Comparing International Women’s Day protests with Year 10 students

While studying for his master’s degree in education, Arthur Casey became intrigued by research suggesting that analogies comparing past and present might improve students’ perceptions of the relevance of history. In this article he reports on the findings of his own small-scale research study, in which he used a present-day anaology to sharpen students’ understanding of the differences, as well as the similarities, between past and present. While acknowledging the risks of connecting past and present, Casey nonetheless argues that directly engaging with presentism foregrounds the inevitable role played by the present in mediating the past...