Relevance is incredibly important for education. While some students will posses strong intrinsic motivation or a passion for the subject matter, many more will wonder why they’re forced to take certain classes. Teachers, genealogists, and parents alike can help history come alive for students and equip them with lifelong critical thinking skills.

“When am I ever going to use this?”
“What do I care about a bunch of dead people?”

You’ve probably heard complaints like this before.

The brain gravitates toward things it finds rewarding. If we don’t see the benefit of learning something, and we don’t use the information for survival or enjoyment, we’re apt to forget it or ignore it altogether. By making a topic feel relevant and meaningful to our students and children, we increase the likelihood they’ll engage with the content.

What is relevance exactly?

When I say that I aim to ensure content is relevant to my students, I mean that they find the material interesting, recognize why it matters, and/or see how it applies to them.

Culturally relevant teaching uses cultural awareness and understanding to inform educational practices and make learning more accessible to students. By doing our best to understand our diverse audience, our teaching will be more effective.

Students often see history as a bunch of dry facts about events and people that no longer matter and may not represent them - been there, done that. It’s over. Right?

It’s our job as educators to help students understand why we study history, where they fit into the story, and how it can help them make a difference in the world. Once we’ve gotten their buy-in, we can make a lot more headway.

So, how do we make history relevant?

We know why relevance matters, but how do we go about doing it?

I’ve laid out some strategies below that you can use to help make history more accessible and exciting to your students. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s how I approach my teaching and I hope you find it helpful.

Get to know your students.

Whether you’re an educator, parent, or other community member, get to know the young people you’re working with. When you understand their strengths, weaknesses, backgrounds, and interests, you can make your interactions more responsive and relatable.

I try to dedicate at least a few days at the beginning of the year to building classroom community and getting to know my students before moving into the content. Of course, building relationships is an ongoing process, but the start of a course offers a unique opportunity for “get to know you” activities. I recommend questionnaires as well as conversations as methods of connecting to students and learning more about them.

Not sure where to start? I offer a student survey in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Make it about them.

As a home historian, I strongly support having students uncover their own family histories. History came alive for me as a child in elementary school, when my teacher assigned us a “roots” project. I was completely fascinated about my own family’s story and how it fit into the bigger picture. Family history can be an amazing tool for making history feel meaningful to the student.

Use ancestry projects to help students see how their story connects to the past. When students see how people in their own lives were impacted by historical events, history can come alive for them. You might assign a family tree project or ask students to interview older family members about important events in their lives.

Explore the resources available in your community. Schools and local libraries often offer memberships to Ancestry.com and other Internet tools. Local genealogical and historical societies are often more than willing to visit a class. Students will have varying levels of access to information, so set appropriate expectations and provide scaffolding and support.

Another important strategy is to make sure that all students see themselves within the course content. This is essential not only for engagement, but also to ensure you have an equitable, inclusive classroom. Be sure that the materials you use portray diverse viewpoints. When possible, tap into community members. Students who see themselves represented in the curriculum will be more empowered by the learning experience.

Let them take the lead.

One surefire way to guarantee that historical content is relevant to students and what they want to know is to allow them to ask the questions. Have students design inquiry projects where they write compelling questions and conduct their own investigations. Many students are used to having research topics handed to them. Be sure to shake things up!

By putting students in the driver’s seat, we give them more ownership of their learning. I encourage students to explore historical topics that are meaningful and interesting to them. The more fired up a student is about a question or theme, the more likely they are to learn from the experience.

Bring on the life skills.

In my classroom, I prioritize skills over content. I’ll talk more about this in another article, but historical thinking skills are at the heart of all my lesson plans. I still aim to help my students fall in love with history, but I fret less about whether they memorize a particular date or term.

By emphasizing skills like media literacy, research, analysis, and argumentation, I’m supporting students in developing the critical thinking skills that will help them succeed in college, numerous occupations, and life in general. I point out what skills we’re targeting in each lesson and how these skills are useful.

If you’re teaching a social studies course, I encourage you to incorporate research, source analysis, and debate as activities for strengthening historical thinking skills. If you’re a family historian, support young ones in identifying quality sources and require that they be able to defend positions with evidence before drawing conclusions.

Diversify your resources.

In addition to incorporating diverse perspectives into the materials you use in class, make sure to change up the mediums. Of course it’s important to have students reading historical texts, but throw them a curve ball every once in a while. Whenever possible, I try to bring in music, artwork, poetry, and podcasts to help bring the history to life.

Some of my most popular lessons included bringing in old family photos. Students were fascinated by my family’s story and loved seeing “real” people from the past. This often inspired historical show-and-tell activities where students would bring in personal artifacts to share with the class. We would analyze documents and images, hold group discussions, and create research questions around the various artifacts students brought in.

Textbooks and other readings play an important role in history. They can and should remain part of the class, but providing students with an image or audio file can help make history feel more tangible. If you’re at home, see what items you can find to draw your learner into the story you want to share.

Connect to the here and now.

Current events can play an important role in a social studies class. It wasn’t until I first became a teacher that I realized how little I knew about the world around me. I remember trying to teach about the 1990s and early 2000s and finding so much of it foreign, despite having been alive and well at the time.

I want my students to be informed citizens who care about what is going on in the world. By incorporating current events assignments and class discussions, I remind my students that history is being made right now. Current events activities can help students figure out what issues matter to them. This information can be used to inform the direction of future lessons.

The New York Times Learning Network provides many great resources for working with current events. There you can find writing prompts, source analysis activities, and discussion questions, among other teaching tools.

You can also have students trace current events back to their historical origins. I highly recommend the podcast Throughline by NPR, which walks back current events to tell the stories behind them. Contemporary issues can be used as a hook to explore various historical developments.

Making history more relevant will only enhance student engagement and achievement. I hope some of these ideas have inspired you to consider how you can help draw in students to the myriad lessons of the past.

How do you share history with the young ones in your life? Let me know in comments!

Home Historian: Making History Relevant