Decolonising the curriculum with Drew Gray

Kahvan and Georgina sit down with Drew from the University of Northampton History department to discuss Black Lives Matter, statues, how we teach history and how to decolonise the curriculum

Following on from recent events and facing the truth of racism being prevalent in our society for generations, now is the time, more than ever for discussion. History lecturer Drew Gray shares with us the reasons for his department releasing this statement, as well as his views on various issues around this including some short summaries of historical events and useful resources for further information.

This interview was an off-the-cuff conversation and no elements were prepared beforehand.

Black Lives Matter: Reading List

History Team Blog: https://historyatnorthampton.com/blog/

Interview Transcript:

Kahvan: From Georgina and I’s perspective, seeing that History statement was something that we’re really pleased about. It was a step in the direction that we’re trying to go in, so I just wanted to get a few of your ideas as to what the impetus for that was and where you plan on going with it?

Drew: I went around the history team because I wanted to say something, I wanted to make a statement and I wasn’t sure what I should say. I kind of wanted to speak from the heart because that’s generally where I want to speak from, but if I’m speaking on behalf of everybody else I felt I needed to get their input. They were pretty happy with the statement that I put, I think they probably corrected my spelling as my colleagues tend to do from time to time.

I also shared it with Tré Ventour (BAME Officer for Student Union), because I’ve talked to Tré about these sorts of things before and he again, was very happy with it. He amended a couple of things in it and said that he fully supported what we were saying. For me it was important because, as historians, we feel that we do teach inclusively. We recognise that the history of this country and the history of the world is not one person’s history. There were lots of things happening over the last week or so, coming out of the George Floyd killing and then the Black Lives Matter protests. The reaction to these and things like the pulling down of Edward Colston’s statue and the removal of other statues like the one in East London. Of course we’ve also had counter demonstrations and people trying to protect statues. For historians there’s quite a lot to unpack in all of that, one is about the way history is taught and the way history is commemorated and created. Arguably, putting up a statue is a historical act and taking down a statue is a historical act so we felt we had quite a lot to say on those things. That statement was about saying we’ve always been committed to this but perhaps we haven’t said it explicitly before and some of us find it needs to be said so that we’re putting our voices with the voices of other people. I think that was important for us to do.

Kahvan: What does that mean for students? Does that mean they will be able to look through the outline of the course and see that? Or does it mean that there are different texts included in the study, different lecturers? How does that look for a student?

Drew: There are some things we can do very little about in the interim. I would argue that if you look around British institutions, probably the same for other places in the world where there are history departments-

In fact to be quite honest, universities are pretty white across Britain. They’re pretty white, they’re pretty middle class. There are some historical reasons for that, it’s just the pathways that people choose through the education system. I remember talking to Criminology students a few years ago, we get a lot more of a mixed diversity of students taking Criminology at Northampton, along with Sociology and Psychology. They are broader subjects in that respect, you need to get people coming through from school being interested in a subject and take them through to university.

If history at school isn’t interesting to you because it doesn’t look like it’s something that matters to you in your life then you’re not going to take it beyond GCSE, you’re not going to take into to A Level and you’re certainly not going to study it at university. If you don’t study it at university, you’re not going to go on and a masters and a PhD and become a history lecturer, so our universities are going to remain white and middle class. We have to change that, that’s quite a long process but I think we really should be making the effort to change that and I think that’s something Northampton could do.

In terms of our students, I talk to my colleagues about what we do about black history. If you look at our curriculum it doesn’t have anything that says black history in it. We do have a clear module in our second year which is ‘Empires Through History’, which is clearly about; imperialism, colonialism, de-colonialism and all that kind of stuff. So it directly relates to the issue of Black British and black world history. We all recognise that we have different people represented in all of our materials. Medieval Britain is not white, medieval Britain has all sorts of different people in it. The same is true for the Tudors’ and Stuarts’ period, the same is definitely true for the 18th and 19 century which is my area. Black British soldiers fought in the first world war, we couldn’t have successfully come out of the first and second world wars without the role played by our colonial troops. That goes all the way through history, you can’t look at history in colour terms. One of the things we were making a commitment to was to bring those things out more explicitly. That has to change in the way that we teach and the sort of materials that we use.

