Associate Professor in Holocaust and History Education

Dr Tom Haward

Tom teaches across the Centre’s professional development programmes, including the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programme, the Centre’s CPD programme 'Unpacking the Holocaust' and twilight sessions for schools.

Tom started at the Centre in September 2015 following a varied career in education. He has over 20 years’ experience in secondary school teaching, mainly in Sussex, and just before joining the Centre was Director of Learning in an 11-18 comprehensive school in West Sussex. Additionally, he has worked closely with the University of Sussex on their ITE programme, to which he was recently seconded as an Associate Fellow in History ITE. He has also taught abroad, both in Zimbabwe as a VSO volunteer, and in Brazil, where he helped set up a new school.

His expertise, particularly relating to the teaching of the Holocaust, has developed through his work as a member of a variety of network groups, most notably with the IWM’s “Their Past Your Future” programme. He has also been part of an ESRC-funded Sussex Scholar scheme run with the National Archives, and an AHRC-funded group investigating notions of “Memory, Myth and Empathy” in which he delivered a workshop entitled “A Trail of Three Cities: Bristol, Liverpool and London,” examining the value of historical walking trails as sites of learning.

A key interest of Tom’s for some time has been in how students learn visually. Following some initial school-based action research into the field of visual learning with the University of Brighton, he has published material consisting of a collection of visual resources and teaching strategies which was a double-finalist at the British Education Resource Awards. His Doctorate in Education (EdD) looked at the way students and teachers experience the use of visual sources in the teaching of history, and how these can be developed. A central element of this is an examination of how students construct meaning and knowledge. There is an educational research blog, which can be found at http://visuallearningsussex.blogspot.co.uk/, which Tom writes to share ideas and his own development as a learner.

Tom has also trained with SAPERE on the teaching of P4C (Philosophy for Children), and has developed the use of a Community of Enquiry approach to teaching and learning, and the use  of Socratic questioning, in his own teaching and research. Links established with American institutions have further broadened Tom’s outlook and approach to the teaching of History. As well as studying at Kansas University, he has been awarded a Monticello-Barringer Fellowship to study at the ICJS and University of Virginia, and has spent part of the summer of 2015 working with other historians and history teachers at Stanford University, with the Gilder-Lehrman Institute.

Selected publications

Haward, T. (2005) Seeing History: Visual Learning Resources and Strategies for KS3. Stafford: Network Educational Press Ltd.

Haward, T. (2007) The Practical Guide to Independent Learning Skills. Stafford: Network Continuum Education

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