All Activities
History

Walking in Their Shoes

Overview

Students take on the role of a person from a specific historical moment and explain how that person might have felt and why.

Learning Objective
Students understand a historical person's experience by imagining their perspective using historical context.

Resources needed

  • None

Lesson stages

0 / 7 done
  1. 1 Describe a historical situation briefly — e.g. a farmer during a drought 200 years ago, or a child in a town when a new road was built.
  2. 2 Ask students to imagine they are that person.
  3. 3 Ask: what do you know? What are you worried about? What do you hope for?
  4. 4 Students speak or write a short first-person account.
  5. 5 Share accounts — compare different students' interpretations.
  6. 6 Discuss: did everyone imagine the same things? Why not?
  7. 7 Ask: how does understanding their feelings help us understand history?

Tap a step to mark it as done.

Variations

  • Two students take opposing roles — e.g. a landowner and a farmer — and discuss their different views.
  • Hot seat: one student stays in role and others ask questions.
  • Write a diary entry for that historical person.
More information

Teach: perspective, empathy, imagine, role, context, first person, account. Sentence frame: 'I am... It is the year... I feel... because...'

Provide specific prompts: 'You have no food for three days. You have three children. There is a market town two days' walk away.' Concrete details help less confident students engage.

Does the student's account reflect accurate historical context rather than modern assumptions? Do they explain feelings using historical reasons?

No materials needed. Entirely oral or written in soil. The historical knowledge and imagination are the resources.

Students project modern values onto historical people. Teach that historical empathy means understanding people within their context — not judging them by today's standards.

Historical empathy is not the same as sympathy. It is the disciplined intellectual effort to understand past experience from within its own context.

Activity details
Primary Medium 25–30 minutes no prep Small Group, Whole Class Indoor & Outdoor
Topics
Historical Empathy Perspective Role Play