During Black History Month our History students are learning about a wide variety of important topics and celebrating the contribution black people have made to the history of the UK and the rest of the world:
Year 7: Comparing life in Medieval Britain with life in West Africa during the Medieval period.
Year 8: Studying slavery with a focus on the black abolitionists and efforts by slaves to free themselves
Year 9: Studying black soldiers and all soldiers of the Empire and their experience during the First World War. This will feed into a later unit on Indian independence.
Year 10: Working on civil rights in the USA as part of their GCSE studies. They have been looking at Stokely Carmichael and the black panthers in recent lessons and making comparisons between the USA in the 1960s and the USA today. There have been lively discussions about race in the USA today and racism in the USA election.
Year 11 Studying the GCSE unit: Voyages of Exploration. This unit focuses on the effects of colonisation on the Aztec Empire, also the impact of Europeans on Cuba and Haiti.
Year 12 & 13 Historians will all have a seminar led by Mrs George on the experience of the Black Tudors
Year 13 Working on civil rights in the USA and some of the very interesting questions being asked include:
“ To what extent was the Second World War a key turning point for Civil Rights?”
“Black nationalists helped rather than hindered the civil rights movement”
“Thurgood Marshall was the most influential black activist. Discuss”
“Women played a key role in the attainment of civil rights?”