Modern History through Visual Sources in the A-Level Curriculum

How can we help history students engage with sources? This is a key question for many history teachers. A-level history students find deconstructing sources easy. Yet, they find using ‘biased’ evidence, especially when openly propagandistic in nature, much more challenging. What if visual sources were the key to unlocking and honing analytical skills? Could the visual and textual narratives used in exhibition display be used to help student to reflect on what sources mean and, more importantly, how they construct meaning?

These questions were the starting point for an intermedial series of workshops, designed by Martina Borghi and Giuliana Pieri.

The workshop – organized for Sydney Russell and Riverside students and teachers in London – began with a thirty-minute masterclass, summarising key phases in the development of Fascism and presenting the focus of the two-hour session on propaganda and communication under the Fascist regime. Students were then divided into groups and each group was given a different selection of images based on categories. The nine categories selected for the workshop were Fascist and Youth, Fascism and Sport, Art and Propaganda, Plurality of Arts under the Fascism, The Fascist Empire, New Italian cities, and Mussolini’s gestures and speeches. Two categories were also dedicated to specific social and agricultural reforms undertaken in those years, namely The Battle of Grain, and The Land Reclamation. In this way each group were able to focus on a specific topic related to the Fascist dictatorship. Students were free to select from their bundle of images the ones they considered more meaningful and then they displayed them on a section of the class wall – this was their ‘exhibition space’. The way they chose to display the images was a means to express their personal critical and curatorial choices. Then each group was asked to explain and justify the reasons of their selection and arrangement on the wall. This phase of the workshop was crucial because it made students responsible for their own visual narrative displayed on the wall that was then transformed in an oral and textual narration by their own explanations. In this phase the students’ critical analysis emerged clearly, and it was possible to connect different groups and reflections together through a lively discussion that completed the task.

Thanks to these activities, the importance of an intermedial and interdisciplinary approach for the study of history and visual culture is rediscovered to allow students to elaborate in complete autonomy a comprehensive reflection on the topic studied. Visual sources remain a valid support to improve students’ skills that vary from the use of historical sources to the development of communicative competences.

Although modern history students at secondary level are not asked to engage with visual sources during their A-level exam, source analysis is a critical skill that is being tested. The use of a broad range of visual material that we presented during the workshop helped students to visualize the capillary nature of propaganda, which was embedded in all aspects of visual and mass communication. The visual sources selected for the event ranged from photos, illustrations and magazine covers to advertisement and graphic works to better comprehend the political and social dynamics of the period, helping students to develop an accurate reflection on the branched-out Fascist propaganda and its influence on the Italian people.

Introducing students to key curatorial skills brings in multi-modality in the secondary classroom, encouraging active and reflective learning and the development of the student’s awareness of the importance of using different types of sources for the study of modern history. Furthermore, the outcomes highlighted for this event were the stress on the relationship between visual culture and history, as well as the identification of visual sources as tools to encourage the study of modern history.