Inclusive Histories Project receives £1.5 million Funding
Working Class Movement Library will be an archive partner on a project being delivered by Royal Holloway, University of London.
Royal Holloway, University of London has launched a £1.5 million project to support teachers with more inclusive UK political history resources and we are delighted that the Working Class Movement Library will be an archive partner.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) backed project will also support the AQA GCSE History specification, ‘Britain: Power and the People c1170 to the present day’. This project, to which AHRC are contributing £1.2m, will chart the struggle for rights and representation from Magna Carta to the present. Royal Holloway, AQA and seven archive and museum partners will lead the collaborative research and schools’ engagement project over three years.
The project will fund a Research Associate to work with the with archive material from the Working Class Movement Library and the Peoples History Museum amongst other archives. The researcher will find case studies within our archive collection that centre the voice, agency and contribution of working class people in their struggle for rights and representation. Working with teachers, these stories will then be turned into a wide suite of free digital resources for schools.
In the third year, AQA will then assess the impact of these resources on student perceptions of history, engagement with the subject, and teacher confidence in teaching more diverse histories.
The project will partner up with AQA, an independent educational charity which sets and marks over half of all GCSEs and A-levels taken in the UK every year. It will also be supported by the Historical Association.
Dr Matthew Smith, from the School of Humanities at Royal Holloway said: “This project, which responds directly to calls from teachers and students for resources to support the more inclusive teaching of history, has been a collaborative endeavour from its inception.
“The project team is incredibly grateful to all the teachers and specialists within our partners who have helped make this award and the work it will enable possible. We look forward to continuing in this same spirit to collaboratively research and co-produce resources that shine a light on how ordinary people, across the centuries, have struggled and sacrificed for the rights we all enjoy today.”