New Approaches to Teaching the History of the British Empire

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How colonial history should be taught in schools has been the subject of significant public debate in England, a debate which has intensified since the 2020 summer of Black Lives Matter. Traditionally this topic has been taught by listing the 'pros and cons' of the British Empire, a method called 'the balance sheet'. During a period of intense public discussion about the legacy of the British Empire and the polarised opinions this generated, continuing in this tradition was seen as a way of fairly reflecting divided public opinion on an emotive topic. My doctoral research investigated the consequences of this teaching method through surveys and focus groups with students and observing months of history lessons. Splitting colonialism into 'pros' and 'cons' encouraged students to see different aspects of a complex process as entirely separate from each other. For example, students described 'education' as a 'pro' and 'suppressing indigenous cultures' as a 'con'. However, beliefs about which cultures were superior and which cultures should be supressed drove the growth of Western education systems in the British Empire, justified the racial segregation of schools and shaped the content of what students learnt in these schools. A framing of 'pros and cons' prevents students from seeing these interconnections between 'pros' and 'cons'. The balance sheet approach also puts the question of what effects did the British have on other people at the centre of lessons. The only people with agency in that framework are British, while Africans, Asians, Irish and Indigenous peoples of Oceania and the Americas can only appear as victims or beneficiaries of British actions. Lastly, these activities of sorting events into 'pros' and 'cons' also - as one teacher expressing her discomfort put it - "do not compare like with like." For example, worksheets which put 'spread cricket and rugby' as a 'pro' alongside 'the transatlantic slave trade' as a 'con' trivialises a very painful history.I developed a set of recommendations for productive alternatives to balance sheet approaches, e.g. a stronger regional focus would enable greater detail of specific pre- and post-colonial histories, allowing for a wider range of groups to be recognised as shaping the history of these regions. I also describe ways in which using the stories of 'ordinary' individuals can show the interconnections made invisible in balance sheet approaches. An ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship would enable me to publish my research and recommendations in scholarly journals as well as to present my work to teachers (online and offline) with the aim of stimulating change in teaching practice.England has certainly not been alone in wrestling with questions about how to teach difficult histories of a complex colonial past. An ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship would enable me to submit well-developed applications to fund a multi-year project which investigates these themes in three further contexts. Different political pressures in Kenya, South Africa and the US have led to policymakers taking action to restructure history curricula and are set to implement these changes within the next two years. However, teachers' voices have not been prioritised in public discussions of these changes and many teachers fear speaking publicly about them, particularly in the US. These forthcoming applications would propose to investigate the origins of these policy changes and their effects as understood by (anonymised) history teachers. I will also draw out their relevance for debates in the English context. Policymakers in England have resisted calls for compulsory changes to history curricula and emphasised the importance of teachers having relative autonomy in how they interpret the national curriculum. A nuanced understanding of how policy interventions in this space have been received by teachers elsewhere can helpfully inform both the DfE and civil society organisations engaged in these debates.