Here are some teaching resources to support history learning in the classroom. While historical fiction does not provide historical accounts in the way historians construct them, these stories can be powerful tools to spark students’ curiosity, engage their imagination, and deepen their interest in historical events.
All The Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr
How We Disappeared
by Jing-Jing Lee
Resistance of the Heart
by Nathan Stoltzfus
Grave of the Fireflies
by Isao Takahata
The Violinist
Following the educators' screening of The Violinist on 1 October 2026, the History Unit had the opportunity to catch up with the film's co-director, Ervin Han for a short conversation. In this brief chat, we explored the inspiration behind the film, the challenges of bringing history to the screen and the role of storytelling in the classroom.
1. You spent over a decade bringing The Violinist to life. What made you feel this was a story you needed to tell?
The story began more than ten years ago as a short film. At its heart was a very simple idea: an elderly woman looking back on a love that was interrupted by war, and a piece of music that carries those memories across a lifetime.
As I developed it into a feature, the canvas became much larger. I became interested in telling a Singapore story through the lives of ordinary people rather than through the conventional perspective of major historical events and personalities. We experience the upheavals of the 1930s and 1940s through Fei and Kai — two young musicians who are trying to build their lives while history keeps intruding upon them.
That was important to me because history can sometimes feel very distant when we encounter it as dates, events and political developments. But for the people who actually lived through these periods, history was also very personal. They fell in love, had ambitions, made compromises, lost people, waited for people who never returned.
The film became, for me, as much about memory as history — how the events we now regard as “history” were once somebody's present, and how their consequences can remain with an individual for an entire lifetime.
2. In doing the research for the film, were there particular discoveries along the way, whether an archive, a person, or a recording, that personally surprised you or changed the direction of the film?
One of the most fascinating discoveries was the story of Lim Bo Seng and the resistance and espionage activities taking place in Malaya. I knew Lim Bo Seng as the historical figure most Singaporeans learn about, but researching what he and Force 136 were actually doing opened up a very different world — secret intelligence networks, agents operating undercover, clandestine radio communications, and operations in places like Ipoh and the jungles around Bidor in Perak.
That research actually changed the film. For a stretch in the middle, The Violinist almost becomes an espionage film, and we were able to introduce elements of spycraft and suspense that give it a very different rhythm and atmosphere.
I liked that contrast. In Singapore, the characters experience the Occupation very directly — fear, deprivation and life under military rule. Then the story moves into Malaya and suddenly we're in this shadow world of resistance, intelligence and covert operations. It allowed us to show another dimension of the war that I hadn't originally expected the film to explore.
It also changed how I approached Lim Bo Seng. Rather than putting him on a pedestal as the national hero we know today, I became more interested in the man doing this extraordinarily dangerous work — intelligent, persuasive, principled, but still very human.
3. The Violinist covers a significant period of Singapore and Southeast Asian history, from the colonial period through the Japanese Occupation. How did you balance historical accuracy with the need to make an emotionally engaging and accessible film?
We made an important distinction between historical events and fictional experience.
Where the film intersects with documented history — the Japanese Occupation, resistance activities, the broader political circumstances, or a real person such as Lim Bo Seng — we tried to respect the historical record. But Fei and Kai are fictional characters. Their purpose is to allow audiences to experience those events at a human and emotional level.
That necessarily involves dramatic licence. We compress time, bring characters into encounters that cannot be documented, and construct dialogue and personal experiences. I don't think historical drama should pretend that these invented elements are historical fact.
At the same time, fiction can sometimes communicate something about history that facts alone cannot. We may know when Singapore fell, for example, but a fictional character can help us imagine what it meant to suddenly experience fear, separation, uncertainty or loss.
For me, the responsibility is therefore not to claim that every scene happened exactly as depicted. It is to make sure that the fictional story does not fundamentally distort the historical circumstances in which it takes place.
I actually hope this distinction becomes useful in a classroom. A student can ask: Which parts are documented? Which are interpretation? Why did the filmmaker choose to represent an event in this particular way? What other perspectives might there be?
Those are very healthy questions. A historical film shouldn't replace the history textbook or primary sources. Ideally, it makes someone curious enough to go back to them.
4. What is the one key message you would like audiences to take away from The Violinist, not just about Singapore's past, but about how we should relate to history and memory itself?