Particularly primary historical materials, we can fairly easily do that, make more explicit what we are doing and how we’re doing it. We all do it in different ways, but we’ve never felt the need to say that we’re doing it. We need to be clear that we’re doing it and we’re saying that we’re doing it because it matters, that’s what is important.

Kahvan: Do you think the value in being explicit in the black history that you’re including is solely for students or would that be reflected for staff as well?

Drew: I think it’s both, I don’t think there’s two things to separate it. We learn from students as well as them learning from us. I know that students come along and if you look at what our students have done in the last week, (History students and joint honours History students), I think I have posted up 7 of their blogs. I made the decision last week which was that I wanted people to be able to write blogs about Black Lives Matter, because we all felt strongly about that but our decision was that we we’re going to give that space to students to write about that. We want to hear their voices, I think I’ve done 7 now from first year, second year and post graduate students, who have all written something for it based on their own experience. I’ve learned loads from that, I’ve learned about their experiences, that will shape the way I think about my teaching and quite frankly will shape the way I think about my life.

One of them on Saturday morning actually reduced me to tears and I’m not someone that gets emotional particularly easily. I thought that it was extremely powerful what the student had written, there’s that phrase “You need to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes to understand how they feel about things”. That’s quite difficult for someone like me; reasonably well educated, middle class, quite nice upbringing and never had that much crisis in my life. I certainly wasn’t called names on top of a bus or spat at, or felt that I was being turned down for opportunities based on the colour of my skin or my accent etc. These are all experiences that my students have. There’s no reason for them to say those things to me in a ‘normal’ classroom but perhaps I should be listening more carefully, listening in the margins about the sorts of experiences that they have and how that helps me better understand them. I think it’ll make me a better teacher.

Kahvan: That’s wonderful! Do you think that you’re going to carry on providing the opportunity for your students to write a blog then?

Drew: Yeah, absolutely! We have always said to students that if you want to write something about this, that’s great. But often it’s attached to, say we’ve been on a trip somewhere, we’ve been to visit the British Museum or something like that and would somebody like to write blog about it with some nice pictures to basically say how wonderful their day out was at the British Museum. It’s an important marketing tool for the university and it’s a valuable part of their experience. It’s from that perspective in a way but this time around it’s about them having something to say and I’m definitely going to encourage them to continue doing that. I also think one of the things it’s shown me, I feel this quite strongly, is that some of the students who have written stuff for us this week their work hasn’t necessarily been brilliant as undergraduate students. They’re not a cause for concern or anything, but their work hasn’t been brilliant, but they’ve really stepped up and shown that they can really write with passion, enthusiasm and clear argument. I can go back to each of them and say “Guys, you’ve really managed to do something excellent! I think you can learn from this and put that into your study work as well”.

I might be implying, I know one of my colleagues is already starting to do this, to use blogging as a different medium to writing an essay etc as a way to improve your communication skills. It’s very important in the 21st century to be able to communicate in different ways and digitally is obviously as important as anything else, if not more important. They’ve demonstrated clearly that they can communicate on a very high level, just as good, if not better than the things that we (staff) as a group of professional writers and historians have created in the last couple of years. They’re producing that, they need to know that, and others need to be inspired by it. It’s not necessarily the stellar students in each class who have produced these pieces of work.

Kahvan: Do you think that speaks to more of a broader issue in higher education and the way we mark work and consider work to be good? Or the way for different communities there’s a lack of engagement that they would have with traditional academia versus nontraditional blog forms of work etc?

Although in this instance it’s a Black Lives Matter topic that could extend to other subjects like Sociology, Psychology or any other subject.

