How can we help students understand the Holocaust in its full historical complexity, particularly when they often come to class with misconceptions arising from the representation of the Holocaust in popular culture? Over a three-year period, Sam Ineson set out to integrate the historical Holocaust into his school's formal and informal curriculum,…

Elizabeth Marsay wanted to ensure that her students were not hindered in their causal explanations of the abolition of slavery by being exposed to overly categorical, simplistic, and monocausal narratives in the classroom. By drawing on both English and Canadian theorisation about causation, Marsay outlines how her introduction of competing…

Making a passionate case for teaching Black British history in the secondary school curriculum, Hannah shares here the personal journey she has travelled in planning for Black British history in her curriculum. She cites her inspirations and offers striking examples to illustrate her rationale and approach to teaching this history. Hannah…

Reflecting on challenges that had surfaced in their own and others' efforts to get pupils to write historical narratives, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie went back to the drawing board to consider the disciplinary purposes of narrative. They used both historical scholarship and theoretical works by historians on narrative construction. Their…

Convinced of the value of a good textbook as a teaching and learning resource, Alex Diamond set out to understand teachers' thinking about Holocaust textbooks and what it would be for a textbook to represent Holocaust history adequately. As Diamond's discussion shows, this is a multi-faceted issue. Evaluating textbook representation involves…

Mike Hill was concerned that his students were unable to genuinely inhabit the historical places they encountered in his lessons. Drawing on fields as varied as history-teacher research, philosophy, and literary and media theory, Hill identified ways to curate his students' constructions of 'secondary worlds' in the historical past, including…

Tom Bennett begins his article with a tale of a frustrating afternoon with Year 7. We've all been there. In his case, his frustration was caused by his finding a conceptual gap between how well his class wanted to do and the actual quality of their causal thinking. Bennett decided to use counterfactuals to improve their thinking. This article…

Building on research by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, Matthew Duncan was concerned that his students were drawn to simplistic explanations of Holocaust perpetrators' actions. As well as the UCL Centre's research, Duncan drew on history education research from Canada and history teachers' theorisation in England for inspiration in his…

Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives, which took full account of the chronological diversity of people's…

Frustrated by the generic statements that her Year 12 students were making about sources, Jacqueline Vyrnwy-Pierce resolved to undertake a research project into how her students were approaching sources about the French Revolution. Fascinated by the research of American educational psychologist Sam Wineburg, Vyrnwy-Pierce decided to use Wineburg's…

The raising of Henry VIII's warship, the "Mary Rose," from the sea bed set in train an extraordinary programme of interdisciplinary research, relentlessly pursuing the clues to Tudor life and death provided by the remains of the ship, its cargo and crew. In this article Clare Barnes offers fascinating insights into the way in which this…

Warren Valentine was dissatisfied with his Year 7 students' accounts of change across the Tudor period. Fixated with Henry VIII's wives, they failed to reflect on or analyse the bigger picture of the whole Tudor narrative. In order to overcome this problem, his department created a "thought-map" exercise in which students had to re-work…

As history departments in England prepare for the introduction of new GCSE specifications, the question of how to prepare students to succeed in the examination while also ensuring that they are taught rigorous history remains as relevant as ever. Faced with preparing students to answer a question that seemingly precluded argument, Rachel Foster…

Pressures on curriculum time force us all to make difficult choices about curriculum content, but the eighteenth century seems to have suffered particular neglect. Inspired by the tercentenary of the accession of the first Georgian king and the interest in the Acts of Union prompted by this year's referendum on Scottish independence, Katharine…

Michael McIntyre and Vanessa Hull explain the work of Facing History and Ourselves, an education organisation based in the United States and working internationally. Facing History aims to engage students in reflection on why violence occurred in the past, on what this teaches us about the world today and on our place and role within that world.…