This ethnographic study of writing and learning history, conducted in the context of a single, working class Year 8 classroom, had three goals: to describe significant referential contexts established individually by the class teacher and collaboratively with the researcher; to provide evidence of the kinds of writing and learning that occurred in response to Referential Source Encounters ( RSE) in those contexts; and to highlight certain patterns and insights connecting referential sources of evidence and information used in History lessons, and the writing students produced in transaction with them. Data collected as a result of participant observation in History lessons include both the Year 8 class teacher' s and student's spoken and written texts, with a range of such protocols forming the main corpus. It represents the content focus of lessons and allows analyses of interactions with texts. From these analyses, case studies of a student writer and his teacher focus on the relationships between teacher discourse and the assigned writing tasks students attempt. They contrast with teacher- researcher collaborations where students write in exploratory/ reflective and extensive modes. These findings suggest the need to plan for History curriculum critique and for construal into a framework for writing-to-learn history. From the perspective of a socially critical pedagogy, the proposed writing-to- learn history curriculum construal features historiography and evidential enquiry and reconstruction methodology as its organising principles.