Arthur Chapman is Professor of History Education and Head of Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment at IOE, UCL Insitute of Education, University College London. He holds degrees in History (BA) and Social and Political Science (MPhil) from the University of Cambridge and a Doctor in Education degree, in History Education, from the University of London. Arthur is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association and a School's History Project Fellow and member of the SHP's Council. He is Editor-in-Chief of the History Education Research Journal, and series editor of The International Review of History Education and the open access UCL Press book series Knowledge and The Curriculum. More here.

1. Introduction: multiperspectivity

For over twenty-five years now, history teaching in Europe has been greatly influenced by the concept of ‘multiperspectivity’ and the work of the Council of Europe, and organisations like EuroClio – European Association of History Educators, have been central in developing this focus, the subject of a now “classic” Council of Europe publication (Stradling 2003). 

Multiperspectivity, in Stradling’s influential definition "is a way of viewing, and a predisposition to view, historical events, personalities, developments, cultures and societies from different perspectives through drawing on procedures and processes which are fundamental to history as a discipline” (Stradling 2003: 14).

Multiperspectivity has been prioritised for many inter-related reasons. It is inherent in good history – which involves exploring ways of seeing and experiencing that are not readily available in the present. It is vital to good citizenship education, since valuing democracy in our complex present involves commitment to pluralism and to learning to live together with others in complex societies which contain many contrasting ways of seeing. It is important in the European context, where advancing the European project means understanding multiple national identities, trying to move beyond often deep-seated inter-group conflicts, and trying to build inclusive approaches to national and supra-national identity.

The OHTE’s 2024 general report included many indications that multiperspectivity was well-embedded in curriculum thinking in the member states of OHTE (Observatory on History Teaching in Europe 2024). There were, however, still concerns about the extent to which it was present in resources and textbooks. The report also argued that it remained hard to get a "clear picture” of multiperspectivity’s deployment in classroom practice and called for “future in-depth studies of how multiperspectivity is articulated at the level of actual history classes, and what types of resources and/or activities are used to familiarise students with a multiperspectival approach to history” (Observatory on History Teaching in Europe 2024: 145). This is not the place for such a study, but one of the things I can do here is point to existing work in the area of multiperspectivity that can, perhaps, help take forward that call to action, and further strengthen teaching in this vital area of historical learning.
 

2. Decentring and defamiliarisation: modelling multiperspectivity

We can distinguish, I think, between two approaches to multiperspectivity – on the one hand, an affective and situational approach, and, on the other, a more cognitive and representational approach. 

The first approach requires pedagogies that develop students’ abilities to decentre from their default personal and contextual ways of seeing the world, that help them try to see the world as others with different origins, beliefs and experiences see it, and try to appreciate the different points of view that different groups of actors in the past or in the present can have on events, developments, states of affairs or significant figures. This approach closely links “promoting historical empathy” and “multiperspectivity”, to borrow from the wording of an item in the 2024 OHTE general report (Observatory on History Teaching in Europe 2024: 104). 

The second approach links closely not to “empathy” but to other historical thinking concepts and strategies – to what are referred to as “interpretations” in England (Chapman 2010) and to what German traditions of history didactics call “deconstruction” (Körber 2021). This approach requires that we develop pedagogies that help students to defamiliarise more than decentre – to look closely at things that may have been taken for granted (meaning and ways of meaning-making) and to examine closely how they work. 

My focus, in this short paper, will be on the second approach to multiperspectivity.

I will focus on strategies to help learners recognise where perspectival decisions are being made, and to recognise just how important these decisions can be.ⁱ Understanding the multiple perspectives that do, and that could, exist on our human pasts is vital to navigating our multi-storied present, in which competing, and often conflicting narratives circulate, some of them toxic and dangerous to our democracy. 

I focus on this representational aspect of multiperspectivity because of its inherent importance, but, also, because it tends to attract less attention that the empathetic aspect. It has been the key focus of my research and practice in history education since the late 1990s when I started to study how my students made sense (or failed to make sense) of multiple narratives about the past (Chapman 2001, 2009). I focus on this aspect also because I think it is eminently teachable, something that I aim to demonstrate by pointing to pedagogic resources and strategies. 
 

