Teaching and Learning About Cross-Cultural Encounters Over the Ages Through the Story of Britain’s Migrant Past

The legacies of struggle and uprisings by Afro-Caribbean people standing up to White-Britain during the vicious transatlantic slave trade contributes to their sense of identity, pride and freedom. They are legacies argued to be related to the actions of the migrant and immigrant Afro-Caribbean people in their defiance of the racism that they faced in White-Britain post World War Two, typified for example through the Brixton Uprisings of 1981 (Brixton, 1981). Whilst content on the struggle for race equality from overseas contexts are offered for study in the primary school national curriculum for history (i.e. Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement in the USA), Britain’s own historical context is curiously absent (DfE, 2013). I draw upon data and findings from my use of auto-ethnography which focused on Brixton 1981. I argue that cross-cultural/ethnic encounters between Afro-Caribbean people and White-Britain over the ages could in fact be used for developing teaching practice on race equality in support of the Equality Act (2010) and for the teaching and learning of fundamental British values (fBv) via The Prevent Strategy. I use Rüsen’s ‘genetic typology’ of ‘historical consciousness’, as a lens to explain how Brixton 1981 with other examples of cross-cultural encounters in Britain over the ages could be applied in the primary school classroom and as part of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) for viewing the past to understand the present, for fostering future learning about race equality in Britain. References Department for Education (2013) (DfE) ‘History programmes of study: key stages 1 and 2’, National curriculum in England, The national curriculum in Britain Framework Document, July 2013, London: DfE. Gilroy, P. (1992) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London: Routledge. HM Government (2011) The Prevent Strategy, Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/97976/prevent-strategy-review.pdf (October 31st 2016). Moncrieffe M. (2018) Teaching and Learning About Cross-Cultural Encounters Over the Ages Through the Story of Britain’s Migrant Past. In: Race R. (eds) Advancing Multicultural Dialogues in Education.Palgrave Macmillan, ChamPhillips, T. and Phillips, M. (1998) Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain, London, Harper Collins. Rüsen, J. (2006) Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral Function, and Ontogenetic Development in P. Seixas, P (ed.) Theorizing historical consciousness, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 63-85. The Equality Act 2010 HMSO (2010), Retrieved from http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/pdfs/ukpga_20100015_en.pdf (20th September, 2016)