The sensitivity of certain topics in the history classroom is closely linked to students’ historical narrativity, which functions as a primary way of making sense of the world.¹¹ Rather than approaching history as a neutral aggregation of facts, students tend to configure events into plots – an act of emplotment – drawing on storylines encountered within and beyond school walls. Families, peers, media, heritage, and examples from public history and community institutions provide salient narratives that shape how young people interpret significance, causality, and moral positioning in the past.¹² Because these narratives from outside school often reflect the collective memory of one’s social and cultural background, classroom interpretations are received through existing plots that already carry affective weight and identity relevance.

Comparative studies across Western nations indicate that students from dominant societal groups often evaluate the national past more positively, plausibly because school narratives resonate with the stories shared at home. By contrast, students with a migration background or from ethnic minorities frequently encounter home narratives that differ from school narratives, and therefore engage more critically with canonical national stories presented in class.¹³ Such divergence between home and classroom does not signal disengagement; it reflects the work of narrative identity in contexts where multiple plots compete for plausibility.

Social self-identification further influences narrative structure and content: the stronger the identification, the more historical events are integrated into a moralising plot, reinforcing present-oriented action. When these narratives serve as anchors for identity, contradictory information can provoke emotional resistance – a psychological defence of both perceived truth and social belonging.¹⁴

Understanding the narrative basis of students’ sensitivities toward certain historical topics is crucial for developing pedagogical strategies that both acknowledge emotional responses and promote critical historical inquiry. These sensitivities can be fruitfully situated within recent developments in the study of historical consciousness, a concept that has generated considerable debate within historical education.¹⁵ Central to this perspective is the work of Rüsen, who argues that historical consciousness is fundamentally narrative.¹⁶ Through narrative, individuals connect past, present, and future in ways that guide both their worldview and their sense of identity. In his monograph Historik, Rüsen further specifies that narrativity underpins historischer Sinnbildung, defining meaning (Sinn) as the criterion through which individuals regulate their relationship to themselves and others and orient their intentions toward action.¹⁷ As Nathalie Popa notes, all learning constitutes meaning-making, and history education can foster deeper relevance by helping students connect their present to a world that exceeds individual experience.¹⁸

Jürgen Straub extends this narrative understanding by grounding historical meaning-making in narrative psychology. For him, narratives are ‘acts of meaning’ and historical consciousness is a general psychological competence – a reflexive, distancing mode of relating to change. Straub proposes a cognitive-psychological framework in which historical narratives function as schemata integrating both concrete and abstract knowledge.¹⁹ This approach resonates with Hayden White’s concept of emplotment and James V. Wertsch’s notion of schematic narrative templates. Both highlight the formative role of pre-critical understandings, which are deeply embedded story structures that shape how individuals construct narrative closure.²⁰ Precisely because these structures operate beneath critical reflection, they complicate Straub’s claim that historical consciousness involves distance. Such distancing is better understood as an ideal type, that is, as a more advanced form of historical understanding in which individuals consciously reflect on and relativise their own relation to the past – which is akin to Rüsen’s higher ontogenetic forms.

This pre-critical dimension of historical consciousness is further underscored by Paul Zanazanian, who conceptualises history as both narrative competence and embodied knowledge.²¹ Histories and collective memories offer people a narrative framework for understanding the past. Yet, this understanding is rarely detached or purely objective, but rather value-laden and closely connected to one’s self-identification.²² Insights from narrative psychology and religious studies help us to more accurately conceptualise this meaningful element of historical consciousness. Narrativity – the human tendency to organise experiences into stories – is central to coping with unexpected or disruptive events. Such events often challenge our worldview and fundamental values, creating a crisis of meaning. Through narrating and re-narrating life stories, individuals engage in meaning-making: integrating these experiences into a coherent plot. This process, known as emplotment, establishes continuity and causal explanation, transforming fragmented experiences into a unified narrative that restores a sense of normality.²³ Narrative psychology further shows that human identity is continually (re)constructed through these stories, and that the coherence of such life narratives matters: fragmented or unresolved narratives, where narrative closure is absent, can undermine an individual’s wellbeing.²⁴ Several dominant forms of narrative closure have been identified, shaped by perceived agency and life-course evaluation – patterns that resonate with Hayden White’s typology (see Table 1) – and highlight the strong link between a sense of agency and mental resilience.²⁵

