Introducing Inclusive Histories
Last month the Inclusive Histories project truly got off the starting block with two new members of the team starting their roles. Jess Brown joins us as our Project Officer, a key role in helping to coordinate the project and translate research findings into resources for schools. Also starting last month was Dr Martha Robinson Rhodes, the first of five Postdoctoral Research Associates, whose role is focused on twentieth century topics covered in the Power and the People specification and the collections of the Black Cultural Archives, the British Film Institute and The London Archives. From hearing that our Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) application had been successful in the summer to this point has been a whirlwind of project briefings, partnership agreement signings, recruitment, and various procurement ducks being dutifully put in a row. The support from colleagues across Royal Holloway's professional services departments in getting our project underway has been incredible, highlighting just how crucial these colleagues are to the success of academic research projects. As we enter our first phase of archival research, now seemed like a good time to share our plans and some background information about our work.
Our project aims to support the more inclusive teaching of British political history at GCSE, taking AQA's Britain: Power and the people: c1170 to the present day as its test case specification. Working with our partners, we will collaboratively research stories which foreground the voice, experience and agency of historically marginalised communities in the struggle for rights and representation. This research will then underpin the creation of a suite of 200+ free educational resources for schools, co-produced with paid teacher consultants, which we will promote and disseminate with the help of education partners including the Historical Association. We will then work with the research team at AQA to evaluate the impact these resources have in the classroom and, based on our findings, co-produce a report to help inform similar future initiatives and ongoing curriculum reform.
Key to the development of this project was the work of the AQA research team to understand student and teacher perspectives on diversity and inclusion in history and their views on the current curricula. This highlighted calls from students for better representation of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability and class, along with the intersectionality of these identities and lived experiences, and calls for these histories to be integrated across the curriculum rather than delivered as separate topics. The report also pointed to requests from teachers for more age-appropriate resources to support the teaching of more diverse histories, and help to bring academic scholarship into the classroom. This echoes, of course, some of the calls made in the landmark Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History report published in 2018 by the Royal Historical Society.
While there have been some incredible initiatives in recent years to support more inclusive teaching, such as the Our Migration Story project, and countless innovations developed by teachers themselves, such as Meanwhile Elsewhere, the high-stakes, fast-paced, content-packed GCSE history curriculum has been a particularly difficult environment for teachers looking to introduce more diverse case studies and sources. In grappling with this challenge, we worked closely with teachers to understand their needs and constraints, and to make sure we don't lose sight of these we will have paid teacher consultants continuing to advise us and collaborate on resource development throughout the project. We are particularly grateful to James Ellis, a history teacher at Hastings Academy, who was a key figure in helping to design our project and is now leading our emerging network of consultant teachers.
We are also privileged to count among our partners the BFI, the Bishopsgate Institute, Black Cultural Archives, Glasgow Women's Library, the History of Parliament Trust, The London Archives, People's History Museum and the Working Class Movement Library. In building this consortium we were keen to stress that it was not just our partners' collections that interested us, but their expertise. The heritage sector has been home to some remarkable work to research and share inclusive histories, with People's History Museum's 'Never Going Underground' and 'Nothing About Us Without Us' and The London Archives' 'Speak Out!' and 'Switching the Lens' projects and exhibitions being just a few examples. Learning from our heritage sector partners is hardwired into our project, and, in the spirit of more equitable collaborative research, all of our research partners are being remunerated for the expertise they are generously sharing and the support they are giving our researchers.
Over the next 20 months five Postdoctoral Research Associates will be embedded with our museum and archive partners, where, working alongside archivists, curators, and other specialists, informed by recent scholarship, and guided by the project's core team (Dr Ayshah Johnston, Dr Claire Kennan, Dr Amy Tooth Murphy, Professor Edward Vallance, and myself), they will research case studies and curate sources to help teachers foreground traditionally marginalised voices. They will be joined by 30 community researchers, working on smaller discrete projects, who will be provided with bursaries to help reduce the barriers to participation in research projects. We will also be organising five 'citizens science' inspired research workshops, held with our partners across the UK, for members of the public to get involved.
Back at Royal Holloway, Jess and I will be working with our teacher consultants to develop a wide range of resources drawing upon this research, ranging from short-form video and podcasts to revision flashcards and workbook exercises. These free-to-download and adapt resources will be hosted on a new project website and our established educational YouTube channel, History Hub, with complementary material and project updates shared via Bluesky and Instagram.
There is lots to do, plenty of challenges to overcome, but also exciting opportunities to seize and discoveries to be made. If sharing updates and more details about the project in this format here on LinkedIn would be interesting or helpful, please do let us know.
Senior Lecturer in Public Humanities at Royal Holloway, University of London
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn on 5 February 2025.