School subjects

While narrative is a key component of history pedagogy at the school level, the capacity to make the connection between the narrative and historical thinking skills is equally important. Without this, the subject will be devoid of the rigour of the discipline that it seeks to teach.

The past is another place and recounting it shall always involve some choice or bias. But no History can be written without proper chronology and credible evidence. School textbooks on History need to pay attention to all this.

This review essay discusses Veera Hiranandani’s young adult novel “The Night Diary” and shows how reading historical fiction can help us develop the historical imagination. Through a close reading of this novel, which deals with the partition of India, the piece shows how engagement with such works of fiction can help us develop an intimate and nuanced sense of historical events and processes.

This article focuses on an illustrated Bangla book on Partition, which the author wrote for middle school children (aged 12+). In the piece she reflects on the rationale of writing the book, a few ethical and methodological concerns, and the book’s reception among a group of underprivileged children. Their engagements with the book provide a cue for pedagogical experiments in teaching history at the school level. 

This piece discusses ten non-fiction titles for children that can work as tools to foster the development of a historical imagination and help in building a nuanced perspective to learning History as taught in school classrooms. The topics covered in these volumes range from environmental history to the interface between history and archaeology, and the freedom movement.

This issue of Samuhik Pahal focuses on the theme of citizen science. Its articles focus on how the process of democratization of science can help us in developing a scientific temper.