Religious studies deepen this perspective by introducing the concept of ultimate concerns.²⁶ In order to make these concerns manifest in life stories, Renske Kruizinga operationalises them as a combination of core values on the one hand and fundamental worldviews on the other. Life feels meaningful when these concerns are realised, when our lives cohere to what we feel is most valuable and to how we believe the world is supposed to work. ‘Meaningful’ in this regard needs to be distinguished from ‘making sense’. Where making sense may refer to understanding how life events were caused or came to be, the term meaningful points to a personal understanding of those events as being in line with how the world is supposed to work and their alignment to what someone holds dear. Such an understanding of meaning adds to the more historical one proposed by Rüsen.

Contingent, existential events can disrupt our sense of meaning. They tend to destabilise the narrative plot of our life stories, precisely because they deviate from the way we thought the world should work. To better understand this connection between plot and the narrative understanding of a life event, Kruizinga distinguishes three different explanations of such events: situational, existential, and spiritual (see Table 2). Especially the spiritual understanding of an event (it influences a person’s life which gives it a transcendent – transcending the immanent – meaning) seems to affect those ultimate concerns and therefore requires attention. Spiritual counselling responds by inviting clients to alter their worldviews or to reflect on their core values. How does a specific existential event help you to think differently about the world and your life? From these reflections, new possible plots may arise, that help to re-tell the life story in such a way that the once disruptive event is integrated in an altered, but coherent narrative.²⁷ Because ultimate concerns and narrative identity are intertwined, critique of a person’s story often feels like critique of their deepest commitments. This explains why narratives – personal life stories as well as historical narratives – evoke strong emotions when challenged.

The present article is based on a qualitative research project which analysed the historical narratives of students to explore their emplotment and the way in which that emplotment corresponds to their ultimate concerns. We aim to answer the following research question: How do students in key stage 4, year 11 (4 havo), construct historical narratives to make meaning with the past? In order to answer this question, three sub-questions need to be answered. First of all, which historical persons, events, and developments do students with different social identities consider historically significant and why? Second, how do they bring these together using a specific plot to create a coherent and meaningful whole? And third, how is this plot related to their fundamental norms and values, or in other words, anchored ultimate life goals?

Similar to personal life stories, students’ historical narratives about a shared past align with social identity and worldviews, yet their connection to ultimate concerns remains underexplored. This study adopts a methodology inspired by the one proposed by Kruizinga to study the meaning-making dimension of students’ historical consciousness. Although personal life stories differ from a narrative understanding of the past, they share similar characteristics – their narrative nature and the way they use emplotment to create narrative closure. Here, meaning is understood as the relationship between one’s emplotment in the narrative understanding of the past, its narrative closure, and one’s ultimate concerns which are operationalised as core values and fundamental worldviews. Such an understanding of historical consciousness relates it closely to students’ narrative identity but adds an existential dimension through those ultimate concerns. This approach needs to consider certain challenges.

First, the narrative competence of secondary school students is still developing, especially in the earlier years. Integrating historical knowledge about events and people into an overarching plot proves to be particularly difficult for them.²⁸ As a result, their image of the past often remains a less than coherent collection of facts and, therefore, not very meaningful. When students try to bring these facts together in a narrative plot, there is a chance that they uncritically follow the narratives used in teaching materials and textbooks. Only in later years and on the basis of appropriate history education do they develop critical, historical narratives, and even then students often tend to construct narratives that reduce the complexity of the past in order to fit rather simple, teleological understandings.²⁹ The research design needs to take this into account.

Secondly, identity itself, especially social identity, is a complex phenomenon: it is constantly and narratively constructed in relation to other people – both to perceived social in- and out-groups as well as to elements of one’s broader environment such as family, subcultures, and historical culture(s).³⁰ People combine multiple identities in diverse ways.³¹ Moreover, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman stressed the liquid nature of modern identity: it has become an unending life project in which people regularly deconstruct and (re)construct identities.³² Identity seems to be a constant ‘work in progress’, especially among adolescent high school students. Moreover, the relationship between historical narratives and students’ narrative and social self-identification appears to be ambiguous. Although social identities are often based on stories of a shared past, the ways in and the extent to which this happens differ among individual students.³³ This study considers modern identity to be fluid, multiple, and narrative in nature, in which personal experiences, collective memory, and shared values and worldviews are intertwined. Because of this liquid nature of identities and their ambiguous relationship with people’s historical narratives, describing students’ identities cannot be based on pre-set categories. Such categories would not necessarily match students’ understanding of their own identities.

