This is The Guardian.

Today, Israel, Palestine, in the classroom.

We meet the Lancashire teenagers debating one of the most contested conflicts in history.

Ten years ago, pupils from a school in Lancashire went on a very unusual school trip.

It was dreamt up by a history teacher who believed that the best lessons took place outside of the classroom.

What you're looking at is a new way of learning history when historians can't agree on how to tell

it. That often happens when a conflict is ongoing and both sides are too far apart to even agree on

their shared past. Michael Davies was a maverick, a soap salesman in a former life. He was 41 when he started

teaching at the Lancaster Royal Grammar School and was determined to make history fun. He recreated the

Battle of Hastings, drafting in a real horse, and he taught feudalism by getting the 11-year-old

boys to pile up chairs and

desks and form a social pyramid with the serfs groaning at the bottom.

But modern history was his passion. No conflict was too naughty, too distant or too difficult.

And where possible, he liked to take his pupils out into the field.

Michael Davis, he's an interesting origin story.

We worked together in the history department here for, I think, 18 years altogether.

And we were in the habit of annual field trips to Ireland, looking at history from a dual

narrative perspective.

Eventually those evolved into spending time with former IRA and former UVF, so students

would kind of capture, you know, the importance of history in terms of how it shaped people,

what they did. I mean, people killing each other because of how they interpreted the past

or their histories was pretty powerful message and it was a bit better than the one we were delivering in the classroom.

...