About the Partition Portal

The Partition portal has been created as part of Ulster University, School of Education PhD project which investigates the educational potential of digitised historical artefacts in the A level classroom.

The Partition portal contains digitised artefacts selected for their relevance to the CCEA GCE A2 2 unit Partition of Ireland topic. These objects have been mapped to the A2 2 History specification and tagged with the relevant topics, sub-topics and key words.

Using artefacts in the classroom

The Partition portal contains a range of Partition-era historical objects including photographs, posters, postcards, documents and newsreels together with modern interpretations by historians.

There are a number of ways of using sources in the classroom. For example, they could be used as a stimulus at a start of a topic to stimulate debate; or at the end of a topic to consolidate a class’s learning.

There are a number of common approaches to analyzing, assessing and interpreting sources:

5Ws

• Who - Who wrote it? Do they have a particular background, insight or possible bias?
• What - What does it tell us? Does it provide a full account of events?
• When – When was the source made? Was it made at the time of the events taking place, or years later?
• Where – Where was the source made? Was the person involved in the event?
• Why – Why was the source made? To persuade or to inform? Why is it important?

Other ways to assess sources include:

DAMMACTO

Assessing the utility of a source use the DAMMACTO:

Use DAMMACTO to remember the different aspects of a source: Date, Author, Motive, Mode (type of source), Audience, Content, Tone and Omissions.

Some other useful guides can be found at:

• Terry Hadyn: Evidence and the use of sources in the history classroom
• The Historical Association's guide to analyse sources
• Library of Congress: Getting Started with Primary Sources
• Library of Congress: Primary Sources, Teachers' guides and Analysis tools
• National Archives (US) Document Analysis