These challenges and the focus of the research questions call for a qualitative, narrative approach that enables participants to articulate their own understandings of the past. Such an approach, however, also brings significant methodological and ethical challenges in both data collection and analysis. Narratives are inherently co-constructed, shaped by the presence of both real and imagined audiences.³⁴ They are also multivoiced, containing internal tensions, historical discourses, and ambiguities that extend beyond the speaker’s explicit intentions.³⁵ Moreover, narratives are influenced by the context in which they are produced and by the questions posed.³⁶ These dynamics are inseparable from broader cultural power relations, which shape how individuals experience and interpret the past.³⁷ When students are asked to narrate their relationship with the past, both the assignment itself, the educational setting, the interviewer, and implicit power structures all influence the stories they tell. Such influences must be taken seriously throughout the research process. As an exploratory study, the goal of this article is not to produce a universal theory but to develop a contextualised understanding of how students use images of the past to construct meaning in their lives. The resulting interpretations aim for theoretical plausibility and remain open to revision in light of new data or perspectives.

Participants were drawn from a single secondary school, 4 havo (key stage 4, year 11; 15-17 years old). The school is a Roman Catholic school located in a diverse neighbourhood of Tilburg, a former industrial town situated in Noord-Brabant, a province in the south of the Netherlands. The student population reflects the cultural and ethnic diversity of the surrounding area and the school explicitly pursues a pedagogical policy aimed at fostering an inclusive and safe learning environment.³⁸

All participants were recruited from the same history class, which the researcher followed for an entire school year – that is 2022-2023. For most students, history was a compulsory subject as part of their final examinations. They had three 45-minute history lessons per week. All students had previously followed mandatory history education, covering world history from prehistory up to contemporary history. During the year in which data were collected, the curriculum addressed history from prehistory up to the industrial revolution.

The research project was presented as part of the regular school curriculum. It consisted of an assignment and interviews with the students, the majority of which were conducted during the history lessons. In total, fourteen students of the total of thirty in that class participated; thirteen took part in the interviews, while one student completed only the initial assignment. No pre-selection was made based on social identity or cultural or ethnic background. Instead, social identities were articulated by the students themselves during the interviews.

To explore the anchored ultimate life goals within students’ historical narratives, two successive data collection instruments were employed: an assignment and a semi-structured interview. In the assignment, students were asked to select historical actors and events from the period between 1800 and the present that they personally considered to be significant. This was a historical concept they had learnt to work with in their history class, in line with general historical insights.³⁹ Students were deliberately not asked to review the entirety of human history, as selecting examples from approximately 5,000 years would have constituted an overly complex task. Limiting the historical scope enabled students to select a manageable number of examples, while still allowing them to identify longer-term developments.

Students were asked to design a museum exhibition using their selected examples. For the purposes of this research, the exhibition consisted of two rooms: one devoted to historical actors and one to historical events. As concrete examples, students received fifty cards – twenty depicting historical actors and thirty depicting events (see Figure 1 for examples). The cards were intended primarily as narrative building blocks. Some represented topics commonly addressed in the Dutch history curriculum, while others referred to events or figures that receive little or no attention, such as the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate in 1924 or Magnus Hirschfeld, an early advocate for gay emancipation. This diversity was intended to signal that the students’ own perspectives were welcome and that they were not restricted to previously taught material. In addition, students received ten blank ‘joker cards’ on which they could include examples of their own choosing.

Students arranged their selected cards on a sheet depicting the exhibition walls in two dimensions. They transformed the cards into a so-called ‘living timeline’ by assigning a vertical position to them: actors and events perceived as more positive were placed higher on the wall, while more negative actors and events were placed lower (Figure 2).⁴⁰ Thus, the historical concept of significance was expanded with an ethical component that allows for a discussion of underlying values.

