Teaching History Concepts: Cause and Effect

A cartoon depicting the European nations discussing the future of Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884

I guess the first thing I should point out before I get stuck into this is that, at present, there is no History Continuum of Concepts and Skills for Stage 6.

That aside, the Continuum is still highly relevant when it comes to Year 11 and 12 students, so I tend to program for Preliminary and HSC Modern History with the top end of these concepts and skills in mind. In an ideal world, the more capable students in Year 11 Modern History would already have a solid grasp of the Stage 5 Concepts, but, as my fellow History teachers should know, this isn't always the case.

These are the concepts from the Continuum just in case you wanted to see them and didn't feel like googling it:

• Continuity and Change
• Cause and Effect
• Perspectives
• Empathetic Understanding
• Significance
• Contestability 

And the skills:

• Comprehension of chronology, terms and concepts
• Analysis and use of sources
• Perspectives and Interpretations
• Empathetic Understanding
• Research
• Explanation and Communication

As you can see, there's a bit of crossover because some of these are things that need to be understood and applied. I don't want to try and deconstruct or explain the whole continuum, instead, I thought I could use this as an opportunity to talk about just one concept and a way that I try to teach it to Preliminary students.

Cause and Effect in Modern Europe

A perfect example of where Cause and Effect can be taught is the mandatory Preliminary Modern History Core Study: The World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. During this topic students look at (among other things) the short and long term causes of World War I. Two such long term causes are Nationalism and Imperialism (I like to capitalise them in the hope that I impress upon my students how important these concepts are in understanding the subject).

These aren't exactly easy concepts to teach to 16 year-olds. One of the hoarier parts of understanding history is getting your head around the ideas that propel the big changes, and 19th Century Europe is absolutely gorged full of such 'big' ideas. Marxism, Nationalism, Imperialism, the Enlightenment, Egalitarianism, Industrialisation, Darwinism, Anarchism... these are the things that make Modern History so interesting and important. A student with a truly solid understanding of where these things come from will, mark my words, become a much more politically rounded and awakened adult. This is why History matters so much!

Ahem. Sorry, I'll get off that soapbox now.

The activity is relatively simple. Students are shown a timeline of European events between 1000 and 1914 (the resource can be found at the bottom of this page). This timeline is fairly broad and aims to draw multiple lines of cause and effect leading up to the outbreak of World War I. The thing with History is that 'cause and effect' is arguably quite subjective. This is why we continue to contest the major causes of World War I. So what I wanted to do with this activity is have students come up with their own causal relationships between events. Anyway, these are the events:

A. 1000-1790: Europe ruled over by monarchies.

B. 1600-1830: Europe uses slave labour to build colonies overseas.

C. 1790: The French Revolution

D. 1800s: French Republic

E. 1830-1850: Slavery outlawed.

F. 1850: Revolutions throughout Europe.

G. 1871: Various smaller European states form into the nation of Germany.

H. 1860-1900: Austro-Hungarian Empire struggles with smaller ethnic groups within Empire.

I. 1870-1914: The major European countries reach various levels of industrialisation.

J. 1884: The Berlin Conference

K 1885-1900: The Scramble for Africa.

L. 1900-1914: European Empires stretch out across the world.

By this point in the core topic, students will already have been taught most of these things. Their goal now is to join them up to each other.

The question that accompanies this timeline is: How do each of these events/eras connect to each other? Write an explanation of how each dot point connects or changes into another.

Theoretically, students could connect any of these dots to any of the others (within reason). One example given on the sheet is the 1790 entry.

EG. 1790: French Revolution - The French become the first European nation to reject their aristocracy, leading to the execution of the French royal family (this links to Event A)

Other examples, not included on the sheet, could be:

• Linking K to J. 
• Linking the revolutions of c. 1850 (oft-called the 'Springtime of the Peoples') to the success of C or D.
• Drawing parallels between the self-determination of ethnic groups in H with the birth of French nationalism in C.
• The rules of the Berlin Conference (J) and their relationship with the outlawing of slavery (E)
• The outlawing of slavery (E) resulting from the charter created by the French people in C.
• Linking L to I.

And so on. There are a lot of other opportunities for connections to be made, and I was surprised at some of the ideas that my students were able to identify in the timeline. The main point was that the students were able to come up with their own 'cause and effect' relationships, which demonstrates the subjective nature of History when it comes to this kind of stuff. It's very historiographical too, which should help set some students up nicely for Extension History in Year 12.

Click to Save/Download - Resource: Cause and Effect