When I first started teaching at my current school, the essential question for our Imperialism unit was “To what extent was imperialism justified?” Granted, this was over ten years ago; cut us some slack. Please? Anyway, as time progressed, and we continued to improve our unit, we were like, “What the hell were the people who wrote this question thinking?” In no way, shape, or form do we want our students to justify imperialism. Yes, one can argue that there were some benefits, but I’m not in the business of saying some technological or economic advancement is worth the suffering of tens to hundreds of millions of people.

Call me “woke.” I don’t care.

As World History teachers (and social studies teachers in general), we know that teaching our content is getting harder to do each year. With ongoing political debates about what schools are and aren’t allowed to teach, many of us are feeling squeezed from every direction at once. Teach it too critically and face pushback. Teach it too gently, and you’ve done your students a disservice they’ll carry for years. (One that you’ll probably regret). 

There is a better way. Here are five strategies that help you teach imperialism and colonialism honestly, from multiple perspectives.

Move 1: Center Colonized Voices in Your Primary Sources

Most World History textbooks cover imperialism almost entirely from a European perspective. The dates, the treaties, the trade routes, the “benefits” of civilization. What gets left out, almost by default, are the perspectives of the people who actually experienced colonization.

Your first and most important move is to change the ratio of whose voice is in the room. Pair every European account with a primary source from a colonized person, a resistance leader, an ordinary farmer, or a child separated from their family. 

Historians who study how colonialism is taught in secondary schools consistently find that simplistic framing of imperialism erases the agency of colonized peoples and their many forms of resistance, which makes students less equipped to understand both history and the present. Fixing the source selection is the simplest, highest-leverage thing you can do.

Move 2: Teach Resistance Alongside Conquest

One of the most common mistakes in units about imperialism and colonialism is treating colonized peoples as passive victims of history rather than active agents who fought back, negotiated, adapted, and survived. 

Build resistance movements into your unit from the start, not as a brief add-on at the end. Teach the Haitian Revolution alongside the sugar trade. Tackle the Indian independence movement alongside the British imperial administration. Explore the Maji Maji alongside German colonization in East Africa. When students see colonized people as people who made choices and fought for their futures, it fundamentally changes the moral weight of what they’re learning.

A trauma-informed framework developed by Edutopia for teaching the colonization of the Americas notes that centering resistance movements is not only historically accurate but also essential for students from communities with direct connections to colonial history. It allows them to see their ancestors as more than victims.

For an in-depth, comprehensive look at the Haitian Revolution, check out my Haitian Revolution Group Activity. It’s ELL-friendly and helps students evaluate different narratives about the Haitian Revolution. 

Move 3: Use Literature to Humanize the History

Here’s the honest truth: you can spend a whole class period explaining how colonizers seized land, stripped resources, and dismantled entire societies, and half your students will still just nod and move on. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that facts on a slide don’t make you feel anything. A novel does. If you haven’t tried pairing literature with your World History content yet, the colonialism unit is exactly where to start.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the classic choice for a reason. It gives students a fully realized human world before colonial disruption, which makes the disruption land with the weight it deserves. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work, Oral Histories From the Pacific Islands, offers rich options for almost every region of the world you’re covering.

The National Council of Teachers of English has long argued that including literature by and about colonized peoples is one of the most powerful tools available for expanding students’ understanding of history and developing their capacity for empathy. This does not require a full novel unit. Even a few pages read closely can shift the emotional register of your entire lesson.

Move 4: Back to That Question in Your Classroom

So what do you do when a student says colonialism brought good things?

You don’t shut it down. You use it.

Ask the student: good for whom? Good compared to what alternative? Who got to decide what counted as an improvement? These are not trick questions. They are the questions historians actually ask, and they teach students to think structurally rather than just reactively.

The History-Social Science Project at UC Berkeley offers a framework for reframing modern World History instruction that helps teachers guide students toward these kinds of analytical questions rather than debates about whether colonialism was “good” or “bad” overall.

This approach also gives you a way to engage honestly without the conversation becoming a flashpoint. You’re not telling students what to conclude. You’re teaching them how to ask better questions.

Move 5: Connect Colonialism to the World Students Live In

One of the most powerful things you can do at the end of an imperialism unit is help students see the connections to the present. Colonial-era borders, global economic structures, immigration patterns, wealth gaps between nations, and ongoing land rights disputes.

The OER Project’s imperialism materials do an excellent job of connecting colonial history to contemporary global dynamics, including how former colonial powers and former colonies relate to each other economically and politically today. This connection work is what transforms a history lesson into genuine historical thinking.

It also answers the implicit question students are often asking when they push back on colonialism content: why does this matter? The answer is that it shapes the world they’re inheriting. That is about as relevant as history gets.

If you’re looking for more ways to decentralize the colonizers, check out How to Make Teaching Imperialism in Africa Less Eurocentric. 

We eventually retired “To what extent was imperialism justified?” and replaced it with something we actually believed in: “How did European imperialism impact colonized people?” That one word swap, from justification to impact, changed everything about how our students approached the content. When your essential question puts colonized people at the center instead of the colonizers, your whole unit changes. And that’s a good thing.