ABSTRACT
Teaching young people about historical interpretations is a crucial element of history education and in England has been a formal part of the National Curriculum since it was first introduced. Indeed, in some senses its inclusion was a necessary guarantee that a national curriculum would not mean the imposition of a single view of the past. However, it has since caused considerable difficulties for teachers both in terms of understanding precisely what is required and how to teach it effectively. Essentially teaching about historical interpretations requires young people to see that our knowledge of the past is a construction rather than a direct copy of that past. Although constructing their own interpretations will help students to understand the nature of this process, the emphasis here is on understanding how and why the past has been interpreted in different ways, which of course requires knowledge of the context in which the different interpretations were constructed. The importance of teaching interpretations is explored in the first extract, whereas the other extracts focus on the challenges of teaching historical interpretations.
