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.

Sort by: Date (Newest first) | Title A-Z
Show: All | Articles | Podcasts | Multipage Articles
  • How should women’s history be included at Key Stage 3?

    Article

    Susanna Boyd ‘discovered’ women’s history while studying for her own history degree, and laments women’s continued absence from the school history curriculum. She issues a call-to-arms to make the curriculum more inclusive both by re-evaluating the criteria for curricular selection and by challenging established disciplinary conventions. She also weighs up...

    Click to view
  • Identity in history: why it matters and must be addressed!

    Article

    Sophia Nzeribe Nascimento, a mixed-race teacher working in a diverse London school, set out to explore her students’ assumptions about who historians are. While her own ethnicity and gender may have convinced at least some of her students that history is not exclusively the preserve of old white men, she...

    Click to view
  • Identity shakers: cultural encounters and the development of pupils' multiple identities

    Article

    History teachers are increasingly used to the idea that helping pupils reflect on and understand identities is one of the central purposes of history education. In this article Jamie B yrom and Michael Riley reflect on what thinking about identity historically might mean; by considering the history of encounters between...

    Click to view
  • Illuminating the possibilities of the past

    Article

    Claire Holliss reports here on the ways in which she has responded over time to the call to ‘do justice’ to the histories of those long neglected within the school curriculum.  Reflection on the need to ensure that the discipline of history remained central to any reform prompted her to...

    Click to view
  • In pursuit of shared histories: uncovering Islamic history in the secondary classroom

    Article

    In 2005, in a Teaching History article entitled, ‘A need to know’, Nicolas Kinloch built an argument for teaching the history of Islamic civilisations to all pupils. Afia Chaudhry returns to this theme, reflecting deeply on the needs of her own students – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – within a...

    Click to view
  • Inclusive approaches to teaching Elizabeth I at GCSE

    Multipage Article

    The events of recent years led many to reflect upon the diversity of representation of their history curricula, what they teach and how they teach it. In the autumn of 2020 the Historical Association convened a diversity steering group of key stakeholders in history education. Over the course of the...

    Click to view
  • Integrating black British history in the National Curriculum

    Article

    The question of what to include is a constant challenge to those given the responsibility of education, whether writing at the level of a national curriculum or the departmental scheme of work. Dan Lyndon and his department have been rethinking inclusion in history. In any school, representative history is essential...

    Click to view
  • Inventing race? Using primary sources to investigate the origins of racial thinking in the past

    Article

    Having been given some additional curriculum time, Kerry Apps and her department made decisions about what had been missing in the previous curriculum diet. Building on an existing enquiry (in TH 176), Apps decided to focus on how and when the idea of race in its modern sense developed in early modern...

    Click to view
  • Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement

    Article

    Inspired by reading the work of Stephen Tuck, Ellie Osborne set out to design a new sequence of lessons that would help her students adopt a longer lens on the American civil rights movement. At the same time, Osborne wanted to put more emphasis on the agency and campaigns of activists,...

    Click to view
  • Move Me On 183: sees no reason to include Black or Asian British history

    Article

    Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...

    Click to view
  • Move Me On 192: analytical focus with diverse histories

    Article

    Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...

    Click to view
  • Music, blood and terror: making emotive and controversial history matter

    Article

    Lomas and Wrenn, co-authors and compilers of the Historical Association’s DfES-funded T.E.A.C.H 3-19 Report (Teaching Emotive and Controversial History), explore further ideas and examples of good practice from issues arising out of the report’s conclusions. Lomas and Wrenn propose five distinct categories of emotive and controversial history that further develop...

    Click to view
  • New, Novice or Nervous? 173: including BME history in the curriculum

    Article

    This page is for those new to the published writings of history teachers. Each problem you wrestle with, other teachers have wrestled with too. Quick fixes don’t exist. But in others’ writing, you’ll find something better: conversations in which history teachers have debated or tackled your problems – conversations which any history teacher...

    Click to view
  • No more ‘doing’ diversity

    Article

    Catherine Priggs and her history department colleagues were increasingly concerned that their curriculum was too narrow. They feared that major areas of history were being left out and that many of their own pupils were not seeing themselves, in their various ethnic, cultural and world identities, in the past. Priggs...

    Click to view
  • Northamptonshire in a Global Context

    Article

    Produced by the Northamptonshire Black History Association and originally published in 2008, this is one of a set of resources for schools offering a more inclusive map of the past that includes an appreciation of Black History within the local, national and global context. The resources provide a range of opportunities to promote diversity within the curriculum....

    Click to view
  • Nutshell 135: The challenge of analysing 'difference'

    Article

    Hello Nutshell. What's all this stuff in the NC Attainment Target about ‘nature', ‘extent' and ‘interplay' of diversity? The trick is to look behind the word ‘diversity'. Then it all makes sense...

    Click to view
  • Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum

    Article

    In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department’s efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He...

    Click to view
  • Polychronicon 113: slavery in 20th-century America

    Article

    Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' is on 'Interpreting...

    Click to view
  • Polychronicon 173: From American Indians to Native Americans

    Article

    Few sub-fields of American history have undergone as many changes over time as the study of Native Americans/American Indians. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians portrayed Native Americans as savage barbarians or ignored them entirely, late twentieth-century historians portrayed them as victims of circumstance and aggressive European conquest. Today, modern...

    Click to view
  • PowerPoint presentation on developing ways to mainstream Black and Asian British history

    Article

    A new PowerPoint presentation by Dan Lydon on developing ways to mainstream Black and Asian British history in the secondary classroom...Click the link below to open the presentation>>>

    Click to view