Based on their exhibition, students were subsequently interviewed. During the interview, which was recorded, students guided the interviewer through their exhibition, explaining their choices and the relationships between actors and events. When the living timeline exhibited a clear shift – from predominantly positive to predominantly negative valuations or vice versa – this shift was explored further through open-ended questions. For example: ‘I see that you evaluate the Shoah very negatively, while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which followed shortly thereafter, is evaluated very positively. How do you understand the relationship between these two events?’ Students were also invited to reflect on broader developments across the period, such as: ‘Do I understand correctly that the struggle for equal rights is a central theme in your exhibition? How do you see this development across history? Is the situation better now than 200 years ago? If not, why?’

In spiritual care, counsellors typically adopt an active role during interviews in order to explore narrative plots and their relationship to anchored ultimate life goals. Since individuals do not usually reflect consciously on such goals, counsellors interpret the client’s narration during the interview, ask follow-up questions when relevant themes emerge, and offer tentative interpretations for reflection. Within educational history, memory studies, and educational sciences, such an interactive approach is uncommon, as researcher embeddedness is often assumed to compromise objectivity.⁴¹ However, to access the narrative plots and the anchored ultimate life goals embedded in historical narratives, the interviewer in this study deliberately adopted a role akin to that of a spiritual counsellor. This form of qualitative narrative research necessarily involves co-creation: both the context in which the narrative is produced (here, the assignment and interview) and the role of the interviewer shape the resulting story.

From constructivist grounded theory, the present study thus adopts an emphasis on the co-constructed and socially situated nature of narrative data.⁴² This perspective supported ongoing reflexivity regarding the researchers’ interpretive role, particularly because data collection and analysis occurred simultaneously during the interviews. Reflexivity was enacted in several ways. Interviews allowed for probing questions when analytically relevant and tentative interpretations were occasionally offered to participants for confirmation or correction, for example, by highlighting recurring themes and inviting reflection. In doing so, the interviewer sought to privilege the students’ own words. However, the interview questions inevitably prompted reflection on narrative elements that might otherwise have remained implicit. Consequently, the resulting data required careful and methodical analysis.

This study combines elements of informed grounded theory and constructivist grounded theory.⁴³ It is ‘informed’ in the sense that existing theoretical insights were systematically integrated into both data collection and analysis – an approach that classical grounded theory would reject. In its classical form, grounded theory is a qualitative approach in which theory is generated inductively from data through systematic coding and constant comparison. Prior literature is deliberately set aside during the initial stages of analysis to avoid imposing predefined conceptual frameworks. At the same time, the research remained open to emerging insights, which prompted new questions and the refinement or addition of codes.

The analysis proceeded in several chronological stages. It began with an examination of the living timelines produced during the preliminary assignment. For each timeline, we reviewed which historical actors and events students had selected, the moral valuations they assigned to these examples, and the overall direction of the timeline – whether it moved from predominantly negative to positive assessments towards the present, the reverse, or showed no clear development. These initial observations informed the subsequent interviews and helped identify potential turning points that required further exploration.

The interviews were then analysed using the coding schemes provided in the appendices. The first phase of coding focused on students’ individual choices. These were coded inductively, using the categories for types of historical significance and values as formulated in Tables 4 and 5 (see Appendix). This open coding remained closely tied to the students’ own formulations but allowed us to understand the underlying core values as elements of the students’ ultimate concerns and their relations with the students’ narrativity.

The second phase concerned the interpretation of major shifts within the timelines. Turning points – moments where the evaluative direction of the narrative changed – were coded using the categories from Table 4 (see Appendix), distinguishing situational, existential, and spiritual explanations, based on the work of Kruizinga, and complemented by intentional and structural causation drawn from historical theory.⁴⁴ This allowed us to determine what kinds of explanatory frameworks students mobilised when accounting for historical change: how does change happen, how is historical change related to history in general and to human nature? These insights in turn helped us understand the students’ (historical) worldview, as the second element of their ultimate concerns.

To ensure consistency, a selection of interviews was independently coded by multiple researchers; discrepancies were discussed and resolved, after which the principal investigator, Gijs van Gaans, systematically reviewed all coding decisions. For each student, an analytical vignette was compiled combining the coded significance, explanatory frameworks, narrative direction, and the student’s own articulation of social self-identification.

Based on this full dataset, each vignette was used to determine the narrative plot that was most characteristic of the student’s historical understanding. This involved assessing both the overarching development expressed in the timeline or articulated in the interview, and the degree to which agency was attributed to members of the student’s own social in-group. Because the plots examined in this study concern two centuries of world history and relate to social identities, they extend beyond individuals’ own life stories. Since the plots presented in Table 1 were originally formulated with reference to such personal life narratives, they were, on the basis of a pilot study, reformulated for the analysis of the data collected in this research.⁴⁵ These reformulated plots are presented in Table 3. Together, these steps enabled a coherent reconstruction of the ways in which students narratively organised the past and connected it to their own identities and fundamental values.

Students were invited to reflect on their own identities either spontaneously, when explaining their choices, or more explicitly at the end of the interview. These reflections revealed a heterogeneous group of students, not only in terms of cultural or ethnic background, but also in how they themselves conceptualised ‘identity’. Some students articulated their identity primarily in social or cultural terms, while others foregrounded personal traits, interests, or everyday practices. Four students explicitly voiced a non-Dutch cultural or ethnic background: Turkish, Kurdish, Somalian, and Ghanaian. The first three also expressed an Islamic identity. One Dutch student stressed her female gender identity. The other students described their identities in terms of hobbies and personal identity traits, such as ‘I like to party’, ‘I am a diabetes patient’ or ‘I am a social person’.

Importantly, identity appeared to be articulated relationally and contextually. The interviewer’s (Gijs van Gaans) perceived cultural and social position may have contributed to differences in how students expressed shared or divergent identities, suggesting that self-identification functioned as an interactive and situational practice rather than a fixed attribute. For example, student 3, who is Ghanaian, was asked by the male, white, middle-aged and Dutch interviewer to describe her identity.

Within the context of the school and that of the interview, the student felt that her ethnic background characterised her identity best; while connecting that identity with a past she did not share with the interviewer and with cultural traits she felt proud of.

Tables 7 and 8 (see Appendix) present an overview of the historical events and actors selected by students, along with the mean value assigned to them (where 1 = very negative and 5 = very positive). The analysis of students’ exhibitions shows a marked convergence in the selection of actors. A limited number of figures recurred across most timelines, most notably Martin Luther King Jr. and Napoleon. Their prominence can be largely explained by curricular exposure: King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech had been discussed extensively in Dutch language classes, while Napoleon featured prominently in history lessons. Other actors had not yet been addressed during the school year itself, and some had not been discussed at all over the preceding years.

Although students often selected the same actors – 57 out of the 90 selections in total were at least shared by seven students – their evaluations were not uniform. Most figures were positioned positively on the timeline, yet a small number elicited more ambivalent or negative judgments. Adolf Hitler and Ho Chi Minh were consistently placed at the bottom, whereas Winston Churchill was generally positioned more neutrally. Greta Thunberg provoked the most divergent responses, ranging from strong admiration to explicit rejection, indicating that contemporary figures could evoke conflicting moral interpretations. Notably, students occasionally used a limited number of ‘jokers’ to include actors they considered indispensable, particularly Hitler. Three actors were not selected by any student: Pim Fortuyn, Els Borst – two prominent Dutch politicians from the late twentieth century – and Marie Curie.⁴⁷

A similar pattern emerged in the selection of historical events. While most students chose examples that overlapped to a large extent, the meanings attributed to these events varied more than those attributed to actors. Events were more frequently evaluated in neutral or negative terms. The Holocaust, for instance, was not always selected as a separate event, as some students understood it as part of the Second World War. Nevertheless, all students referred to it during the interviews, indicating its implicit significance within their historical understanding.

We operationalised ultimate concerns in historical narratives as a combination of core values and world views. During the interviews, students were invited to explain why particular actors and events mattered to them. Their responses rarely drew on formal criteria of historical significance; rather, they articulated meaning through a small set of value-laden themes that recurred across accounts – most prominently freedom and equality, alongside peace, technology, and the environment. A small number of statements referred only to general effects of these events without further specification, and some resisted neat categorisation. The detailed distribution of these themes over all interviews is available in Table 6 (see Appendix), but the analysis below privileges how students narrated significance in their own terms.

Students commonly expressed a sense that the present is, in important respects, ‘better’ than the past, especially in the social domain. Ten students spoke of growing freedom and equality, while acknowledging persistent inequalities and uneven access to these gains. Technological change, by contrast, elicited ambivalent evaluations: six students appreciated increased convenience and connectivity but worried about social consequences – particularly the effects of the internet on social relationships and everyday interaction. Environmental concerns were also voiced, often as a counterweight to narratives of improvement.

