Teaching Black Tudors

Smiles all round at our Teaching Black Tudors Workshop in Oxford in September 2018

Ever since I first became involved in the world of Black British History, I have, like everyone else in the field, been passionate about getting the subject taught in schools. Back in 2012, I spoke at the Department of Education about this, and the following year, when Michael Gove threatened to remove Olaudah Equiano and Mary Seacole from the curriculum, I wrote in The Times that we 'need to retell the story of our island, taking the new perspectives of Britons of all skin colours into account'. So I was absolutely thrilled in 2018, when a group of secondary school teachers responded to one of my tweets saying they'd like to work with me to figure out how to get the histories I'd written about in my book Black Tudors: The Untold Story into the classroom. 

Workshop in action: sharing great thoughts!

In September 2018, we all got together for a Teaching Black Tudors workshop, kindly hosted by Jason Todd at the Department of Education in Oxford, and supported by the Historical Association. We began with a short talk on Black Tudors from me, then three teachers (Josh Garry, Chris Lewis and Gemma Hargraves) showed us the lessons they were already teaching. Then we had some thoughts from Jason and veteran of the cause Martin Spafford on the reasons why it was important to include these histories (which Jason has written up here), before workshop-ing how this would work in practice. ​

Natasha Henry brought us a digital marketing perspective

Writing on big pieces of paper is always good!

Chris shows me his student's work

The day was a real highlight of my career to date. I was blown away by the enthusiasm of everyone involved, how they were already using my work in ways I couldn't have imagined, and seriously excited about how we could work together to bring the work into many more classrooms across the country. ​

Work at King Edward's School for Girls, Birmingham

Since then, the teachers have continued to teach Black Tudors. Chris Lewis has written about how he does this at Brookfield Community School in Southampton in the December issue of Teaching History- one of the Historical Association's magazines (you can read his articles on his rationale here and the details of his lesson plans here). One of the great things about what Chris is doing is that he incorporates the stories of Africans in Tudor England into all his lessons on the Tudors, rather than "doing" them as a one-off. And of course, I particularly enjoyed the homework he set his students to write a letter to the BBC explaining why they should commission me to make a documentary about Black Tudors!
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​One angle I didn't expect was that Black Tudors is being used in English lessons too- Wendy Lennon is giving her students at Brockington College, Leicester the short fictional paragraphs I wrote at the beginning of each chapter imagining a moment in each Black Tudor's life to read and then asking them to continue the story in their own words!

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The next step was sharing what we're doing with the wider teaching community, which we did at a series of conferences in spring and summer 2019. Kerry Apps and Josh Garry spoke at a Historical Association Teaching the Tudors Day in York last month; Jason Todd and Chris Lewis ran a workshop on 'Bringing the Untold Stories of Black Tudors into the classroom' at the Historical Association Annual Conference in Chester on Saturday 18th May and I gave a keynote on 'Teaching Black Tudors: bringing untold stories into the history classroom' at the Schools History Project Summer Conference in Leeds on Saturday 6th July, which was followed by a workshop on 'Using Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors to refresh the teaching of the Early Modern World' led by Josh Garry and Wendy Lennon. 

So, if you're keen to learn more, check out the resources shared by some of the teachers I'm working with, who are already teaching Black Tudors on this Shared Google Drive. We'd love you to give us your feedback, and/or add your own lesson plans to the drive.  

The ultimate aim is to produce Schemes of Work and lesson plans inspired by Black Tudors that any teacher can download and take straight into their classrooms. These will be published by Hodder Education later this year. I have also collaborated recently on some other resources with OUP which will be launched soon. 

Other relevant resources include the Our Migration Story site, which I contributed this piece to, and the Institute of Historical Research's guide to over 100 resources for teaching Race, Migration and Empire. 

Excitingly, for teachers who was to do some CPD and develop a really in-depth knowledge of the history, my free, online 6 week Black Tudors: The Untold Story course with FutureLearn will be available any time from 12th July 2021.

If you want to be kept informed of all things Teaching Black Tudors, please enter your email address in the form below. ​