But in neither case did we probe qu

But in neither case did we probe quite what these teachers meant by these statements. What,for example, does it mean to understand things in history on different levels? What makes something simpler? What is the pervading level of understanding in history? Why is that possible? Other current research on history teachers(Cunningham 2002) suggests that at least some history teachers do indeed have very clear ideas here, but to unearth these she had to dig very deep in her questioning and work with teachers over an extended period of time. The picture that emerged for us was a fuzzy one, combining elements of what the teachers knew about school history with what they knew about how pupils learn. Hence what they wanted the pupils to understand was generally, a reflection of what they knew about the history. Where the teachers had been both very clear and specifc about the history embedded in their lessons, so too were they clear about what it was they wanted the pupils to understand. The key in coming to understand these things seemed to be a process of building blocks, with some ideas or skills mastered first and others later. Thus, understanding why Hitler came to power had to be broken down into a number of different reasons and each looked at in turn, so that gradually each factor would be understood in its own right and as a contributory factor in the overall picture. Similarly, to answer the question of why the Good Friday Agreement was possible, a number of different reasons needed to be explored before an understanding of the final answer could emerge. For one teacher, different processes were associated with the stages in building understanding: there was knowledge acquisition, knowledge application and knowledge implementation, while for several of the teachers, developing some sort of base of contextual factual knowledge was clearly a prerequisite for any type of evaluation or judgement. Linking ideas and information was clearly important for the teachers, but what the nature of these linkages needed to be was not evident. We are puzzled by our findings here. Many of our conversations with the teachers and our experience in their lessons suggested that they have strong images of pupils' understanding in history and if examination results in history are any guide at all to this, the success of former pupils is testimony to the quality of historical understanding developed by these teachers. It may be that our failure to gain good access to this aspect of their expertise is no more than a reflection of our methods. It may be that for experienced history teachers this aspect of their expertise is so interlinked with their knowledge of school history and their knowledge of how pupils learn that it does not make sense to try and disentangle the two.But it may also be that it is an aspect of their knowledge that could usefully be articulated more. Articulating what is hard to understand and why, what is easier, exactly what progress might look like in history in all its forms,what the necessary links are, what the foundation stones are, could all provide the basis for valuable disussion within history departments and especially for beginning teachers. The one clear piece of the fuzzy picture was the notion
that stuents understanding in history had to be built up and that is something that many beginners stuggle with.