Although progress was a powerful frame, it did not monopolise students’ thinking. All students integrated elements of decline into their accounts, and one student developed a distinctly pessimistic plot in which power holders repeatedly exploit crises – citing, for example, the covid-19 pandemic – to scapegoat others. In general, students’ accounts reveal a dynamic interplay between optimism about social advances and caution about technology and ecology.

Across interviews, students tended to argue for significance by direct reference to their fundamental values rather than by embedding choices within a larger, architectonic narrative of historical development. Freedom and equality were mentioned by almost all, but the mode of justification varied. Students who explicitly articulated a minority identity within the Netherlands more often connected their selections to personal lived experience, family histories, or ongoing inequities. Other students, who did not explicitly articulate a minority identity, justified choices in more general terms – what might be described as textbook formulations of impact – emphasising scale or consequence without specifying concrete mechanisms or personal resonance. The inclusion of same-sex marriage by student 1 illustrates this contrast, as discussed below.

Student 1, identifying as a Somalian Muslim, first discussed Sayyid Qutb, an influential Egyptian Islamist thinker associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose writings have been central to the development of modern political Islam. The student acknowledged limited prior knowledge of this actor and framed his interest through religious identification:

Later, he argued for including the legalisation of same-sex marriage within a broader commitment to equal rights across all groups:

In this formulation, the event of the same-sex marriage acquires significance as a testament to civil liberties that benefit society as a whole, including the speaker himself. So, on this specific topic, he says that his identity as a Muslim does not matter, but his understanding of equality before the law does, which is indirectly influenced by his identification as a minority that is not always treated equally. Student 2, who likewise self-identifies as a Muslim, engages in a comparable line of reasoning when he justifies his selection of the first mosque in the Netherlands by adopting a collective ‘we’ perspective.

A similar pattern of linking historical developments to personal experiences appears in the reflections of Student 5, who emphasised her identity as a woman. When discussing the introduction of universal women’s suffrage in the Netherlands, she draws on her own experience of women’s opinions being taken less seriously than those of men.

Because students generally did not frame their choices within a larger narrative structure, explicit causal links between events and actors were initially thin. When prompted to explore connections, the explanations they presented were diverse but could be clustered around two modes. Some students referred to a proximate context (direct causes and immediate effects), while others appealed to general, more existential, tendencies in human behaviour (Table 9, see Appendix). This more existential explanation is visible when student 7 was asked to explain why World War I started:

Here, great power rivalry and grievance are translated into recognisable interpersonal motives of envy and perceived unfairness rather than into structural accounts of imperial competition or alliance dynamics. Notably, no student referenced their social self-identification to support their causal reasoning.

The emplotment codes used in the analysis of students’ narratives were derived from two criteria: the perceived direction of historical development (progress or decline) and the degree of agency attributed to the social in-group (see Table 1). The timelines produced for the assignments did not follow a clear linear trajectory; instead, they moved back and forth through time, alternating between high and low points. Only in the interviews did more coherent narrative patterns emerge, when students were prompted with the question: ‘When visitors leave your exhibition, how would you like them to look back on history – with a sense of progress, decline, or neither?’ However, even though most students verbalised that the world had improved during the last two hundred years, they did not hold a specific social group responsible. Although respondents explained the role the historical actors they selected had played in history, it seems that they did neither include them to their own social in-group nor connect them to historical events. This may relate to the predominance of existential explanations: for most students, events seemed to have happened because that is who humans are, or what human life is (see Table 9: Appendix). The preference for such explanations indicates a distinctly historical worldview in which human nature is seen as immutable and therefore regarded as a reliable causal factor.

The data invited, but ultimately resisted, a spiritual reading of students’ explanations. In pastoral or spiritual care, notions such as calling, sin, grace, or abandonment may frame experience; these terms did not appear in students’ historical reasoning and are arguably ill-suited to their understanding of the past. A more promising approach was to ask whether students construed history as a growing manifestation of fundamental values – equality, for instance – with individual actors and events contributing to an overarching moral trajectory. Yet, even with this broader interpretation, the interviews yielded little evidence of a spiritualised narrative of history. Students’ accounts remained primarily existential, emphasising recurring human dispositions over teleological moral progress.

