“It’s a fantastic moment” to bring black British history to schools

Dr Moncrieffe, Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, primarily focuses on the application of 20th century Black British history and its cross-cultural interaction with White Britain for advancing education, and is bringing out a new book ‘Decolonising the Curriculum: euro-centrism and primary schooling’ in December.

Speaking to the University of Brighton podcast, Dr Moncrieffe said the Black Lives Matter movement and his research with white British primary school trainee teachers suggests the time is now to transform and improve the curriculum: “It does start with education. The focus in the UK has been cast on history because in order to understand the now, we need to look at the past and project future possibilities.

“History's been given a higher profile. Everyone’s got a stake in that particular story and everyone gets a stake in the now and the future, so we can do this together. With the curriculum at university, with curriculum in schools, it's not just about focussing on policy documents that we used to teach things, but focusing on our own life experiences in terms of what we bring to curriculum in order to bring new knowledge to that particular space in teaching.”

Dr Marlon Moncrieffe

Dr Moncrieffe, a former primary school teacher and deputy head teacher himself, said he started his research by asking British trainee teachers from different backgrounds ‘what does British history mean to you?’. Most participants who were from a white British background had a similar answer: “They basically regurgitated what is in what is in the national curriculum and a Eurocentric kind of history that excludes any other sort of story.

“So they were talking about Victorians, the Tudors, World War 1 and World War 2 and speaking to white European characters, heroes and heroines. Those discourses do shape the way in which we see history and they marginalise any other account.”

Teaching about topics like the dark sides of the British Empire, colonialism and Windrush are missing from the national curriculum, but Dr Moncrieffe thinks the desire for change is felt across society: “We have to go through this struggle with each other - we will come out at the end of that struggle with each other to try to make the world a better place. We’ve seen that through Black Lives Matter. It wasn't just black people walking up and down the road protesting, it was black and white people.

“I guess that's what I'm trying to do with my book is to look at cross-cultural encounters and to say, look, we're all involved in this. In order to get out, we need to work with each other.”

Dr Moncrieffe also believes if change is going to be made on teaching black British history in schools, white teachers will need the support to deliver the knowledge correctly: “You have to allow young teachers to tap into their knowledge of their own cross-cultural encounters.

“You want to reach out to different students, you have to have the capacity to be reflective and reflexive so that you can engage with different people in different cultures.

“The teacher is probably more important than the curriculum itself because it’s the teachers who have the power to change that document according to the children that are in the classroom and according to their values and beliefs.”

Find out more about Dr Moncrieffe’s ideas from a recent article in The Conversation and listen to the full podcast on all podcast platforms.