British Migration History: Reconstructing the Curriculum

Description

 

Malachi McIntosh (The Runnymede Trust)
Robin Bunce (University of Cambridge)
Joanna Story (University of Leicester)

Please join us for a session which aims to explore the importance of teaching a diverse and inclusive History curriculum in British schools and universities. This session comes in the wake of changes to the British national curriculum in September 2016, which enable young people in British schools to learn about the long history of migration to Britain, and the history of the British Empire, in a structured and formal capacity for the first time. The pathway to the introduction of these curriculum changes raised important questions about what British history is and who gets included in ‘our Island story’. These questions have become especially pertinent in post-Brexit Britain, where the relationship between the resurgence of increasingly narrow, nationalistic, expressions of national identity and the nation’s collective ‘historical amnesia’ demands closer attention. Papers at this session will explore the efforts of The Runnymede Trust, and of individual academic historians, to engage British school and university students with broader understandings of what British history is and with histories of the world beyond Britain. Runnymede’s new, collaborative, Our Migration Story project offers one such example. It is hoped that this session will provide a space for contributors and audience members to collectively discuss the politics and possibilities of formally engaging young people in Britain with histories of migration, colonialism and wider, world, histories. This session is being jointly hosted by the Cambridge Migration Society.

For some background on The Runnymede Trust’s work on history and the British national curriculum, please see Alexander & Weekes-Bernard (2017), History lessons: inequality, diversity and the national curriculum.

CRASSH is not reponsible for the content of external websites.

 

Open to all. No registration required.
Part of the Decolonising the Curriculum in Theory and Practice Research Group Seminar Series.
In collaboration with the Cambridge Migration Society.

Administrative assistance: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk