Teaching a class of newly arrived immigrant teenagers from various backgrounds and ethnicities poses many interesting challenges: varied levels of schooling, varied levels of mastery in a new language, no common frame of reference, varied ways of understanding and making sense of the world and very varied ways of making sense of history. How exciting and rewarding such classes are!

This lesson sequence was constructed for a class that needed to learn, in one year, what Swedish teenagers learn in nine. Our second-order concepts were change and continuity. Our substantive focus was highly relevant to them: Swedish migration history. I wanted my students to see Sweden as a country of both emigrants and immigrants, to learn some Swedish twentieth-century history and to understand both their own experience of migration and their current situation in the light of a bigger picture of migration in Swedish history. The enquiry question that I devised in order to draw all this together within an intriguing historical problem, was...