Drew: I think that’s an interesting question Kahvan. How do we maximise the ways in which we asses them? (students). We try in History to assess them in lots of different ways, so we get them doing essays, exams and we also get them creating little videos etc. I think that’s a really interesting way to get students to engage in forms of communication that they’re going to use in the real world. You leave university and you’ve got a degree in History, I choose History because it’s the only subject I look after, how many times are you going to have to write a 3000-word essay?

Kahvan: -laughter- Exactly.

Drew: -laughter- Probably never! But you are going to have to write; cover letters for jobs, reports for careers you work in, lesson plans if you go into teaching, business reports, lawyers’ briefs, speeches for parliament if you go into politics. Of course, blogs are a part of that, opinion pieces/journalism. They’re more likely to do a variety of short pieces from 100 words to 500 words. It’s probably a better way to test student’s skills, all of them were grammatically correct. I did put an editor’s brush over everything they did and I didn’t have much to do. The sentences were properly constructed, the grammar was excellent and the spelling was correct. They presented their work beautifully so great credit to them, they created professional pieces of work where you could’ve put them into a newspaper straight away! I think we should be using that to assess students more and I think that’s a very good point. We need to work out how we will incorporate that.

Kahvan: My subject area was Sociology and we talked a lot about cultural capital and the way that’s in built into the education system. Things like being familiar with the ways of assessment or your parents being familiar with certain ways of assessment and therefore you get the benefit of that. Do you think even subjects like history have a role to play in reproducing class differences or cultural differences that benefit certain students and not others?

Drew: Of course, yes, History covers everything of course it’s a broad subject and it’s a very specific subject, you can get down to the areas of your interest. I went to a grammar school and doing exams is something you did every year, you’re very used to doing it. Some of my students they aren’t used to doing exams and they say, “I hate doing exams”. There also seems to be a gender difference, girls hate doing exams and boys don’t mind. When it comes to presentations, you’ve got different levels of skill and confidence. Fundamentally it’s about confidence and familiarity, there’s absolutely no reason why somebody should find an exercise or an assessment at university particularly difficult if they know what they’re doing. If they’ve been told what they’re doing and they’re helped through the process and that’s made really clear to them, they get the opportunity to have a go at it.

The world of work out there is varied in terms of what you will do, you could argue that cultural capital applies to a lot of that. It’s like going into law and feeling like you’re trying to break into a space which doesn’t look familiar to somebody from the working class and certainly not a BAME background. That is going to look quite an alien environment, it’s full of privileged middle-class people who went to Oxford. That’s an exaggeration, a simplification but that’s broadly reasonable. You have to break those barriers down and I think history has a role to play in doing that. I think we do try very hard at Northampton to do that and we don’t lecture in the way that we used to. We don’t just expect students to disappear off, do all the work and come back to be quizzed. We do workshops, we consider how you use primary and secondary materials and we debate issues. We tried to be inclusive and we tried to understand where our students have come from in the first place. At Northampton we have so many students from what you would call a broader demographic. We don’t have a lot of BAME students in History, but we have a lot of white working-class students in History. They’re not familiar either with the cultural capital you’re talking about, that’s not something their parents recognise. I’ve been in Northampton for years and I’ve worked here 15 years, I was a student here as well. I’ve always worked with students and when I come to graduation their parents will tell me ‘My son or my daughter is the first person in our family to ever go to university.” That’s still true today…

Kahvan: I’m perhaps putting on the spot here but with your expertise in history are you able to look back at times of change where a certain strategy or a process has led to that change, that we can apply to the changes we’re trying to generate in this current climate, with BLM etc?

The only reason I ask is because I’m very nervous about news cycles for instance, when a new news cycle comes around perhaps the momentum would drop off. How do we maintain the momentum and make meaningful changes like you’re doing in History in a broader sense?

