Recently, as a family, we’ve been watching the classic Mr Bean series. Now we’re about 8 episodes in, I’ve started to reflect on how my own children are accessing and understanding the programmes from a historical perspective. The largely visual comedy is both ageless and timeless, but Mr Bean’s world is not.
From the Mini Cooper Mr Bean drives, the prevalence of Reliant Robins on the road, the phone he uses and the 4-channel television that requires him to manually switch over, to the stereotypical depictions (or notable absence) of certain people in society, the series is unquestionably based in and reflective of the popular values of early 1990s Britain. And it is this context that influences so much of the trajectory of the storylines because it determines Mr Bean’s framework for understanding the world and, therefore, what is and isn’t possible in his decision making.
While I’ve been watching this programme with my children, ‘seeing’ the series through their eyes, it is these peripheral, contextual things that suddenly jump out at me. For me, the world Mr Bean inhabits is evocative of my teenage years living in a pre-internet, economically depressed 1990s Britain. For my children, this world is both simultaneously strange and strangely familiar. As they watch this series unfold, they are noticing how Mr Bean’s world jars with the world they now inhabit. They are asking questions and making observations, not just about the comedy but also about the changes they can recognise have occurred since the programme was filmed.
Understanding the recent past
This has got me thinking about some lessons I’ve observed over the last year or so which have touched on late C20th history – the Fight for Rights in 1960s and 70s Britain at Key Stage 3 or the Making of Modern Britain at A Level, for example. Do we assume too much of our pupils when we teach these most modern of modern history topics? Do we do enough to world build for pupils, helping them to understand the decision making of people in the past – even if that past feels reasonably reminiscent of now? And do we make as much of a big deal with our beginning teachers about developing a sense of period for the 1980s as we do for their teaching of the Medieval or Tudor period? After all, it’s worth remembering that the 1980s are as remote for pupils today as the end of the Second World War was for me as a secondary school pupil in the 1990s.
In a recent observation of a Yr12 lesson exploring the winter of discontent, I witnessed sixth form students who had a strong specific subject knowledge of 1970s political climate. The beginning teacher who had been working with them was keen to support them to understand the lived experience of people in this period by making comparisons to current experiences of inflation, the cost-of-living crisis and strike action. They had been well taught, and yet, on some level, students still couldn’t quite connect with the motivation for some of the behaviour and decision making they were witnessing in the history. Their sense of the world in which the political protagonists were operating was limited by their grasp of the peripheral detail of people’s lives in the 1970s and their conflation of that period with the present. In static images and politicians’ speeches, people’s lived experience didn’t look a million miles away from their own, and yet it was of course fundamentally different.
Building a sense of period
There are many different ways to build a sense of period – Ian Dawson (2009) observed that he was never ‘taught to develop a sense of period. It seemingly happened while [he] wasn’t looking’ (p. 50). Of course, the subconscious acquisition of a sense of period, doesn’t mean that its communication hasn’t been carefully designed. Indeed, Mike Hill (2020) explored the ways in which history teachers engage in a process of ‘curating the imagined past’, whilst Jonnie Grande (2022) demonstrated how valuing the hinterland knowledge pupils acquire along their learning journey can be just as, if not more important, as the destination knowledge at which they arrive. Hammond (2014) meanwhile, demonstrated how crucial ‘period knowledge’ and ‘wider historical knowledge’ is, in addition to more specific ‘topic knowledge’, for pupils seeking to develop effective historical arguments (pp. 22-23).
My meanderings into the world of Mr Bean have made me wonder whether, when teaching late C20th (and in short-order, early C21st) history, we should seek to make the unfamiliarity of the familiar more obvious. Might making space to weave the wider narrative into our curriculum, to provide pupils with a rich hinterland understanding of the past (Counsell, 2018) be even more important when it comes to the relatively more recent past, where ahistorical misconceptions can abound more readily (and potentially with greater ease) in the minds of our pupils. It also made me wonder whether we are more inclined to draw on film and television ‘interpretations’ of periods with pupils than on contemporarily filmed media ‘sources’, which are evocative of the period precisely because they embody that moment in history by being that moment in history?
As for me, I’m going to head back down the rabbit hole that is Mr Bean, enjoying it as much for the waves of nostalgia it evokes in me as for the unbridled laughter it provokes from my children.
References
Counsell, C. (2018) Senior Curriculum Leadership 1: The indirect manifestation of knowledge: (A) curriculum as narrative. Retrieved from The Dignity of the Thing Blog: https://thedignityofthethingblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/07/senior-curriculum-leadership-1-the-indirect-manifestation-of-knowledge-a-curriculum-as-narrative/
Dawson, I. (2009). What time does the tune start: From thinking about a “sense of period” to modelling history at Key Stage 3. Teaching History 135, 50-57.
Grande, J. (2022). #6 This week in history… why the hinterland is core. Retrieved from Curricular Pasts: Reflections from a history classroom: #6 This week in history… why the hinterland is core. | Curricular Pasts: reflections from a history classroom (wordpress.com)
Hammond, K. (2014). The knowledge that ‘flavours’ a claim. Teaching History 157, 18-24.
Hill, M. (2020). Curating the imagined past: world building in the history curriculum. Teaching History, 180, 10-20.
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