Decolonising outreach: Stand in the gaps

In this, the seventh in a series of blogposts from the Inclusive Cataloguing Working Group of the Diversity and Inclusion Allies, Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on the broader implications of a recent ARA ALES event (Decolonising the curriculum, the help teachers need and the role of the archives in achieving a decolonised history) which was presented by Orlene Badu.  

Decolonising outreach: Stand in the gaps

If we are to be confident to talk about, for example, black history, queer history or disability history, we may well feel unprepared by our own general and professional education.   In my own context at the Globe, for example, it is important that I understand that Shakespeare’s London was not a white monoculture.  It is not unreasonable to imagine that some of the black people identifiable in Jacobean parish registers attended performances and even a black performer on the early modern stage is not an impossibility.  It has been noted that make-up for ‘blacking up’ would have been more expensive than employing, for example, musicians from the royal household for the non-speaking black roles that became a repeated feature of early modern plays[1]. 

While decolonising remains a contested and misunderstood term, Orlene noted that there was sympathy for her inclusive curriculum work, when people understood the diverse population that she was serving within London.  However, her view was that everyone needed to leave school with a greater understanding of why the world they inhabit is the way it is and that schools serving mono-cultural populations need a diversified curriculum even more than those where young people grow up alongside people with life experiences very different from their own.  It is worth reminding ourselves that Wendy Williams’ Lessons Learned Review implicitly identified the failure of past education curricula when noting that she had found evidence of:

an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush generation.

and recommending that:

The Home Office should devise, implement and review a comprehensive learning and development programme which makes sure all its existing and new staff learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world, including Britain’s colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration and the history of black Britons.

Despite moves towards anti-racism in schools, Orlene noted that there are still children experiencing a curriculum where the only black people encountered are slaves.  As the Sewell reported itself suggested the solution to that experience is not “token expressions of black achievement” which has sometimes been what young people have experienced in Black History Month from teachers who have not themselves had a diverse curriculum and lack confidence to teach what they were never taught.  Like these teachers, we have a responsibility to compensate for their deficiencies in our own schooling.

Orlene’s presentation referenced a recent article in The Curriculum Journal which potentially pertains to the world of archives when it recommends:

developing and strengthening connections beyond the school (including with universities and other sectors and settings), to inform teacher professional development in areas of curricula and pedagogy beyond prescribed national policies

Orlene also advocated thinking globally with a Meanwhile, elsewhere approach, which is sometimes supplemented with a However in other periods approach, that allows for words like Revolution to have meant different things in different contexts.  Another important role that archivists can play in supporting schools is to foreground evidence in our records for the involvement of ordinary people in campaigning for a different and better world (e.g. opposing enclosure or the slave trade, campaigning for universal suffrage and for civil rights), which could be part of a Meanwhile nearby approach. 

Orlene also encouraged us to follow what is already happening in some schools by learning to  read our records ‘against the grain’, and to consider the educational potential of acknowledging the silences and erasures as an opportunity for supporting the exploration of questions about power, privilege and bias.  Taking the example of the campaign for women’s suffrage, thinking intersectionally will help us notice that our photographs may showcase middle-class white women (rather than a broad cross-section of white women), prompt questions about how what reaches the archive may be unrepresentative of what once was, and encourage us to complicate the stereotype by mentioning the likes of Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh and Rosa May Billinghurst. 

Those working in archival outreach, in other words, have the opportunity to partner with teachers in playing the role of Gower in Shakespeare and Wilkins’ Pericles:

I do beseech you

To learn of me, who stand i' the gaps to teach you,

The stages of our story.

[1] CHAPMAN, MATTHIEU A. “The Appearance of Blacks on the Early Modern Stage: ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’s’ African Connections to Court.” Early Theatre, vol. 17, no. 2, 2014, pp. 77–94. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43499754. Accessed 13 Sep. 2022.