3. Decisions, visions and revisions

“Histories… are decisions,” Hughes-Warrington has argued, pointing to the fact that amongst the decisions that historians have to make when setting out to write history are ones about the choice of medium in which they wish to represent the past, and about the length and scale of the histories they wish to write (Hughes-Warrington, 2014: xi). Hughes-Warrington goes on to add that these decisions are shaped by “the beliefs history makers have about how the past ought to be understood by its audiences”, to which we could add a range of other shaping factors from Stradling’s guide to teaching multiperspectival history, such as:

[T]he limitations of the evidence, the subjective interests of those who are interpreting and reconstructing it, and the shifting cultural influences which determine to some degree what each new generation regards as significant in the past. (Stradling 2003: 10)

I want to linger on decisions – since we can relatively straightforwardly focus students’ attention on these, making them teachable. Figure 2 outlines some of the kinds of decision that history-making, in academic and an in other modes of representation, is likely to involve.ⁱⁱ  

The decisions that we make when determining our approaches to the past have consequences – to borrow the language of economists, a decision can open-up an opportunity (if I decide to look through this window, then I can see the beautiful view of the lake), but decisions can also have opportunity costs and close things down (if I look at the window that opens on the lake I miss the view of the mountains available at the other side of the house). When reflecting on the perspective that an historical representation is presenting us with, then, we can look for and understand the decisions that the people who crafted that perspective have made (which “windows” they have chosen and why). We can also ask about the consequences of these decisions for the vision of the past that we are presented with by an historical representation. In other words, we can ask “What do we see and what do we miss, when we decide to approach the past in this way?” ⁱⁱⁱ

Thinking with young people about history-makers' decisions and visions can contribute to history education in many ways, for example, by promoting reflexive awareness of how histories are made. It can also, of course, contribute to democratic culture.

A reflective citizen is someone who can think critically about the narratives that they encounter – about what those narratives are trying to do, and about whether or not they wish to accept or challenge those intentions. Thinking about multiperspectivity can contribute, also, by asking us to think about whose perspectives - in the past or in the present - have been included and excluded in the visions of our collective past that we have been offered. 

Considering what alternative decisions might have been made also opens-up the question of revision, and history education’s power to contribute to developing our students’ agency as historical sense-makers. Histories are made in the present by their authors. Each generation needs to make its own history, just as it needs to make its own future. History helps us think futures by considering who and where we are, where we come from and what we can reasonably expect to be and become. Considering multiperspectivity in terms of decision, vision and revision can contribute to the vital democratic task of debating who we are and the kinds of worlds we want to build (and rebuild) together. 
 

4. Pedagogic strategies for considering history-making decisions

I will now explore the range of decision-types identified in Figure 2 to indicate the potential that working with the concept of “decision” has for opening-up multiple perspectives on the past. I will also try to point to important pedagogic questions throughout – not only the question “What decisions have been made?” but also the questions “What do we see and what do we miss by making these decisions?” and also “What other decisions might be made and what might we see if we made them?” My treatment of these issues will, of necessity, be brief, and is indicative only, not exhaustive libraries could be written on these questions. A fuller presentation of some of these issues can be found in a keynote presentation to the OHTE Annual Conference in 2023 (Chapman 2023b).

4.i Modes of relation to the past

A number of writers – including philosophers like Nietzsche (1997), historiographers and historical theorists like Rüsen (2005), and history education researchers like Barton and Levstik (2004) – have distinguished different stances that we can take towards the past. Barton and Levstik distinguish, for example, between: (a) an “analytical” stance to the past, regarding it as an object of enquiry and something external to us that we can examine dispassionately in order to understand it better; and (b) an “identification stance” towards the past through which we regard it as something that our identity is bound up with – a tradition that we continue and regard as helping to shape how we feel, believe, and so on. Similarly, Rüsen distinguishes between traditional approaches to the past and “critical” stances, in which the past is regarded as something negative to be judged in terms of our present standards and interests.

From the latter perspective, for example, we might regard most of European literature and art as profoundly sexist in the opportunities and roles it does and does not offer women. We might also want to ask what roles such representations helped to play in the systematic oppression of women.

One question we might look to open-up with students, then, is the question of the stances we might take on the past. What do we see and what do we miss if we try to find common points of identity between ourselves and the people of the past – what might the advantages and disadvantages of taking such an approach be? What do we see and what do we miss if we regard people in the past only through a critical lens, looking for ways in which they might diverge from us and our current ways of living?

