Online Professional Development Course for high school educators
13, 20, 27 November 2026
Registration Fee: Rs. 1800/- [3 sessions]
What if students encounter history not as a finished narrative, but as an archive of fragments from which historical accounts have to be constructed?
What if we could shift learning from memorizing textbook facts to active historical inquiry?
This year the professional development course invites teachers to think critically about archives and to explore how archival materials can help students develop an understanding of historical thinking by asking questions of evidence, identifying provenance, recognising perspective and bias, reading silences and absences, corroborating sources and distinguishing between the past and the histories we construct about it.
A central concern will be the question ‘Who gets to leave a trace of the past and who gets remembered through archives?’
The introductory session will focus on what is an archive, what goes into an archive and the types of historical archives.
Concepts will emerge during the course of the following sessions through hands-on activities and interactive discussions. Going beyond source-analysis activities and archival technique this course aims to develop an archival sensibility in the history classroom enabling teachers to help students read, question, create and curate historical traces.
At the end of the course, participants should be able to see the archive not simply as a source of information, but as a site of inquiry, interpretation, contestation and historical imagination.
Session 1. Friday, 13 November 2026. 5.30 p.m.
Keynote: Teaching with Archives
Anjali Ramachandran
The talk will provide an introduction to various ways in which archives can be made an integral part of school education. Primary sources preserved and made accessible through archives are an excellent resource for teachers to facilitate and cultivate students' interest in history and research. Archival education ought to be an obvious part of pedagogical practice in schools. A few ways in which this could be facilitated is through school visits, training programmes for teachers, in-depth workshops, archival outreach through exhibitions, teaching aids and resource guides. Unfortunately, archives are seldom introduced in the school curriculum in India, due to which teachers and students rarely have access to archival networks, their hidden treasures and to a more vivid image of the historical past. The emergence of numerous digital archives in India can change this, since thousands of historical records in the form of manuscripts, letters, photographs, art, rareartifacts, maps and drawings are being made available for open use and open access. Participants will be introduced to such exciting archival repositories and learn ways in which archival resources could be used in the classroom.
Anjali works as a senior archivist at Archives at NCBS, a History of Science in Contemporary India (HOSCI) archives based in Bangalore. At the Archives, she coordinates archival processing and leads an education programme focussed on high school students and teachers. Prior to this, she worked as an archivist and reasearcher at IIT Bombay Archives and was part of the team that set up a Virtual Experiential Museum on Ajanta caves at National Museum, New Delhi. Her research and work is focused on developing participatory and intersectional engagement with archives.
Session 2. Friday, 20 November 2026. 5.30 - 7.30 p.m.
Creating Archives in the Classroom
Akhila Seshadri
What defines an archive? Beyond state repositories and formal institutions, how are voices and artefacts preserved—and what or whose are left out? How can personal collections of photographs, diaries, or everyday objects become a vital gateway to understanding the past?
Creating an Archive is a hands-on workshop designed for educators to bring these critical questions directly into the classroom. Through engaging activities around memory and oral history, teachers will learn how to guide students in building their own archival projects.
Beyond simply collecting, the workshop aims to help teachers to work with their students and guide them to interrogate the choices behind preservation—examining the reasons, impulses and silences that shape how history is recorded.
Akhila has been a teacher for over 35 years, 34 of them at The School (KFI). Her abiding interest in the Humanities, particularly History and English Literature, has led her to teach English, History, Geography and Hindi as a second and third language.
Her work at school involves including history trips, music and theatre in her pedagogic practice.
She has held positions of responsibility as Coordinator of the Middle and Senior Schools and served on the school’s Steering Committee, contributing to policy and decision-making.
Akhila has co-created and co-anchored Inquiry Course and facilitated modules as part of the Teacher Education Programme organised by the Krishnamurti Foundation of India.
Session 3. Friday, 27 November 2026. 5.30 - 7.30 p.m.
Reading the Archive
Sunita Biswas
This workshop will lead history teachers into an exploration of what it means to read an archive and how this differs from reading an individual historical source. Students may have already learnt to interpret primary sources. This workshop will build on that skill by introducing them to the relationships between sources, the character of collections and the questions of selection, preservation and absence that shape the historical record. Alongside conventional and unconventional archives participants will examine the narratives that these different archives reveal, and their possibilities and limitations? Participants will consider questions of provenance, context, bias, silences and corroboration, and examine how historians build arguments by reading sources alongside one another.
By the end of the workshop the participants will be able to bring archival thinking into the classroom by guiding students to move beyond extracting information from sources towards asking questions, comparing perspectives, recognising uncertainty and constructing evidence-based interpretations of the past.
Sunita taught history in school for over 25 years, encouraging students to look beyond the textbook, question received narratives and develop a curious, critical engagement with the past. Now a Senior Programme Officer at History for Peace, she continues to explore ways to make history engaging, more questioning and, perhaps most importantly, a force for empathy, dialogue and peace.
13, 20, 27 November 2026
Registration Fee: Rs. 1800/- [3 sessions]
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