This chapter reports on a study that examines the cultivation of values in teaching ancient history in an Australian junior secondary school classroom. We focus on how the values of ‘democracy’ are discussed in learning about ‘city-states and governments in Ancient Greece’. Our analysis makes visible the language resources used to establish ‘democratic’ values and how these values are transmitted in the discourse of teaching and learning. We first identify three sources of evaluation – including the school’s history perspective, the teacher’s perspective, and the perspective of Australian citizens. We show that as the source of evaluation changes, different types of ‘democratic’ value are enacted. Democracy is formulated as a set of values enacted by clusters of evaluations, in opposition to what is evaluated as ‘non-democracy’. We also consider how the teacher confirms or rejects instances of evaluation as they work to form ‘bonds’, aligning students into a community of shared values. The chapter makes explicit the fact that in building knowledge of history, ‘what you know’ and ‘how you feel’ construct ‘who you are’.

In this chapter we explore the teaching of ancient history in an Australian junior secondary school classroom, focusing particularly on how the knowledge of government in city-states in Ancient Greek are developed. We show that an important part of knowledge building in ancient history involves ‘factoring out’ the meanings which are condensed in technical terms – characterised informally as ‘flexi-tech’ because of the weakly classified nature of the terms. Throughout two history lessons, the teacher guides the students to think ‘critically’ about how types of government are categorised. We show that while Spartan government is referred to in different pedagogic materials as a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a military state, as the lessons unfold the teacher repositions Spartan government as a complex structure – comprising elements of different kinds, including specific elements of democracy. Our analysis focuses on how this repositioning is achieved and what kind of ‘critical thinking’ is involved.