I took part in a research internship in the summer of 2025, in which I contributed to a project about decolonial approaches to Russian history. The aim of this project was to assess the current GCSE and A Level curriculum for history and how Russian and Soviet history is approached in these. This is a topic with a great deal of real-life importance, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and it was exciting to take part in something that felt very relevant.
Myself and two other interns were responsible for researching the current curriculums for each exam board and identifying areas we felt were missing or not fully developed in the history of the multiethnic Russian empire and Soviet Union. Following on from this, we all got the opportunity to choose a topic we wanted to research, as well as creating a list of other important areas we’d identified.
For my topic I chose Soviet atomic testing in Kazakhstan. This was a topic I didn’t initially know much about, and I loved the opportunity to read about it in great detail. I quickly became very interested in this period of history. Soviet nuclear weapons were tested in rural areas on the Kazakh steppe, where local people and wildlife were exposed to radiation. This has caused many problems for multiple generations of Kazakh people, and played a key role in Kazakhstan’s development after its independence from the Soviet Union.
I used a mixture of online and physical resources to research this topic, and then compiled a selection of resources I judged would be useful to history teachers to use in a classroom to teach about the topic. I tried to find a range of different media for my resources, as I know that this is helpful in a classroom to engage students’ attention and hopefully spark their interest.
After we’d identified a selection of resources about our respective topics, the three of us created posters displaying them for history teachers. We made the posters as engaging and informative as possible, as well as being easy to approach for history teachers whose time is extremely limited. We presented these posters to each other and to the members of staff involved in the project, and received feedback on them.
This internship has been a great opportunity to learn about an area of history that I chose for myself, as well as hearing about the areas of research undertaken by the other interns on the project. It has also been a really interesting insight into academic research, and an opportunity to take part in something that could have a real impact on teachers and students.
