Teach Secondary Issue 14.7

classroom. Scaffolding the information and chunking the detail are effective ways of slowly taking pupils’ ‘known’ knowledge and playing around with what the evidence presents. What’s crucial is for teachers to show students that history can be legitimately reinterpreted when new evidence arises, whilst at the same time demonstrating how history can be distorted for political ends. Misrepresenting the past To take this one step further, we could look at how historical events have been used to write a new narrative with a distinctly political agenda. In 2007, Vladimir Putin saw to it that a wave of new statues dedicated to the last Romanov Tsar, Nicholas II, were sent to countries across eastern Europe. These statues have come to be seen as a means for Putin to connect his modern Russia with an earlier period of history, in a way that downplayed the role of the Soviet Union. They show Nicholas II as a powerful ruler, which isn’t how history has recorded the end of the Romanov dynasty. In fact, that isn’t even howNicholas saw himself at the time. Is this an example of a leader trying to paint a picture of his country’s past in a more powerful light, so as to draw connections between Russia and Europe prior to the Ukrainian war? From this vantage point, the statues certainly seem to presenting a more romanticised version of events that sidelines the reality of Nicholas’ rule while airbrushing the Soviet experience. Uncomfortable to teach Within our own country, the revisiting of historical topics such as the British Empire has caused a great deal of debate among historians, teachers and politicians. In 2018, a tweet posted by the HMTreasury Twitter account stated that, “ Millions of you helped end the slave trade through your taxes ”. This led to an outpouring of hostility, and the deletion of the tweet hours later. Many wonderful books have been published about Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, and the world that has been created because of it. The odd lesson looking at the Windrush generation, or schemes of work that address the transatlantic slave trade will oftenmiss the chance to look at how this period of British History has been interpreted in years gone by. It may be uncomfortable to teach, but it’s necessary if we’re to make our students rounded individuals, and able to move on from ‘ This is how things were... ’ to ‘ This is how history is written...? ’ Why itmatters History taught as fact is safe, but can often be misleading in terms of the truth it presents, and in howwe present the subject in the classroom. History taught as something that’s dynamic, contested and, yes, sometimes uncomfortable is far more realistic and powerful. It not only makes our students better historians, but equips themwith the skills to be discerning citizens, and alert to how the past can be written, rewritten and manipulated. So, next time a Y7 insists that ‘ Everyone died in Pompeii ,’ stop and think. You don’t just want to correct them. This is your chance to open the door to a journey that your history lessons should be taking. It isn’t just what happened, but ‘ How are we sure? ’ and ‘ Why are they writing that, in that time period? ’ ABOUT THE AUTHOR Philip Arkinstall is a lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire, Secondary Partnership Lead; prior to this he was a head of history in secondary schools for 19 years 63 teachwire.net/secondary H UM A N I T I E S