Disagreement Through Multiperspectivity in Practice

History without disagreement would be boring, wouldn’t it? Educators are challenged to teach students how to disagree in a respectful way while staying open-minded to new ideas and perspectives. In this workshop Anna Huijgen (DENISE Amsterdam) and Maayke de Vries (International School Almere) will use three approaches or “layers” to teaching disagreements (Wansink et al. 2018): multiperspectivity in the past; multiperspectivity between past and present and multiperspectivity in the present.

The first layer consists of the perspective of individuals, people or groups who have been living in a particular moment in the past. For this, primary sources can be used to represent a multitude of views in that event.

The second layer is about historiographical approaches and interpretations to the past , developed by historians (but also politicians and journalists) who mostly did not live in the same time period as the events they write about.

The third layer is the approach of history from a contemporary position. The goal for students is to realise that perspectives are personal, that teachers and students are consumers of history and that we make our own constructions of the past.

In this workshop we will put into practice one activity for each layer so educators can experience each approach and how disagreement can be conducted within the classroom. The aim is to provide educators with practical examples, which are easily translatable to their own context, so teachers get hands-on guidelines on how to address controversial topics. The workshop also aims to have a dialogue between educators to exchange their best-practices in teaching multiperspectivity regarding debated and controversial topics.