These sound very abstract issues. In fact, they can be very concrete – and often quite literally so. Modes of relation to the past can very easily be explored when considering statues and public memorial architecture. On the day, in July 2026, when I encountered Bansky and Athena in Waterloo Place in London (Figure 1), I  encountered a monument erected in 1861 that I was seeing for the first time also – the Guards Crimean War Memorial (Historic England n.d.a). 
 

On the face of it, this looks very easy to understand, in terms of the “mode of relation to the past” that it seeks to create: it is a memorial and would, no doubt, be classified in Nietzsche’s terms as aiming to express a “monumental” relation to the past – promoting the commemoration of virtuous ancestors and gratitude for their “sacrifice” for their nation. In the terms set out in a HISTOLAB tutorial I have contributed on “Multiperspectivity and monuments” (Chapman 2024b) this would be seen as aiming to “institute” a past, and raise it up for celebration. It would be interesting, of course, to see what young people made of this memorial now – and whether it would have any contemporary resonances The answer would very much depend on the context you were exploring it in, no doubt, as it would resonate differently in London and in Crimea, for example. It is also interesting to note that the monument was subject to criticism when it was erected as being too solemn and mournful and not sufficiently heroic (Danahay 2022: 41–45) – an observation that helps underline the fact that even established representations were often controversial when erected. 

Understandings of the concept of “mode of relationship to the past” (Chapman 2018, Day 2008, Paul 2015) can be developed by working comparatively with monuments that manifest different modes of relation – by, for example, contrasting monuments such as the one just mentioned with “negative” monuments that seek to “destitute” or negate a past,  such as Günther Domenig’s design for the Documentation Centre in the remains of the Nazi Party rally grounds at Nuremberg (Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds n.d., Handa 2018). These in turn can be contrasted to public pasts that are neither negated nor affirmed but simply preserved or alternatively simply left to wither and dilapidate. Interesting questions to explore with young people are many – particularly given the facts that: positive monuments from the past can, over time, come to be seen as highly problematic and questionable; and that they can become so when we ask young people to reflect on them (see Seixas and Clark 2004). Consider, for example, the now notorious former Colston memorial in Bristol (Olusoga 2020, von Tunzelmann 2021) or the kinds of observation that might be made, for example, about the Victoria monument in Dalton Square, Lancaster - a monument to a queen and “her” age, that only contains one other woman and that contains nothing to monumentalise the “subjects” of empire whose labour and resources were vital to the prosperity of cities like Lancaster when the memorial was erected in 1906, or the labour of the English working classes (Chapman 2024b, Historic England n.d.b).

• What do we see and what do we miss when we look at Victorian England in the way that the Dalton memorial does?
• What do we see and what to we miss about the Third Reich when we look at it in the way that the Nuremberg Documentation Centre does?
• What do we see and what do we miss about the Crimean War when we focus only on mourning British guardsmen as that Guards monument does?

These are some of the pedagogic questions we might use to open-up multiple perspectives using the concept of modes of relation to the past. We might also explore the question “What is to be done?” in the present and future in relation to these monuments. The Guards monument was moved not long after it had been erected to enable additional monuments – one of the nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale, for example – to be erected. Monuments are frequently moved and removed as the present changes and the relationships that monuments construct no longer have meaning for new generations, or as hidden and repressed past and present relationships come to have greater prominence, changing what monuments come to mean.  
 

4.ii Subjects, objects and questions

The shaping and in/excluding and history-shaping role played decisions about who makes history, about what they make it about, and about which questions are asked can be appreciated many ways. 

The history of history in the twentieth century can be told as an expansion of the historians involved – as formerly excluded groups gained access to the academy and as higher education expanded. The rise of labour history, of women’s history, of Black history, and of a range of new types of history, are stories about social justice and access, as the range of people able to be academics and the kinds of contents that were the focus of attention expanded. The history of history is also about new questions and new methods of enquiry, and not just about new contents. History from below, for example, is both the history of those hitherto excluded, namely those not in the conventional political and social elite. It is also a question, however, about new questions being asked: about how societies work, about how hierarchies have been challenged and changed, and so on. ^iv 

A relatively simple and interesting approach can be to work with book titles, book covers and, if more is needed, with the summaries publishers place on the end of books. We can often learn a lot about the kind of perspective taken (“What do we see?”) and not taken (“What do we miss?”) by examining these. See, for example, the discussion of histories of the French Revolution in the open-access book chapter “Historical interpretation: Deconstructing represented pasts” (Chapman 2023a: 131-133). 

