Whilst the theoretical underpinning and rationale for deeper learning presented and discussed in Chapter 4 is based on current thinking and research by academics and educators, its interpretation, application and actual implementation is challenging. Understanding the mechanisms of deeper learning is one thing. Generating and sustaining learner commitment and achievement is another.

This chapter considers the idea of history, in its broadest sense, as it applied during the early Middle Ages. How were people and events of the past pictured, structured and recreated? When and why were they written about? Since we as modern historians depend so heavily on the historical writings of previous generations, from the period we are looking at to our own, ideas of what history is and how it works are topics of central importance. The case studies pursued in this chapter exemplify different ways in which the past was treated. Genre, audience and context were crucial: individual writers each had their own concerns to pursue. At the heart of the issue are of course texts that called themselves histories, which were written as coordinated, authoritative accounts of the past. But even these were composed according to the expectations of the day, with different valances assigned to truth, embellishment and objectivity. Æthelweard’s Chronicle, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain represent three distinct deployments of this tradition. But ‘history’ was far from the only way of handling the past. Other genres deployed accounts of historical figures and events, including heroic verse (Beowulf) and pithy genealogical inscriptions (the Pillar of Eliseg).

This final chapter has two aims. One is to give an outline of the shape of Britain, and of its subsequent developments, in the eleventh century. These included the establishment of a new dynasty in Alba, and the Norman Conquest of England, the latter leading to realignment of the relations between all the major powers of Britain, as well as between the British kingdoms and mainland Europe. The second main aim is to isolate some of the overarching changes in the period covered by this volume.

Language is a fundamental element of life and identity, and can serve to divide or unite, to clarify or obfuscate, and to empower or diminish. This chapter examines aspects of language in early medieval Britain, a place that saw important changes in what tongues people used and the connotations they carried. Four themes will guide us as we go along. The first two are the roles of Latin and the various vernacular languages. Third is the interaction of those languages when they came in contact with each other. Finally, we will look at the functions of writing.

This chapter explores further the implications for extending Deeper Learning Episodes and provides some initial guiding questions which position educators as designers of learnscapes.

The design, guidance and supervision of learnscapes requires alternative approaches to teaching and learning which call on a wide range of competences. Learnscaping requires reconceptualising how we grow shared, safe, plurilingual learning spaces. These spaces normalise digital learning. They seek to provide engaging opportunities for promoting learning based on increasingly challenging subject understanding, enabled by individual language progression – that is, all the components brought together into a learning ecology.

This chapter looks at how the idea of Britain evolved during the early Middle Ages. As there was mostly no single authority that could exercise hegemony over the whole island, it represented a fragmented political space, and generally featured in the minds of contemporaries more as a physical reality, or as an idea, a claim to power that could be projected on to neighbours through thinking of the past. Here, three specific eras of thinking about Britain will be assessed: that of Gildas in the immediately post-Roman centuries; that of Bede and the Historia Brittonum in the eighth and ninth centuries; and finally the tenth century, when claims to rule over all Britain were made and pursued by kings of the English, provoking responses from observers in western and northern parts of the island.

Britain between 650 and 850 still consisted of numerous competing kingdoms, which in this period can be thought of as moving in three broadly distinct orbits: North Britain beyond the Firth of Forth, which was the domain of the Pictish and Dál Riatan kingdoms; middle Britain, between the Forth and the Humber, which was dominated by the powerful kingdom of Northumbria; and south Britain below the Humber, within which the Mercians were pre-eminent among the English and Brittonic kingdoms for most of the period described here, with Wessex emerging as a stronger player along and south of the Thames, especially in the ninth century. This chapter examines these three segments in turn, with final consideration of economic developments, and the initial encroachment of the vikings, that cut across wider geographical divisions.

Chapter 5 outlined the need to bring student affect and growth required for deeper learning into the frame. At the same time, the role of the teacher – in terms of facilitating growth by creating the most conducive conditions for learning and progression – is embedded in ecological processes which stimulate and refine effective meaning making and knowledge construction. Supporting learners to ‘own’ learning goals and engage in subject development through a commitment to the successful achievement of those goals, however, is dependent on complementary actions and ways of being by the teacher.

Dede echoes these thoughts when he states that the focus of educational technology has turned from ‘artificial intelligence to amplifying the intelligence of teachers and students’ (2014, p. 7). He calls for teaching strategies and principles which are geared towards deeper learning and which integrate the use of information and communications technology (ICT) because ‘technology as a catalyst is effective only when used to enable learning with richer content, more powerful pedagogy, more valid assessments, and links between in- and out-of-classroom learning’ (Dede, 2014, p. 6).