At the Migration Museum, personal storytelling is at the forefront of the work we do, including our learning programme. Oral history gives students a hands-on way to explore migration and local history. In this blog, James Lopez, a trainee teacher on a Teach First Summer Project, reflects on how these projects help students see how personal experiences shape broader histories.

The most rewarding experience from my years of teaching history was running an Oral History club with my students. Simply put, the club gave pupils a chance to learn about migration and local history, practice interview techniques and understand the ethics of interviewing. Each student then interviewed either a family member of someone in their community about either their experiences of migrating to Birmingham or living in the city.

Projects like this are becoming more common in schools across Britain. Teachers such as Dan Lyndon-Cohen, Eliza West and Emily Toettcher have published fantastic practical guides, and through my work with the Migration Museum I have created resources to support teachers running similar projects. The Migration Museum will shortly be running their own Oral History project with a local secondary school. In this post, I want to explain why Oral History matters, and what it brings to the classroom.

Understanding History in the Classroom

In 1991, the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, personally intervened to try and influence the development of the National History Curriculum. It is hard to imagine a sitting Prime Minister engaging in the detail of curriculum design for any other subject. But history has always been different. Debates over statues, museums, memorials and history classrooms are proxy for debates about culture, heritage and identity.

The ‘new history’ consensus since the 1970s has sought to treat classroom history as akin to disciplinary history – as a form of critically distant social inquiry into the past. But in reality, school history will always serve another purpose. History helps us make sense of who we are now, and where we might be going. To put it simply, “Who we were” shapes not only “who we are” but “who we ought to be” and as a result “what we ought to do”.

Teaching history is especially challenging in multicultural countries like Britain. If the national story exclusively represents the majority, minority groups risk being ignored or made to feel invisible. In that instance, ‘who we are’ becomes a projection that leaves minorities either not recognised or misrecognised.

Multicultural nations face great difficulties here. If our story about ‘who we were’ does not represent minorities, neither will our account of ‘who we are’. This not only denies some pupils an important sense of belonging, it also can leave them feeling disempowered, stereotyped and marginalised. This is why organisations like the Migration Museum and the movement to diversify the history curriculum matter: piece by piece, they help us build a national story that is more inclusive.

Learning Through Stories

Oral history should be an important part of this mission for two reasons. Firstly, it makes students active rather than passive learners. They can come to see themselves as having a role to play in constructing the past – there is a power to this. Secondly, it encourages pupils to see themselves and their families as active participants in bigger historical narratives. In the work I have done, this was about inclusion within local history, but there is no reason why Oral History projects cannot seek to include pupils within national history.

For example, one pupil interviewed his mother who had moved to Birmingham from Jamaica. Reflecting on his interview, he wrote, “Birmingham is a mix of various people from different places. So coming from Birmigham is a home away from home, because we mix with a lot of local communities.” Another pupil – whose entire family had recently migrated from Pakistan – wrote that he better understood his family’s story as a result. One simply wrote that “we are proud of our identity”.

Stories like these should remind us that oral history has powerful inclusive potential. By democratising the construction of historical narratives, and crucially giving voice to disempowered groups, oral history can be an important part of a wider movement to diversify British history.

About the author
James Lopez is a Postgraduate Student at UCL interested in studying the intersections between political theory and social memory. He previously taught History at an Inner-city School in East Birmingham, and has spent time creating teaching resources for the Migration Museum.

This blog was written during James’s Teach First Summer Project with the Migration Museum.