What is community history and how can it support teachers?

Shared with kind permission of PortraitEMB and Holly Cooper. Find the original article here.

Our project community-grounded scholar, Holly Cooper, writes on the importance of engaging with community, both their past and present, for the teaching of sensitive topics such as the British Empire, migration, and belonging.

Defining community history

Community history refers to the practice of historical research outside of academia, universities, and formal education. This is an empowering practice for marginalised communities, as they can access, disseminate, and democratise their own living memory, knowledge, and experiences. Also, the recognition and celebration of local community histories contributes to a more grounded, collective sense of belonging as well as improving general wellbeing.[1]

Often, the histories that mean the most to marginalised communities are found on the margins of traditional scholarship. Why is this marginalisation so commonplace? Because these histories disrupt the dominant narratives that tells us that only those belonging to certain classes, races, sexualities, genders, and cultures can produce valid, neutral knowledge. We know this is false.

What have teachers and schools got to do with this? Well, as Professor Linda Tuhiwai-Smith points out, we (as in Indigenous, colonised, and marginalised communities) have “often allowed our ‘histories’ to be told and have then become outsiders as we heard them being retold” and that schooling is “directly implicated in this process”.[2] This is because the history we are taught is “the story of the powerful and how they became powerful”.[3] This power is implicated in the decisions made around the histories, geographies, and literatures around the British Empire, migration, and belonging. Power is reflected, for example, in how the National Curriculum is created, enforced, and enacted, but also in textbooks; in exam specifications; in school priorities. All of this highlights a need to think about where knowledge is located.

But what can you do as an educator who really wants to engage with the topics of the British Empire, migration, and belonging in the classroom? Acknowledge the above power dynamics and the uneven way historical narratives are constructed and look out to the local community.

You may be surprised at what your local community has to offer – both their history and their present. You’re not restricted to the teaching of London-based histories, nor are you restricted to the teaching of Mary Seacole and John Blanke every Black History Month and Malala Yousafzai and Freddie Mercury every South Asian Heritage Month. I believe that every town, city, village, and suburb have their own figures and events you can engage with when teaching about the British Empire, migration, and belonging. Furthermore, Burn and Todd (2018) have argued that focusing on the local can be a powerful way of decentring knowledge as well as attending to students’ affective needs and desires.[4] However, there is a dearth of regionally specific resources to support teachers, which is robbing students of the chance to learn about their own history.[5]

Connected Communities

So, how do we rectify this absence of resources tailored to the local? Community history! And how do we capture these histories? Through mutually beneficial partnerships!

The Connected Communities Programme ran from 2010 –  2019. In 2016, they published their report Creating Living Knowledge, which looks at “community-university relationships and the participatory turn in the production of knowledge”. The report was focused on their executive question:

How can community and university expertise best be combined to better understand how communities are changing, and the roles that communities might play in responding to the problems and possibilities of the contemporary world?[6].

This led to an incredibly thorough research project with a variety of recommendations for other projects intending to look at community histories. Their overarching conclusion argues for the importance of long-term, meaningful, and mutually beneficial partnerships, where “communities, and the universities that form part of those communities, can collaborate to question, research and experiment to create new ways of understanding, seeing, and acting in the world”. This report, and the subsequent work of the Connected Communities Programme, led to the formation of Common Cause, which is largely inactive now. However, during its active years (2017 – 2019), it influentially informed the academic world, especially those dealing with marginalised communities, past and present.

Of course, this work is largely seen through the lens of universities as the educational institution. We believe, however, that common cause can be made between schools and communities too. This would consist of a slightly different partnership, as schools do not have the same financial and academic freedoms that universities have. But it is a good foundation, and we aim to build upon this to create guidelines for collaboration between schools and communities that provides a well-rounded approach to the topics of the British Empire, migration, and belonging.

We hope this blog raises some interesting questions for teachers. We are keen to hear from you about the ways you currently explore and incorporate local community histories into your curriculum, moving beyond the limitations of London-based or nationally recognized figures during specific heritage months. Also, what are your thoughts and experiences of how mutually beneficial partnerships between schools and communities can be established to enhance students’ understanding of their own history, particularly in the context of the British Empire, migration, and belonging?

To get in touch please use the comments section, or by email us at portraitemb@ucl.ac.uk, using the subject header community.

NOTES

[1] Alison Twells, Penny Furness, Sadiq Bhanbhro, and Maxine Gregory, “It’s about giving yourself a sense of belonging’: community-based history and well-being in South Yorkshire’, People, Place, and Policy 12:1 (2018): 1-21.

[2] Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999 [2021]): 37.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Katharine Burn and Jason Todd, ‘Right up my street: the knowledge needed to plan a local history enquiry’, Teaching History, 170 (23 March 2018): 50-60.

[5] Caroline Bressey, Meleisa Ono-George, Diana Paton, Kennetta Hammond Perry and Sadiah Qureshi, ‘Introduction: Reflections on Black British Histories in History Workshop Journal’, History Workshop Journal (2021).

[6] Keri Facer and Bryony Enright, Creating Living Knowledge: The Connected Communities Programme, community-university partnerships and the participatory turn in the production of knowledge. Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2016. (https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/75082783/FINAL_FINAL_CC_Creating_Living_Knowledge_Report.pdf / Accessed 22 February 2024)