Drew: History does tell you that both of those things are true, something was always shoved off the agenda. I do a lot of work with newspaper sources particularly over the Victorian period, we talk about moral panic which I’m sure is something you’ve looked at in Sociology. Something is in the public glare for a period of time and sometimes you can get minor changes or important changes, in the history of crime that’s certainly true and then things fall back again, it’s the same pattern unfortunately.

I grew up in the 70s so my interest in politics was framed in the beginning of the 1980s, the end of the 1970’s and I used to meet my mates and we would go down to this thing called Rock Against Racism in London. It was held in London and elsewhere and then there was the ska movement that came out of Coventry particularly, the 2-tone movement. So, for us punk, ska, Rock Against Racism and all that kind of stuff was all about young people saying no to racism and yet here we are 30- 40 odd years later and we’ve got the same issues within society. That kind of tells you that whilst we’ve had a lot of legislative changes, we haven’t culturally altered some of the mindset in this country. Whether you argue that Britain is racist or that some of our institutions are racist, I think those points are debatable, but there are certainly plenty of racists in Britain.

So how do you change that mentality? I would’ve hoped by now it would have changed because various generations have come through. Where I would look for positives in that, is if you look at the history of gender and the search for women’s rights and to some extent the search for gay rights. Those two things have been long struggles, but they have resulted in legal change. Nobody today for example I think, you might disagree, but most people today would not argue that men were more important in society than women or that women should defer to men. I don’t think that would be an argument that people would expect. I don’t think anybody in society today would argue that men were superior to woman. So, we have managed to make that cultural change but unfortunately of course it’s taken well over a thousand years to get there. I don’t think Black Britons or black people in the world want to wait for another couple of thousand years to see real change in our society.

The laws are in place and I was reading in preparation for a class I’ll teach in the autumn about Lord Mansfields’ judgment in the 1700s. It effectively argued that once a black slave arrived in this country, he could no longer be considered to be a slave, he was a free man. This is because there was no slavery in England, so although his master had brought him over from the Caribbean, as soon as he touched land in England he was free. The guy had run away and the master was trying to punish him and have him back. Lord Mansfields and Lord Chief Justice ruled that no, this guy was free and he could do as he liked because there was no slavery in England. That was an important landmark judgement, things like that happen and we have racial equality. We might have it in law but we don’t necessarily have it in practice.

I think that’s about education, that needs our young people to be coming through the education system and getting into the positions of power, I say our young people but I mean all young people. We need to see black lawyers, black educators, black prime ministers, black captains of industry. All of those things you need to see a diversity across our society and at the moment it’s just too white at the top. It’s too white and it’s too male, women are beginning to break through those positions but it’s taken them a very long time. Bear in mind that women only got the vote at the end of the first World war, so only a hundred years and now we’ve had two female prime ministers, a handful of women in boardrooms. Women make it into positions in the entertainment industry but they don’t necessarily make it into positions of political power which is what we need. That seems to be true for Black Britons as well, we’ve had one black American president but we’ve never had a female president in the US and that’s absolutely ridiculous and if you think about it like that it’s just mad quite frankly. That was a really long answer to a really difficult question.

Kahvan: I have an equally difficult question and sorry for putting you on the spot again! If somebody is looking from the outside of UON, they saw your statement and they’re not a history student is there anything you could recommend them to read or watch that would give them a bit more of a background on black history or the kind of things that you’re trying to include in the curriculum?

Drew: Yeah, I think so! There’s a variety of things and what we did in History is that we all put together a summer reading list based on stuff that we would use for our modules and stuff that we like. In this case sometimes its good to read things that aren’t necessarily history books, I mean like Andrea Levy’s Small Island which is a perfect book about the post war Windrush. That’s a great novel of the British experience, I would urge everyone to go out and read that. David Olusoga who wrote the book ‘Black and British’, he currently presents things on the BBC, he grew up in Bristol and his family have connections to slavery in Bristol, his ancestral experience and I think his work is really interesting. We can share some of this if you want? There’s stuff like a book on the first world war called ‘Lost Battalions’ which is the great war and the crisis of American nationality because of the experience of black Americans serving in the first world war. Again, a story which just doesn’t get told very often. Stuff on the Indian experience of serving in the war and there’s one that Tré always recommends, Pete Fryer’s ‘Staying Power’. Which covers the issue of black people in Britain which is really excellent. There are quite a lot of things that they could look at.