Student 15 exemplifies this tendency. Discussing Sojourner Truth, he reflected on the discrimination faced by his non-white friends while shopping:

This reasoning is existential: discrimination persists because fear persists. Later, when asked about a causal connection between the Shoah and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he answered:

His timeline gives pride of place to Martin Luther King Jr. and Sojourner Truth and elevates the Dutch constitution, the abolition of slavery, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while placing the Shoah at the bottom as the paradigmatic negation of equality. Yet, when invited to characterise the overall trajectory of history – progress, decline, or ups and downs – he opted for the latter. Despite his strong commitment to equality, he did not perceive history as a story of its improvement. The absence of a stable plot anchored in a collective agent (a social in-group, for instance) recurs across interviews: students typically refrained from attributing large-scale change to groups they identified with, preferring instead to speak of humanity in general.

We will now examine in greater detail the narrative understandings of student 3, whose narrative understanding of the past was the most personal and therefore provides the best insight into the role that ultimate concerns may play in students’ historical narrativity.

Student 3 self-identified as Ghanaian, and thereby African, and articulated a sense of connection to themes of justice and equality through an intergenerational memory of enslavement. In discussing her choice of the abolition of slavery, she stated:

She compared slavery to the Holocaust, emphasising that both should be remembered. When asked whether she feels slavery receives sufficient attention at school, she argues that it receives very little attention and that it is discussed ‘too carefully’. She believes the same is true for the Holocaust. She would like to emphasise that the effects of slavery did not end with its abolition. Her explanation for selecting the abolition of slavery and the Berlin Conference is explicitly tied to her own identity. About the Berlin Conference, she says:

This focus on equality also affected her selection of events and actors that are not specifically related to slavery. For example, she selected two actors, Simone de Beauvoir and Mohammed Hatta, and one event, the Berlin Conference, that were less frequently chosen by other students (Tables 7 and 8). She explains selecting Simone de Beauvoir, together with Aletta Jacobs, by arguing:

In discussing her selected events, student 3 referred to three core values: equality, justice, and freedom. The first two were especially important to her. For example, with regard to 9/11, she acknowledged the suffering in the United States but emphasised that specific social groups – which she did not specify – were cast in a bad light and denied a fair chance in society. Later in the interview she also explained how former classmates with an Indonesian background were affected by the very brief discussion in class of the decolonisation of Indonesia and its effects on their families, something she considered unfair. At one point the interviewer asked:

Here we see how both individual and ethnic aspects of the personal interact with her historical narrativity. She shared a story about slavery that she considered important to remember and insufficiently addressed at school. She recognised similar experiences among students from other migrant backgrounds. At the same time, she has experienced inequality and injustice in her own personal life. These experiences made her value justice and equality, values she used to orient herself in time.

Student 3 primarily used intentional explanations to make sense of the past, with an existential character. For example, when asked why the 9/11 attacks occurred, she argued:

Later in the interview she explained how the Civil Rights Act could have passed while racial discrimination still existed in the United States:

Although she recognises structural causes, she focuses on people who protested and enacted change. Interestingly, she also connected this American event to her own life.

In student 3’s interview, we see how personal experiences – both individual and ethnic – interact with her historical narrativity. These experiences are closely related to this student’s ultimate concerns: her core values and worldview. First, she values justice and equality, and uses these values to orient her understanding of history. These values were used to select actors and events, which were often explicitly linked to her personal experiences. The past showed her that these values were not always upheld, but also that people actively fought for them. Figures such as Aletta Jacobs and Martin Luther King served as examples.

Second, student 3 used intentional explanations, linked to an existential view of human nature. Negative events occur because people are inherently egoistic; positive change is driven by people striving for equality and justice when they have had enough. We would therefore still classify her narrative as one with a romantic plot (see Table 3): there are existential challenges – visible even during the covid pandemic – but significant progress has been made thanks to people who stood up for justice and equality.

Student 3’s narrative supports the idea that for some students, history is personal, bringing together collective memories, personal memories, and historical knowledge. Her understanding of history not only helps her make sense of the world, but also to attribute meaning to it: history tells her that we must continue to work for equality and justice.