Provide students with a range of images relating to the topic. They imagine they are curating a museum exhibition on four separate walls. How will they categorise the images into four categories? How will they caption them?
Examples: Portraits of Napoleon, Stalin or other dictators with a penchant for propaganda. Images of the Middle Ages. Images relating to the British Empire (both positive and negative). Political cartoons about appeasement and Hitler’s foreign policy.
Taking it further:
- Some of the images may be deliberately obscure – students should place these to one side. In a second phase of the exercise, the teacher provides caption slips which have to be matched to each image prior to further thought being given to the exhibition.
- Students could choose the images / images of artefacts themselves.
- Students could even construct the exhibition and place it in a public area, or design a ‘Museum in a Box‘
Year 10 Historians designing an exhibition about the Weimar Republic