Thanks to Katie Hopwood for this blogpost. Katie is an ECT at Bishop Young Academy in Leeds. Last year she did her PGCE with the University of York.

When starting my second placement of PGCE year, I knew that my second school would be quite different from my first. I had moved from a large inner city religious school to a rural school. As part of a university assignment, I was interested in investigating the challenges of teaching a diverse history curriculum in a rural community with a predominantly white demographic where it is not uncommon for pupils to come from families who do not move far from the local area. I wanted to investigate what support my pupils needed from me to help them to be motivated to learn about aspects of the past that did not immediately seem to connect to their own lives, and what gaps in their wider knowledge existed that would help them to make sense of the specific topic of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and learn about its impact on the millions of people enslaved. 

My placement school history department had been working to make the history curriculum more diverse and inclusive. Lessons on Empire and the Slave Trade focused on the experience of the colonised and enslaved, rather than the colonisers and enslavers. For example, pupils investigated the words of Olaudah Equiano. In discussion with colleagues it was suggested to me that I needed to help pupils to understand that enslavement happened to real people. As well as planning to use source material from Equiano, Prince etc., I also decided to start my teaching of the topic of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (TAST) with an explanation about language. I explained to the pupils why we would try to not use the term ‘slave’ in lessons, but rather we would use the term ‘enslaved person’. I explained that this was to humanise the enslaved people. However, some pupils could not understand why we could not use the term ‘slave’. It seemed to me that they really were struggling to grasp that these people from the past were real and that we needed to speak about them as humans. I concluded that I should not have started with a discussion about language, and that I needed to investigate the limitations of their wider knowledge. If their wider knowledge, in this case of Africa, was weak, then how could they make sense of the topic or connect with it as relevant and about real people? 

I undertook a small classroom-based research project and collected data about pupils’ understanding of Africa, what their preconceptions of the continent were and how these factor into their understanding of Africa as a whole. I could then use my findings to inform my planning and practice going forward. I hope it will be useful to others to share my findings from this very small project.  

At the start of the lesson I put multiple images from Africa on the board – ranging from maps of the continent, animals and different cultures. The pupils then had to write down on their whiteboards what they knew about Africa. Even with the use of stimulus images, I received the following responses:

‘Poor’	‘No water or food’	‘People dying’
‘Lots of different animals’	‘Lots of different cultures’	‘Disease’

This demonstrated to me that their prior knowledge of Africa and African history was very limited. I discovered that most pupils thought that Africa was a country rather than a continent and some even struggled to know where it was when looking at a map. Most pupils thought that everyone in Africa was poor. They had no knowledge of its history. This geographical knowledge, and historical knowledge connected to it, had not been learnt formally, or informally, prior to the lessons. My findings confirmed the view of departmental colleagues that extra wider knowledge lessons were needed before pupils started the topic of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, so that pupils could gain the wider knowledge, including geographical and sociological knowledge, relevant to the specific topic. In future I will make sure to find out what my pupils know already and be prepared to teach this basic knowledge, and why it matters, before launching into the specific topic.

As a result of finding out my pupils’ knowledge gaps I planned a lesson: ‘What was pre colonial Africa like?’ I taught it in two different ways to see how well the pupils would grasp the topic. With one class, the lesson was focused on multiple different pre colonial societies such as Benin, Kongo and Asante. Pupils carried out an investigation into these societies using information sheets and primary sources. With the other class, I decided to set the scene with an introduction about the range of places and then to focus on just the kingdom of Mali. I started off both lessons by teaching pupils a brief history. The first class then focused on sources related to the societies. They had to identify the topic of the source, describe it, and then identify what positives and negatives each source was describing. Through this analysis of sources as evidence, students were able to learn about different African cultures. Here is an example of the worksheet completed by the first class.

Via questioning at the end of the lesson, pupils showed a greater understanding and knowledge of parts of pre-colonial Africa. They were also engaged and motivated by what they had learnt. These places now meant something and mattered more. 

However, I believe that the lesson was more successful with the second class where they were focused on just one African empire. Pupils of all abilities were able to understand in greater detail what life was like in one part of precolonial Africa. This greater depth was more valuable than the breadth achieved with the first class. Pupils had more knowledge they could use to assess the impact of the Slave Trade in future lessons.

As part of a plenary in the lessons focused on Africa before colonisation, I asked pupils to write down what they now knew and thought about Africa. Responses included: 

“More cultured than I thought”	“History in Africa doesn’t start with the slave trade”	“Lot more to different countries than I realised”
“Not as poor as I thought”	“Did they have slaves then?”	“A lot of different history”

This was a very short research project in one small school, but it seems to me that teaching a diverse history curriculum in a rural school can be challenging. Challenging because pupils may lack basic knowledge and ‘botheredness’ that other pupils may already have. They don’t necessarily know that topics have resonance for other people. They therefore bring lots of misconceptions into the classroom. I need to find out what my pupils do, and do not, know and then plan to support pupils to move beyond stereotypes and limited views of people, and to help them to connect with specific topics. I need to do this by making sure that I spend time teaching the wider knowledge they need so that they can make sense and connect with the specific. This wider knowledge is not all directly historical. It is also geographical and sociological. I need to do this before I address matters of language and respect directly. 

I hope it has been useful to share this thinking and experience for anyone else teaching in a similar school setting.