Perhaps that history is not only what happened; it is also what people remember, what they forget, and what one generation chooses to pass on to the next.
At the beginning of The Violinist, Fei is an old woman being asked to look back on events that happened many decades earlier. That framing is deliberate. We are not presenting the past as something perfectly preserved. We are entering it through memory — and memory is emotional, selective and sometimes imperfect.
Singapore has changed enormously within a relatively short period of time. As generations pass, there is inevitably greater distance between young Singaporeans and experiences such as colonialism, war and Occupation. We can preserve documents, photographs and dates, but we also need stories that allow people to imagine what it might have felt like to live through those times.
At the same time, we should never treat a film — including ours — as the definitive version of history. Every telling involves choices: whose perspective we follow, what we include, what we leave out, and how we interpret the evidence.
If The Violinist encourages a young person to ask “Did this really happen?”, “Whose story is this?”, or “What else should I find out?”, I would consider that a very meaningful outcome.
History should not simply give us answers about the past. It should make us curious about it.
MFA (2PS) Ms Foo Chi Hsia with History Unit moderator Master Specialist, Dr Angeline Jude Yeo
The polished essay. The well-supported judgement. The student who can interrogate a source, weigh competing interpretations and construct a convincing historical argument. History teachers know these ‘performances’ well. But at the 2026 History Symposium held on 23 July 2026 at the Lifelong Learning Institute where about 230 History educators, school leaders and senior management gathered, Dr Christine Counsell invited us to look behind these performances: what must we nurture before students can genuinely think historically?
It is a particularly urgent question now.
Students inhabit a world where information is abundant and generative AI can explain an event, analyse a source or draft an essay in seconds. Beyond the classroom, students can encounter history everywhere around them. Historical narratives shape identities, territorial claims and memories of conflict; different actors draw upon the past to make sense of—and sometimes justify—their actions in the present. These were precisely the challenges that framed the symposium’s theme, “At the Heart of History: Reorientate, Relate, Refresh.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs keynote address by Second Permanent Secretary, Ms Foo Chi Hsia brought the discussion closer to home, highlighting the relevance of historical understanding in making sense of current geopolitical developments and Singapore’s navigation of a complex world.
So when Dr Counsell took the stage, the question was larger than how to teach History well.
What can a history teacher give young people that information at their fingertips cannot?
Dr Counsell’s answer began with knowledge.
Not information. Knowledge.
Historical knowledge, she argued, “changes what we see in the world”. It acts like a filter, shaping how we understand other societies, cultures and values. It matters to civic life too. Knowledge of national and diverse cultural stories gives citizens resources for understanding one another. This is why, she argued, the notion that knowledge can simply be “looked up” is so misguided. Much of the knowledge we need is precisely the knowledge we do not yet know we need.
Hence her call for a knowledge-rich, not information-rich curriculum. Information can be accumulated or looked up. Knowledge, Dr Counsell argued, is different. It is “connected and coherent”; it has structure and shape. Over time, students build what she called a “flexible jigsaw in the head”, the temporal framework and reference points that allow new information to find its place and make sense. We can outsource smaller details, she suggested, but not the fundamental structures that allow us to have an informed conversation about World War II, how countries and identities were shaped, or the trajectories of the Cold War.
This is the nurture behind the performance. Historical consciousness, Dr Counsell argued, has to be built steadily through rich, secure and varied knowledge and immersion in genuine historical problems.
Often, that nurture begins with a story. There may be good reason why stories have such a hold over us. Jerome Bruner once described human beings as “storytelling creatures”. Stories do more than tell us what happened. They give shape to experience and help us make meaning of the world.
For the 130 secondary-school and junior-college teachers who attended Dr Counsell’s masterclasses on 21 and 22 July 2026, the power of narratives in history teaching has already been explored in depth.
The proposition was deceptively simple. Stories should not merely decorate a history lesson or provide an engaging introduction. They can do serious intellectual work like opening an enquiry, punctuating a longer sequence or supplying background knowledge that might otherwise be difficult to assimilate.
However, telling stories well requires craft. Dr Counsell encouraged teachers to begin with concrete matter rather than abstract meaning; to stay close to a human perspective; to let explanation follow the action so that curiosity has time to form; to go small in time and space; and sometimes to end not with a conclusion, but an image.
