BH4SCHOOLS IN THE TES MAGAZINE

This article came out in the TES Magazine today:

Sunday is the bicentenary of the bill that abolished slavery. The TES Magazine looks at resources that commemorate the anniversary

If the slave trade is not a significant part of your key stage 3 curriculum yet, this is the ideal time to get agitated, educated and organised. March 25 is the 200th anniversary of the passing of the Parliamentary Bill that abolished the slave trade in the British Empire. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority recommends that the subject should become compulsory.

To commemorate the event, many new materials, events and exhibitions have been unveiled. A good place to start is the websites of Daniel Lyndon, head of history at Henry Compton School in Fulham, south London. He has collected resources, lesson materials and articles about black people in Britain from Tudor times onwards. There are descriptions of the conditions on the Middle Passage, the transportation of Africans to the Americas as slaves, and storyboards of the life of Olaudah Equiano, ex-slave, author and campaigner. A research project investigates the significance of the tobacco trade, and there are materials for a trial based on evidence from the case of the slave ship Zong, when slaves were thrown overboard to drown as part of an insurance scam.

“There’s a danger that if people just focus on slavery, they see black people as victims and don’t look at the wider movement of abolition,” says Daniel. “This was one of the first mass movements. It involved black and white people, and its methods fed into Chartism, factory reform and campaigns for women’s rights.”

He believes multicultural history should be mainstreamed into the curriculum, not treated as a unique set of topics. “Instead of having Black History Month in isolation, look at your schemes of work, look for examples that can come through at different times,” he suggests. “That way it’s not tokenistic, not separate.”

For example, his department’s work on poverty in Tudor times includes a lesson on why Queen Elizabeth tried to expel the “Blackmoores” as part of an examination of government policies to deal with unemployment and the soaring cost of poor relief. Many pupils are surprised to find there has been a continuous black presence in Britain for centuries before Caribbean migrants arrived on the Windrush in 1948.

#Posted 23 March 2007 at 6:56 PM

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