The following samples of book titles were uncovered through unsystematic internet searches for books on “the American Revolution” that I made whilst preparing this article. The search itself was a choice of perspective – perhaps a search for “the American War of Independence” would have turned-up different books. The results provide a way into the kinds of thinking about multiperspectivity that can be opened-up by asking who is making this history, about what history is being, and by asking which questions. 

• Bernard Bailyn (2017), The ideological origins of the American Revolution, 50th anniversary ed., Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• Jeremy Black (2021), The war for American independence, The History Press, Cheltenham. 
• Robbie MacNiven (2021), British light infantry in the American Revolution, Osprey Publishing, Oxford. 
• Billy Wellman (2024), The American Revolution: An enthralling overview of the American Revolutionary War and its impact on the history of the United States of America, independently published.
• Hope Whitfeld (2026), The women the Revolution left out: A beginner's guide to the forgotten female founders, patriots, and ordinary women who helped build the American Republic, independently published. 
• Sean Wilentz (2018), No property in man: Slavery and antislavery at the nation’s founding, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

One can see from these titles, clearly, that there are many different content choices that one can make when determining a subject focus for historical representation: ideologies, war, soldiers, women and the history of slavery and antislavery.  These are not just topic differences, however, but point to different types of history: the history of political thought, the history of war, military history, women’s history, the history of race and racism. In terms of questions, the titles might be taken to indicate the following kinds of inquiry-focus (one would need to read further to check, of course):

• What were the ideological origins of the American Revolution? [Description and explanation of causes]
• What happened during the American War of Independence? [Description]
• What was the role of the British Light Infantry in the American Revolution? [Description]
• What happened during the American Revolutionary War and how did it change the course of American history? [Description and explanation of consequences]
• What role did women play in the American Revolution? [Description]
• How did racism and enslavement shape the founding of the United States? [Description and explanation of causes and consequences]

That is a crude analysis, but it can certainly open-up questions about what the inquiry-focus of a book might lead one to include (“see”) and exclude (“miss”). It seems unlikely, for example, that any of these books will give us insights into the histories of agriculture in this period. The shaping power of the question can be revealed by changing conceptual focus. How, for example, might the first volume be different if it were inquiring into the economic origins of the revolution, or about its religious effects? Questions are decisions also and have consequences.

The list also raises questions about history-makers: the authors’ given names suggest that all but one of the authors identify as male, and their family names seem almost all to originate in the British Isles. How might these histories be different if those aspects of their authors’ identities were different? These book titles (and their covers – some of which look as if they have been generated by AI) also point to another aspect of history-making: its mode of production. Histories are not made by people as much as by institutions and networks. These books include academic presses – three at a very prestigious American university. Others are published by commercial publishers, including a specialist military history publisher. At least two are self-published. What differences do these origins make to what the books say and to how the books have been made? These are issues worth exploring with students also. University press books, for example, typically require peer-review, limiting, and also providing objectivity checks on, what their authors can claim.  

There are also aspects of the titles that reveal assumptions and attitudes and that position the books in terms of the perspectives on the past that they have decided to take. A book that promises to “enthral” for example is offering a kind of emotional experience, and a book about “founders” and “patriots” is a book that asks us implicitly to identify with, rather than identifying against or simply be neutral towards, those whose stories it seeks to tell. Also, a book for “beginners” will differ from a book for specialists and both kinds of book will in/ex/clude different things.

4.iii Theory and Method 

The types of history just discussed can be contrasted, also, as ways of finding out at the past.

It is worth spending time helping young people appreciate that challenges and the opportunities that finding out about pasts can present, so that they can begin to appreciate how history-making works, and the kinds of decision-making that history-making must of necessity involve. 

Historians work with archives, for example, and this fact in itself is revealing. What gets kept and what gets thrown out? Why does that matter? How will that shape, for example, what future generations can say about us, or what we might say about ourselves in twenty years’ time? Here we can see decisions of a different kind and ones that one can readily explore with children. We all leave footprints, but we also leave digital footprints. What other traces do we leave and what do these traces leave out? What decisions to we make every day about what is worth remembering and what can be forgotten and “thrown-out”? If we asked our class to reconstruct what happened in the same class last week, what might our “archive” be, and how full or narrow a record would we have? 

