the QCA, on the history attainment target and on Assessing Pupil Progress in history; for Ofqual on international comparisons at Advanced Level and on standards over time in history examinations; for local authorities in Tyneside and Liverpool and for the Harris  Federation, The Prince’s Trust and Teach First. I have also worked as an educational consultant for governments and NGOs in Armenia, Cyprus, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. I have been invited to keynote at academic conferences and / or to present seminars (for example) in Brazil, Chile, Finland, Lebanon, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland and I have been a visiting scholar at the universities of  Paraná, Hiroshima and Karlstad and at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In June 2024 I was elected a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Council of Europe’s Observatory on History Teaching in Europe.

In addition to work on school and college history education, I have contributed to history teacher training initiatives focused on undergraduate history, for example, by working with the East Midlands Centre for History Teaching and Learning providing support for beginning history lectures in developing their teaching and by contributing to the revision of  the History Benchmark Statement for undergraduate history degrees for QAA. In 2007-2012 the Higher Education Academy (HEA) funded my History Virtual Academy project which focused on making links between sixth form students and teachers and historians in universities. In 2013/14 I collaborated with History and History Education colleagues at the universities of Edge Hill and Roehampton on an HEA-funded project on Developing Historical Thinking that aimed to use digital tools to help undergraduate historians progress in their first year introdutory courses on historical methods and concepts.

You can access most of my publications via my academia.edu site and my amazon page. A selection of publications, relevant to themes addressed in this blog, are hyperlinked from the Causal Reasoning and Historical Interpretations pages of this blog.

Page last edited: 24th July 2024