I think it’s sometimes better at this stage to look at a novel or a general book like ‘Staying Power’ to get an overview. Something that’s a relatively, what I would call ‘gentle’ introduction. If I want to know something about a period of history that I don’t know anything about I go for something gentle and introductory. I then use the bibliography or references in that book to drill down and go off and pique my interest in other things. Our ‘Empire’s’ module has a really large reading list of stuff that is available in the university’s library. If people want to look at that stuff I think that’s good, I would say if you’re not a historian read ‘Small Island’, ‘Staying Power’ something like that. They did make Small Island into a BBC tv drama a few years ago it might be, I don’t know if it might still be on BBC iPlayer.

Kahvan: I’ll have to have a look at that, sounds good!

Drew: There’s some interesting stuff like that and Hollywood is quite good at presenting black history, it’s done that over the years in the same way that it’s been good at presenting other minorities like LGBTQ+ history. Hollywood is much more inclusive than say a lot of America, so you can get some stuff on that.

Kahvan: I really appreciate that answer actually, I’ve got a lot of things to now go and look for. Georgina do you have any questions?

Georgina: Not necessarily, I feel like the answers have been quite in depth. You explained a lot of potential questions with the answer to one question if that makes sense?

But I do like the approach that you have, I like that you have acknowledged there is an issue and things need to change, That’s the main first step because from there you can make a plan of action for things that you could do; or even your colleagues, friends, family, people around you etc could do to help with the issue and solve it.

Drew: Thank you, before this actually, earlier in the year the history colleagues were talking about how we might broaden our curriculum particularly in the first year. We agreed we would put in an American history module which we don’t not currently teach. There is a lot of interest in American history but it’s also a really good way to put more black history into the curriculum because you can’t separate race from American history. It absolutely runs all the way through, America is built entirely on the backs of slavery and the effort of post slavery generations of Americans and immigration. Immigration is the other thing which I teach a lot about in my third-year module about London in the late 19th century is a really mixed place, just as it is where I grew up today. That’s really important, those are things we’re going to make changes or improvements in and we will continue to try and do that. We don’t want to pay lip service to this, this is something that has to be fundamental you’re right. The acknowledgement of the need to do more and to not sit back and just hope for things to change or expect that this is something that black people have got to make happen. This is something that people have got to make happen.

Kahvan: I like that answer!

Drew: Thanks! I feel it’s super privileged to sit here and have the life that I have and it’s not always easy working in academia but it is a lot easier than working some of the things I’ve worked in. This not a criticism, but I would prefer it if my university looked more like the world outside.

Kahvan: I agree. That’s all from me in terms of questions, I need to figure out how we’re going to release this but it’s been a very useful chat. Not just for the UON community but for the wider public as well, that’s where the use of this will come in. I appreciate your time, thank so much for being so willing to put a statement out in the first place. That is a big step for any department and for you guys to pioneer that I think is amazing and thanks for your time here today as well Drew, we appreciate it!

Drew: Thank you both very much, to close I would say that we have a lot of students who have contributed with what they’ve written. Some of them are trying to contribute through one of our podcast series we have just started. I’m sure they would be willing to talk to you guys as well, I am sure it would be nice to have those sorts of conversations happening across different departments and subject areas in the university a bit more once we can.

Kahvan: Any time those guys want to have a chat I’m willing and I’m sure Georgina will be the same. Even if we’re not in it we will share it on our channels, sounds good!

Many thanks for Kahvan Bryan and Drew Gray for the compelling interview and Georgina Laing-Sutton for transcribing the interview.