In the past and the present what gets “kept” also talks to questions of power (economic, political, cultural). If you walk around any city, treating it as an archive, and ask, “Who built the old buildings that we can still see today?” the answer is usually likely to be that it was overwhelmingly the economically powerful, since only they could afford materials like stone that last. Not only that, what remains in a cityscape if often what the present regards as valuable or interesting, and that tends not to be cheap and poorly built. What is true of buildings is true of other less durable traces also – such as the objects of everyday life and written records. For most of history, the poor could not write, and men received more formal education than women, and these facts shape what does and what does not leave a trace for future history-makers to work with. The word “archive” itself points to some of these issues. It originates from the Ancient Greek word for magistrate (“archon”) and the archon’s house contained the records that those who exercised power decided to keep as they exercised that power, since it contained the records of their decisions (Derrida 1995).

As has been said, the history of history-making is, in one respect, a changing history of who gets to make history. Many of the new types of history developed since the Second World War and new, also, because they used new methods. The work of the great Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg is a good illustration. Much of Ginzburg’s work has focused on recovering the beliefs of ordinary people in Italy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period – for example, in his works The night battles and The cheese and the worms (Ginzburg 2013a, 2013b). In both books, Ginzburg aimed to explore the history of relatively powerless groups, who did not control any institutions that could preserve records of their lives. He found their histories – or enough material to start to reconstruct aspects of their lives and beliefs – in the archives of the Catholic Church, and, specifically, in the archives of the Inquisition, that tried and sometimes condemned to death ordinary men and women who refused to follow their teachings on religion, describing them as “witches” or “heretics”. In the case of The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg was able to evoke in great and compelling detail the remarkable lost world of Menocchio, a miller whose worldview was remarkably resistant to the religious authorities and how they wanted ordinary people to live and think. 

There is great value in introducing students to the practical struggles of historians – and of groups – to tell new histories (fe.g., Bengry 2021, Clark 2022, Rowbotham 1997, Thompson 1984, Trouillot 2015). Doing so helps foreground the decisions that archives make about which traces remain but also the decisions that history-makers can make to try and break out of the limits an archive might seem to impose, and also their creativity in finding new sources in order to tell new histories. 

Focusing on these issues also helps point to the ways in which wider factors than historians’ decisions alone can help shape histories. We are able now, for example, to do remarkable things with technology that open-up ways of thinking about pasts that were not available before. This becomes possible through cutting-edge digital humanities techniques (see, for example, Guldi 2023). It becomes possible, for example, when technologies are able to collate and find patterns in data. Consider the remarkable Slave Voyages project that, by collating together records spread across archives around the world (including the records of 30 725 slave ships between the 1660s and the 1860s) and by bringing together “a multi-disciplinary team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers, in consultation with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America” (Rice University n.d.), was able to create data visualisations of the growth and development of the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans, quite literally, creating knowledge about that history that was never known before their collection and representation made this terrible collective history visible.

The example just given opens-up powerful questions that teachers have successfully opened-up with students, and not just in the older years of school – as can be seen in the remarkable example of an English teacher reporting her work on "Theory and method" with Year 8 (12- and 13-year-old) students (Hammond 2007). This work compared cliometrics (large scale economic history made by counting and looking for patterns of change in data) and micro-history (individual stories explorable where archives allow this) as ways into understanding the experiences of the enslaved in the southern United States.  When looking at archives and at methods of interpreting – as with other questions of perspective – we can ask, of course, “What do you see and what do you miss when you look at this history through this archive using this method – and what would happen if we changed the archive and the method of interpretation?” It is possible not only to ask such questions but also meaningfully to progress student thinking by doing this, as Hammond’s work suggests. 
 

4.iv Narration and Representation

History inevitably involves narration, because history is essentially about change over time or about understanding past worlds (Megill 1989). 

