Of all the examples of colonial loot, the Koh-i-Noor diamond is one of the most controversial. The recent decision to avoid using it in the upcoming coronation ceremony seems a sensible one considering the many disagreements and competing claims over its past and future. The question we wanted to explore with our Year 9s is: how has one stone come to symbolise so many things over the centuries?

By tracking the diamond through the ages as it is dramatically passed from empire to empire, we can observe how the cultural value of the Koh-i-Noor grows and evolves. We can extract lessons about the use and display of power and how an object is afforded its value through what it comes to represent. Even though the story is one told at overview level, we can gain a real depth of knowledge about the empires of the Indian subcontinent and the nature of British colonial rule. As a result, the story is full of opportunities to incorporate aspects of decolonial thinking in authentic and challenging ways.

This year we approached our Eleanor of Aquitaine enquiry differently. We focused on what Eleanor’s story has represented to different historians, and why she has therefore been presented in different ways. In doing so, we asked the question of how Eleanor’s story and character has been ‘invented’, a term which encapsulates the idea that historians are active creators of new content in their work.

As is often the case, the enquiry straddles the divide between significance and interpretations. The concept of significance shone through in pupils’ exploration of how the historians select and emphasise different aspects of the past within Eleanor’s story according to their values and interests. As such, these historians determined which parts of Eleanor’s story left the realm of the ‘past’ and entered historical consciousness. The different parts of Eleanor’s life historians featured resulted in different ‘versions’ of Eleanor being remembered. As such, the enquiry demonstrates how significance works in a disciplinary context.