Alice Kunce, who teaches sixth-grade English and seventh- and eighth-grade “exploratory fiction” in Little Rock, Arkansas, uses historical fiction, specifically the book Fire From the Rock, to engage her students with their city’s history of integration. As the class reflects on the various characters’ choices, Kunce asks her students to consider: “How does society influence those decisions? What limitations are put on characters? By themselves? Friends? Family? Society?”

Humanizing history not only means it’s easier for students to connect the historical dots, research shows that it also encourages empathy. Being told a story via historical fiction helps students identify with the characters’ points of view, and that ability to recognize different outlooks, Levstik explained, is an essential historical skill: “How is it we understand how the world looked to other people? And how do you get kids to care enough to do the work of figuring out somebody’s perspective [back then]?”

In that vein, humanizing history means making it recognizable for all students. Rudine Sims Bishop, professor emerita of education at Ohio State University, wrote a seminal article in 1990 that advocated for increased diversity in children’s literature. Bishop presented a model of literature working as mirrors, which reflect and affirm readers’ experience; windows, which provide insight into other’s experiences; and sliding glass doors, which allow readers the ability to move from their perspective into the experience of another.

Not only do minority students need stories with people who are like them, she argued, a lack of diversity in literature also negatively affects the majority group by reflecting back only what they know. Bishop wrote, “Children from dominant social groups … need books that will help them understand the multicultural nature of the world they live in, and their place as a member of just one group, as well as their connection to all other humans.”

Terrie Epstein, a professor of education at Hunter College, studies the differing frameworks with which students of various races and ethnicities approach the history they’re taught in school. Her research found that minority students tend to have a more skeptical view of textbooks and traditional historical narratives. For any narrative, whether historical or otherwise, Epstein says students who don’t see their stories reflected are usually “less likely to give the source credibility than a source that has their story in it.”

Psychology studies show that children develop a strong sense of fairness at an early age and understand when they are receiving less than others. Kids in some countries, including the U.S., have been shown to have “advantageous-inequity aversion,” meaning that they’re bothered when they receive more than others. As Levstik and her colleague Keith Barton recommend in their book, Teaching History for the Common Good, teachers can build on students’ strong sense of justice to connect discussions of historical events to contemporary civics and issues, guided by the question “what can we do to help the world function better for everyone?”