Recovering the hidden histories of people of African and Asian heritage living and working in Georgian London
'Fulham Palace is delighted to support the Sankofa London Schools Project. The project's exploration of local links to resistance by enslaved people reveals compelling tales in an engaging way, and the sessions give participants the tools to go about peeling back the layers of history by themselves!'
Kate Kern, Learning & Engagement Manager
Sankofa London Schools Project participants have so far identified 45 people of African and Asian heritage in London parish records
'It was a real pleasure to introduce SLSP participants to working with with archive material at the London Metropolitan Archives as they were engaged, attentive...asked good questions and got stuck in, despite the whole experience being new.'
Claire Titley, Archives Officer (Collections Knowledge & Engagement) LMA
The Sankofa London Schools Project has collaborated with year 12 students at Chiswick School to recover, and share, the life stories of Freedom Seekers -
John Whitt and his companion from Virginia, Bess from South Carolina, Henrietta from Bengal, and a group of young sailors who ran from the Hampden packet ship, whilst docked in Deptford.
Having done the Sankofa project with Year 9, I had some idea of what to expect but the SLSP's work with the A Level group blew those expectations out of the water.
The students engaged so thoughtfully with the material and threw themselves into the research with such energy and commitment, that I realised how perfect this project is for A Level ability levels.
Our students gained a huge amount of confidence and the project sparked their intellectual curiosity well beyond their normal curriculum.
They had fantastic experiences at Fulham Palace and the London Metropolitan Archives, returning to school with renewed excitement for their study of History.
Students were able to work independently on both their research and their Wikipedia edits, which meant that their sense of achievement was even greater.
I could not recommend this project more highly for a group of A Level history students to really spark their imaginations and show them the possibilities of history outside the constraints of school!
Freedom Seekers
Enslaved and indentured
men, women & children who
ran from captivity whilst in the capital.
Recovering the shape of their absence
in the context of the local and wider global community, migration & empire.
Image: Jacques Andre Portail 1695-1751
History Programmes of Study: Key Stage 3 National Curriculum in England
'The National Curriculum explicitly calls for young people to understand their own and others’ cultures ‘as an essential element of their preparation for life in modern Britain’, in which ‘they understand, accept, respect and celebrate diversity’. Teaching the long, diverse, often-fraught history of migration, belonging, and empire would partially achieve this. To adequately prepare students to be tolerant, confident citizens, these topics must be understood as integral both to our history and to the richness of British culture.'
'Migration and empire are not marginal events: they are central to our national story. As it stands, the story we are telling is incomplete'
TIDE - Runnymede Report: Teaching Migration, Belonging, and Empire in Secondary Schools
I am a London based historian and community outreach project developer currently working in collaboration with heritage organisations, borough councils, community groups and secondary schools on a number of multicultural history projects
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