To tell a story is, of course, to make decisions and narrative decisions are of many kinds, including decisions about: 

• Whose story (or what story) is going to be told - a story has to be a story of something (or about a group of somethings) and of changes over time concerning it;
• What kinds of change the story will narrate – economic changes, psychological changes, changes in military strength, and so on; 
• What kind of story it will be – a story predominantly of continuity or of disruption, a linear story of improvement (or decline) or a cyclical story of repetition and return, a tragic story, in which positive intentions are frustrated and terrible destruction results, an ironic story in which nothing turns out as anyone wanted, and so on; 
• When the story begins and ends and when the climax of the narrative will be (many historical disagreements turn on when we start the narrative – when X attacked Y, for example, or 100 years earlier when Y was attacked by Z, and so on); 
• When the narration begins – one could start at the end, representing the final tragedy in chapter 1, for example, and then flash-back in time to the events that led gradually towards that outcome, or one could tell the story out very differently, starting, as it were, on day one; 
• Which episodes, locations and people in the narrative will be focused on at different points, the best to convey key information about the character of events and developments (will the story be, as it were, a game of thrones, will it start with a battle or with a bird’s eye view of a city scape from the past?);
• Whose (or which) narrative line/s are to be foregrounded (one can tell the story of a war, for example, through the story of one family and its members of through the story of many different families in different situations and on different sides, and on); and 
• Who the story is for, since it will be told differently for different audiences, just as a textbook for primary school students may organise the story differently from a popular history for adults, and both will be organised differently from a dissertation presented in a university, from a computer game scenario designed around a past context, and / or from a script for a documentary telling the story written for a TV company.  

That list is in no way exhaustive – those are just some of the decisions involved in narration. What it does very clearly do, however, is underline just how important narrative decision-making is in shaping the kind of story that a history tells and the kinds of effects it will have on how the topic/s of the history are represented and perceived.

Pedagogic decisions about which aspects of narrative and representation to focus on in class must also be made, clearly, and these can be of broadly different kinds. A teacher might decide, for example, to: 

• Focus student activity on constructing narration – on making some of the decisions about an episode, event, person or state of affairs in the past; or 
• Focus student activity on deconstructing narration – on analysing and comparing the decisions that others have made when making their narratives about a specific past.^v

There are advantages to both approaches, and both can be developed in many different ways. 

One can imagine a constructive exercise that (a) gave students the same collection of materials about an episode from the past (say short film clips from the past, a selection of images from the past and timeline of events and some documents that could be quoted) and then that (b) tasked students to use software to make short documentary films about the event, asking different groups to tell the story from the perspective of different actors from the past, or with a different purpose in the present, or for audiences of different types.  A constructive approach like this could create many opportunities for decisions to be made by different groups of students and, also, for these decisions to be compared in class and for differences in choices made to be debated in terms of their effects.

One could combine deconstructive and constructive approaches. For example, a task might be to make a textbook double-page spread for a specified age group in school, telling the story of an event. Before doing this, students could be presented with some contrasting examples from old textbooks showing how this has been done in the past. Student groups might be asked, for example, to update past approaches and be given slightly different instructions – some being asked, for example, to make sure that their narrative included gender perspectives, others being asked that their textbook explore the experiences of different social classes, others being asked that their textbook tried to take a European perspective, and so on. Once the different textbook designs had been made, students could be asked to analyse and compare each other’s (with or without an explanation of what others were tasked to do, as the teacher say fit). “What might users see and what might they miss if given textbook design one?”, they could be asked, and “Would things be better, or worse, or just different, if they were given textbook design two, or three, or four?” 

I will end by sharing aspects of an approach to narrative that I developed with a colleague working in a school near Manchester in 2019, at the time of the bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. This exercise worked with a graphic novel about Peterloo issued that year (Polyp, Schlunke and Poole 2019) and a shorter version of the narrative written for school children and their teachers (Polyp and Marsh 2019). We worked on the sequence of lessons on the graphic novel. We conducted an interview with the authors, and we included short clips from these interviews in which we asked the authors about their narrative choices in the lesson materials. The lesson plans and resources for the sequence of lessons that can be downloaded, open access (HIESIG 2020) and we have presented an account of the experience of teaching the lessons (Turner and Chapman 2023).^vi

To get students thinking about narrative decisions – when they deconstructed a graphic novel narrative and when they constructed their own design - we used the simplified analytical device of a camera to model perspective (see Figure 4). We asked students to consider three kinds of narrative decision: decisions about perspective (in the sense of point of view, or where in the physical space of the historical events the camera tripod would be placed), decisions about focus (in the sense of the degree to which the “lens” was zoomed-in on detail or zoomed-out onto the big picture of events); and decisions about which elements of the story to dramatise almost in real time (the time of the telling corresponding to the time of the past action), which we called “scene”, and which bits of the story to leave out and pass over in a simplifying “summary”. 
 