At the MasterClass, the narrative built around Farquhar laid the context for the early days of Singapore’s establishment as a British port. Instead of beginning with Farquhar’s historical significance, students first encountered his experience with the land - clearing trees. Layer by layer, students are introduced to the context of the foundational years of Singapore’s development. Here, information follows action. Rather than closing with a neat summary of his contributions to Singapore, the story ends simply: “Another ship dropped its anchor.”
The image leaves students with some work to do.
Dr Counsell then complicated the story. What if Farquhar’s were not the only eyes through which students encountered early colonial Singapore? Add a Bugis captain deciding whether to bring his fleet into the new free port; a Chinese shopkeeper watching the streets fill; Raffles returning to a town he scarcely recognises; Munshi Abdullah observing them all.
Now ask: Who really founded Singapore?
The stories do not make the answer easier. They make the question richer.
That is the point. Dr Counsell proposed that a sequence of lessons can run simultaneously in two directions: a narrative direction, supplied by stories, and an analytic direction, supplied by a sustained disciplinary inquiry question. Stories furnish students with people, circumstances and perspectives; the inquiry makes them think with what they have encountered.
Dr Christine Counsell delivering the keynote and Q&A with History Unit moderator Lead Specialist Mr Noel Ong
Stories, however, are powerful precisely because they persuade. Dr Counsell was candid about their dangers. Imaginative details can be mistaken for historical certainty; a single perspective can become the perspective. The answer is not to abandon narrative, but to help students recognise its “powers of seduction”; to ask what has been selected, foregrounded or left out, and eventually to become thoughtful narrative-makers themselves.
The same disciplinary concern informed her treatment of sources. She cautioned against isolated source exercises and the familiar “death by sources A to F”, where students work mechanically through disconnected extracts instead of encountering sources as evidence within a genuine historical inquiry. Sources become meaningful when encountered within a sustained inquiry, supported by enough contextual knowledge for students to engage with them as historical evidence.
Underlying the stories, sources and inquiry is scholarship. Dr Counsell drew on historians such as Vladislav Zubok on the Soviet collapse and Michael Maclear on Vietnam to show how historians themselves weave narrative into argument. For teachers, continuing to encounter scholarship renews not only what we know, but the stories, interpretations and questions we can bring into our classrooms. .
This was why Dr Counsell’s parting recommendation in the keynote was so simple: stay close to the discipline.
Keep reading up-to-date historical scholarship.
Keep enjoying it.
Keep talking about it with other history teachers.
A teacher still relying only on the scholarship encountered as an undergraduate, she warned, risks becoming “a history teacher frozen in time”. .
And then came her challenge: “So to history teachers I say unleash your superpower. Stay close to the scholarship that defines your practice and furnishes your goals and methods.”
As participants moved from the keynotes into the concurrent teacher sharing sessions, there were signs that many of these disciplinary powers were already being exercised in Singapore classrooms.
For instance, at Serangoon Garden Secondary School, a flipped-classroom approach moved some content acquisition outside lesson time, freeing students in class to “do history”— raising questions, investigating the past and taking greater agency over their learning. At Catholic Junior College and Victoria Junior College, teachers showed how analogies, from cocoons and tree-planting to fire and forced marriage, could make abstract historical ideas accessible, while examining where an analogy breaks down pushed students towards a more complex understanding of the past.
The World Café offered still other possibilities. Students navigated “Choose Your Own Adventure” journeys through Japanese militarism and the Berlin Blockade; visible-thinking routines helped them question narratives and their own assumptions; while a “human library” of lives in Nazi Germany used research and narrative-writing to develop historical empathy.
Different approaches, but a common thread: to move students from receiving history to thinking, questioning and making meaning historically.
Perhaps this is what it means to unleash the history teacher’s superpower. Not a single technique, and certainly not a new technology, but the capacity to draw upon deep historical knowledge, scholarship, story, evidence and inquiry to help young people see more than they could see before.
In a world increasingly good at producing answers, the history teacher’s superpower may lie in nurturing young people who know how to ask better questions.
We would really like to hear how you have been inspired during Dr Counsell’s masterclass and keynote, or any part of the symposium that you have attended. Please scan the QR code or click on the link to share your ideas and you might be featured in next year’s History Unit e-bulletin. Looking forward to reading your replies!
Syllabus Materials and Resources