Andy Stone reflects upon his involvement with the Experienced Teacher Programme. He draws upon recent scholarship to address the development of environmental issues and decolonising the curriculum within his own teaching.

I found the course to be very engaging and rewarding. I’ve been teaching for 20 years, and the last 15 of them in the same 6th form college within a small, consistently-staffed department that I now lead. In that time I’ve tried to keep up to date with changing pedagogy through Teaching History magazine and wider reading, but have not had the opportunity to regularly access peer-collaboration through such high-quality CPD. 

My context naturally informs the extent to which I feel I can put into practice some of the themes covered. Without the relative flexibility of key stage 3 classes, my curriculum planning is necessarily quite circumscribed by the demands of extensive A-level exam content. So, for example, although I am very interested in the potential advantages of Big History (if also somewhat intimidated by the interdisciplinary challenges that it raises) it’s not really something I can do justice to in an exam unit on late-20th century USA. 

I do though want to run with some of the ideas on incorporating greater environmental awareness in my teaching. It’s an issue that I have written a little about in other contexts, as well as engaged in activism around. And a few years ago when Greta Thunberg inspired the Fridays for the Future movement I helped to initiate a day where we suspended the regular timetable so that each subject area addressed the climate emergency. There is some scope to integrate this more within my units – though I already give a little time to the Little Ice Age and its effects on the Stuart period, and the growth of environmentalism in the USA in the 1970s. Peter Frankopan’s book is on my shelf for summer reading.

Similarly the debates on decolonising history are ones that are not unfamiliar to me, and I have tried to address within the scope of my courses, but I know there is a long way to go. Since the course ended I’ve read Emma Dabiri’s ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’, a useful corrective to the western lens that has traditionally dominated school history. I’ve always felt most at home with written sources, but this reminds me how narrow that can be in the way it excludes oral, visual and material culture. And indeed, while going on excavations or excursions may not be practical activities I did recently run a very productive lesson where students carouselled around several stations of reproduced 20th century documents and artefacts (thanks National Archives).

I particularly enjoyed the discussion on scholarship, which let’s face it is the most intellectually stimulating part of the job. I try to give my students a taste of this when they are doing their coursework assignment, by giving them choices over their enquiries and the texts used to pursue them. I’ve learnt that some will need added structure in independent research that will often be novel to them (particularly with a typically disadvantaged intake who have seen library provision slashed in the last decade). One way I’ve sought to start that process is by interleaving the enquiry options into earlier parts of the course – for example, a question on the ‘Blitz spirit’ with reference to Angus Calder’s thesis while we study World War 2. But I intend to go a bit further in future by exposing students directly to some extracts from him, as well as those like Addison and Marwick who take a different line. In response to demand I’m also changing one of the enquiry options to the reasons for the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire – the Eric Williams debate that I grappled with at university, but which it seems has only developed more layers since.

Regarding ‘online worlds’ I suppose I would baulk at describing myself as a techno-optimist (as anyone seeing me struggle with the photocopier would attest), but neither would I label myself a techno-pessimist.  Perhaps techno-Luddite would be better – not because I am compelled to destroy machinery indiscriminately as in the popular misconception of King Ludd and his followers, but because I think it needs to be selectively harnessed without making the human factor redundant. So while I am happy for AI to mark multiple choice quizzes I maintain that qualitative feedback should still come from the teacher – and if the workload is too great that is another reason to cut class sizes and bureaucratic tasks to make it manageable. There now, you’ve got me started and it’s almost time for bed…