Diversity in the past

The materials in this section are all focused on the choices that teachers have to make about the substantive content of their curriculum. The diversity that all students encounter within the past – the range of specific individuals and groups of people about whom they learn – and the ways in which different topics are treated within the curriculum are known to impact on the extent to which young people engage with school history and on the connections that they see between past and present. The resources in this section illustrate different ways in which teachers have increased the diversity of their curriculum – paying more attention, for example, to women other than monarchs in the early modern period; examining the work of  Black British civil rights campaigners; or questioning the stereotype of the English ‘Tommy’ in examining who fought for Britain on the Western Front. Teachers will need to develop their own subject knowledge if they are to teach more diverse pasts and many of these resources help to provide some of that new knowledge or show where it can be found.

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  • How diverse is your history curriculum?

    Article

    The past was full of diverse people and our students are entitled to learn about this diverse past. History lessons should enable students to see their connection to the past and to understand the world today. Here are a list of questions for history teachers to use to support a...

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  • 'Britain was our home': Helping Years 9, 10, and 11 to understand the black experience of the Second World War

    Article

    In this article, Helena Stride shows how the Imperial War Museum responded to criticism that insufficient attention had been paid to the contribution of black and Asian people to Britain’s wars. She focuses on one of two resource-packs produced by the Museum, which highlights the experience of Britain’s colonial peoples,...

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  • 'Doing justice to history': the learning of African history in a North London secondary school

    Article

    ‘Doing justice to history': the learning of African history in a North London secondary school and teacher development in the spirit of ubuntu The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan observed many years ago and the ‘form' of what we do carries ‘content' as Hayden White has argued. This article...

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  • 'How our area used to be back then': An oral history project in an east London school

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. How can oral history enquiries engage students with the study of history and help them connect their learning about the past to their present lives? How can oral history engage and develop students' understanding of...

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  • 'Victims of history': Challenging students’ perceptions of women in history

    Article

    As postgraduate historians with teaching responsibilities at the University of York, Bridget Lockyer and Abigail Tazzyman were concerned to tackle some of the challenges reported by their students who had generally only encountered women’s history in a disconnected way through stand-alone topics or modules. Their response was to create a...

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  • A comparative revolution?

    Article

    Although the curriculum changes of 2008 brought with them new GCSE specifications, Jonathan White was disappointed by the dated feel of some ‘Modern World' options, particularly the depth studies on offer. Drawing on his experience of teaching comparative history within the International Baccalaureate, and building on previous arguments in Teaching History...

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  • Beyond tokenism: diverse history post-14

    Article

    Nick Dennis shows how a ‘multidirectional memory’ approach to teaching history can move history teachers beyond seeing black history as separate or distracting from the history that must be aught at examination level. He gives examples of ways in which a diverse history can be built into examination courses, strengthening...

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  • Bringing psychology into history: why do some stories disappear?

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. History is always a relationship between the present and the past and the meaning of the past shifts as values and events change in the present. In this article Anne Llewellyn and Helen Snelson use...

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  • Bringing school into the classroom

    Article

    The Secondary Education and Social Change (SESC) research project team at the University of Cambridge collaborated with four secondary school history teachers to produce resource packs for teaching Key Stage 3 pupils about post-war British social history through the history of secondary education. In this article, Chris Jeppesen explains the...

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  • CARGO Classroom: digital resources for diverse histories

    17th March 2021

    To address the urgent need for digital learning resources, and to address the imbalance of perspectives in the History curriculum, CARGO Classroom is now providing multimedia learning tools for Key Stage 3 History via a freely accessible, interactive website: cargomovement.org/classroom “CARGO is about doing. We talk a lot. We talk about...

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  • Circle Time in the secondary history classroom

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Circle Time is a commonly used technique in primary classrooms and is sometimes used in secondary personal and social education lessons. This open form of classroom organisation allows pupils to share opinions in a democratic...

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  • Cunning Plan 143: enquiries about the British empire

    Article

    I wanted to give my Year 8 students ownership of their work on the British Empire by allowing them to suggest our ‘enquiry question'. In order to introduce the Empire, I brought in sugar, spices, bananas, chilli peppers and cotton. I then showed maps demonstrating the Empire at its height....

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  • Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution

    Article

    ‘Disastrous and terrible.’ For Arnold Toynbee, the historian who gave us the phrase ‘industrial revolution’, these three words sum up the period of dramatic technological change that took place in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We may not habitually use Toynbee’s description in the classroom, but it is...

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  • Cunning Plan 173: using Black Tudors as a window into Tudor England

    Article

    On 29 September 2018 I was fortunate enough to get involved with a collaborative project with Dr Miranda Kaufmann, the Historical Association, Schools History Project, and a brilliant group of people from different backgrounds all committed to teaching about black Tudors. In this short piece, I will share how I...

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  • Cunning Plan 183: Teaching a broader Britain, 1625–1714

    Article

    ‘Gruesome!’ was how we decided to describe our teaching of seventeenth-century British history, although ‘inadequate’ was probably more accurate. Oh, how much was wrong!  We had… Incoherence. The Civil War and Protectorate years plonked in between the Elizabethan Age and the origins of the industrial revolution. We had lost years! A...

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  • Cunning Plan 185… for building difference into GCSE curriculum design

    Article

    Many history teachers have been busy making space in their curriculum plans for different sorts of histories. This process, as Priyamavda Gopal has argued (in response to claims that moves to decolonise the curriculum constitute an attempt to censor history by editing out those bits viewed as ‘stains’ on the nation’s...

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  • Cunning Plan 186: teaching Samurai Japan in Key Stage 3

    Article

    Like many history departments we have been seeking to develop schemes of work that are more outward-looking, and, as the National Curriculum describes, ‘enable pupils to know and understand significant aspects of world history’.  To my mind, Samurai Japan offers students the opportunity to explore a time and place that is...

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  • Cunning Plan 191: diving deep into ‘history from below’ with Year 8

    Article

    Can the ‘subaltern’ speak, Year 8s? When the Indian scholar and literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked this question in 1988, she wasn’t asking Year 8s on a Monday morning. What she wanted to explore was whether those marginalised people written out of the archive – ‘the subaltern’ – could...

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  • Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in the KS3 history curriculum

    Article

    In this article, Dan Lyndon-Cohen makes the case that history departments should move from diversifying the curriculum to decolonising it. After reflecting on some examples of how he made the content of his lessons more representative, he explores how the influence of writers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Emma Dabiri...

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  • Decolonising sources: helping Year 9 pupils critically evaluate colonial sources

    Article

    Danielle Donaldson’s history department was already working within a professional culture that sought opportunities for making the history curriculum diverse and representative. Responding to wider debates within and beyond the history education community, however, the department began to ask fresh questions about what it meant to decolonise a curriculum. Donaldson...

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