It was during a rainy Bristol Tuesday breaktime that I realised why I was so flippant about including environmental history in my curriculum. ‘The climate, you see’, I said to my colleague Tamsin as I double-boiled the staffroom kettle, ‘can’t challenge you when you don’t include it.’

Kate Hawkey’s book History and the Climate Crisis had convinced me that I did need to include some teaching of climate change in my history curriculum, but I was resistant. It felt wrong. Why? Because it was alien, unfamiliar, other.

A new person joined my most-beloved What’s App group last month, and I was horrified when I saw her name appear. What if she interrupted the dynamic? What if she silenced another friend by dominating the group? What if she stole one of my best friends from me?

I soon realised that I had the same feeling about bringing in histories of the landscape, environment and climate into my history curriculum. How would the dynamic work in my curriculum if I shoehorned it in? What rhythms would be disrupted? What would I have to lose?

Richard Kennett and Alex Ford know the importance of those rhythms. They liken historical learning to a great ‘symphony’ in which ‘the teacher-conductor needs to be able to help their students understand how all the elements fit together.’ How and when do I bring in environmental histories so as not to interrupt my curriculum’s ‘rich symphony’?

And so I chose to ‘know my enemy’, and the more I knew, the more natural connections to existing curricula I identified. As Verity Morgan brilliantly wrote, ‘it’s a change of emphasis’. It’s moving the camera away from Cromwell’s warty face and towards his wetlands.

Big swathes of history – macro history – leaves me cold. Scale hopping is hard. Learning about the impact of decades of drainage or industrialisation on the climate doesn’t grab me. But a lightbulb lit up in my brain when I read the work of Rachel Foster on using biography in the classroom. Foster argues that we should ‘paint complex worlds in human scale.’ And I soon found a wonderful human to help me do this. You have probably never heard of her. She is called Eunice Foote. This is her story.

Eunice does all sorts of jobs for me.  Her story allows me to reinforce Year 8 pupils’ previous knowledge about:

Eunice also helps me to prepare my Year 8 and 9 pupils to study:

• Urbanisation
• Changes to transport (canals and railways)
• The growth of coal and textile industries during the Industrial Revolution
• Campaigns to secure women’s rights.

Eunice allows me to ‘build in’ discussion about climate change INTO the history curriculum that avoids instrumentalism. Kitson and Langdon identify four human ‘thresholds’ of change in the world’s climate.

I built in two of these thresholds into my story, forming two handholds in the ‘large scale’ history of climate change.

I’m a little in love with Eunice. When checking my story of Eunice with historian Roland Jackson, he said that we are still searching for an image of her. Perhaps I don’t need one? Perhaps I should be content with a mental picture of her with her pumps and jars, with her pamphlets and political statements.

You may have noticed that she provides one, very special opportunity: to tackle ‘silences’ in the curriculum.

Eunice’s work has arguably been silenced at the third moment: the moment of fact retrieval. The story of Raymond Sorenson’s rediscovery of Eunice’s work is an excellent opportunity to discuss silence and historical significance with pupils. It’s the reason why I begin Eunice’s story with Sorenson in 2011 rather than Eunice in 1848.

The story of Sorenson’s discovery therefore provides history teachers with an opportunity to discuss the concept of ‘changing histories’ with our students. Raymond Sorenson was excited about reading Eunice’s work in 2011 because our interests are changing. We, citizens of the twenty-first century, are newly interested in Eunice’s story because our world is changing and we want to understand how environments have changed. We are also interested in bringing in more women’s history.

Eunice was indeed like a meteor: her life and work now light up other aspects of my curriculum, and provide a new opportunity to improve pupils’ disciplinary thinking.

Key references in this blog post:

1. Ford, A. and Kennett, R. (2018) ‘Conducting the orchestra to allow our students to hear the symphony: getting richness of knowledge without resorting to fact overload’ in Teaching History, 171, Knowledge Edition, pp.8-16.
2. Foster, R. (2023) ‘Compressing and rendering’: using biography to teach big stories’ in Teaching History 190, Ascribing Significance Edition, pp.62-73.
3. Hawkey, K. (2023) History and the Climate Crisis, London: UCL Press
4. Jackson, R. (2018) The Ascent of John Tyndall, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. Kitson, A., and P. Langdon (2021), ‘How did we get here? Humans’ changing relationship with the natural world’. Schools History Conference, July.
6. Morgan, V. (2024) ‘Equestrian comrades and an octopus of mud: bringing environmental history into the classroom’ in Teaching History, 194, Environmental History Edition.