The students were encouraged to think about the implications of all of these decisions – to consider how the story might land differently with the audience emotionally, for example, as a result of different decisions being made on these three dimensions, and also to consider how the meaning and even the politics of the story could shift as these decisions shifted. The historical “story” of a massacre will vary considerably if it is told from the perspective of the authorities (there were magistrates watching events from a first storey window) or from the perspective of the “victims” and this, and other implications of narrative decision, could very easily be grasped the students. 

Figure 5 embodies narrative decisions in two senses, and one of the things that we asked students to do was to analyse these two images and to consider the pros and cons of the decisions made in each and about each: 

• First, in the sense of compositional differences - one image positions the camera in the crowd, focusing quite widely so that we can see troops and other protestors; the other image positions the camera with a soldier on a horse and zooms in so tightly that all we see is the eye of a victim of the massacre, in which we can see our reflection (a soldier on a horse) as we strike down at the crowd with our sword); 
• Second in the editorial sense of which of these two images to select for the actual book cover (both were drafted out but only one was used – the image of the eye). 

Conclusions

I have set out in this article to explore some ways in which multiperspectivity can be developed in history classrooms. There are limitations to what this short exposition can attempt. I am very aware that I am writing from an English context, for example, and, no doubt, other and more arresting insights could be developed from multiple range of different perspectives.  As I have said, also, I have restricted myself to a focus on what I have called a cognitive and representational approach to multiperspectivity, focused on decisions and on seeking to defamiliarise historical narration the better to render it an object for pedagogic attention. I have had little to say here, therefore, about what I have called affective and situational approaches to multiperspectivity that aim to develop students’ abilities to decentre from their usual ways of seeing the world, in order to appreciate the multiple alternative perspectives, past and present, from which the pasts can be seen. I appreciate that there will be many things that have been missed in my approach, but I hope that the ideas outlined here may be useful in helping history educators contribute to their pupils seeing the work of history and historical sense-making more clearly. This may help them better appreciate the range of decisions that history makers make, the history-shaping role that their visions of the past can have, and their own agency in re-visioning the past as we seek together to make a better and a kinder world. 

To return to Banksy and Figure 1. In that image Athena – the goddess of wisdom – looks on as Banksy’s suited man (some kind of politician, one expects, and I think, a figure or metaphor for assertive pride) marches forward and, blinded by the symbolic narrative he is telling, falls off his plinth: “pride” in the proverbial phrase, “comes before a fall”. Banksy is asking us, I think, to be careful of the narrators we listen to and of the stories they tell, particularly if those are appealing stories that flatter our personal and collective vanities and self-love. By asking young people to notice and reflect on the lenses that the histories they are surrounded by ask them to wear, multiperspectival history teaching potentially does powerful work to further social and epistemic justice and to strengthen our democracies and to save us from collective illusions and delusions. We want our young people to be wide-eyed and not blinkered in how they think about stories and perceptions of the past. I hope that this short piece can make some small contribution to that cause.

i. I owe my focus on decision to the work of Marnie Hughes-Warrington, and, in particular, to a passage in the introduction to her 50 Key Thinkers of History mentioned in section 3 of this text (Hughes-Warrington 2014). I have found it a transformative idea, not least because it is so simple and teachable and such a good way of opening up complex issues.

ii. The figure is not exhaustive. I have provided other lists of relevant issues in Chapman (2010, 2024a).

iii. I should declare my debt to my UCL History colleague Dr David Sim from whom I borrow this phrase. In 2015 he shared a short video for upper secondary history students on the significance of Martin Luther King in which he asked the inspired question, “What do we see and what do we miss if we focus only on King?” The question has stayed with me ever since as a valuable teaching tool – again, a simple idea that has potential to open-up complexity.

iv. There is more to be said, of course: for example, about where history-makers are located, geographically and culturally and epistemically. See, for example, Woolf (2019).

v. The contrast between “construction” and “deconstruction” is common in German traditions of history didactics (see, for example, Körber 2021).

vi. 'I am grateful to Paul Fitzgerald (Polyp) for permission to produce his cover art for the Peterloo graphic novel in this article.  Polyp, has made a number of remarkable graphic histories – see https://polyp.org.uk/books/ (accessed 7 September 2026). Historians – e.g., Marcus Rediker – have collaborated on graphic novels also – see  https://www.marcusrediker.com/books/under-the-banner-of-king-death/ (accessed 7 September 2026).

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*The opinions expressed in this work are the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Council of Europe.

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