It was a huge honour to be asked to present at this year’s Schools History Project Conference. In this post, I’ll set out the rationale, approach, and resources for the presentation.
The PowerPoint from my presentation is linked here. Additional resources are
linked throughout the post.
A huge thanks to Dan Lyndon-Cohen and Katie Amery, in
particular, for their help in preparing my ideas for the conference.
The Case for Decolonising the KS5 Curriculum
Over recent years, the focus for delivering a just and
rounded History curriculum has shifted somewhat, with emphasis moving away from simply including more diverse history to challenging and reshaping narratives about a
range of groups and actors. The latter approach is summed up neatly by Dan
Lyndon-Cohen’s recent call on teachers to “decolonise, don’t diversify” (Teaching
History 183).
In the case of Jewish Russian and Soviet History, I tried to
move this approach in two distinct directions.
The first, and broadest, was to consider the possibilities
for “decolonising” the curriculum for exam classes, in particular at Key Stage
5 (A-Level). This, I argued in my presentation, is something which presents
both challenges (a lack of teaching time and need to cover and prioritise the
specification) and opportunities (in particular to develop broader narratives
that the specification focuses on).
The second, and more specific, was to consider the
possibility of reshaping narratives about Jewish people in Russia and the USSR.
With Jewish history already being nodded to in the specification, through the
inclusion of antisemitism and pogroms, this I argued was an area which required
and was open to a broadening and reworking of historical narratives and
pedagogical approaches.
Overall, I offered three areas in which this could be done.
(It’s worth noting that I have applied these in particular to AQA’s 1H unit, Tsarist
and Communist Russia, 1855-1964; although I am confident that both the
principles and aspects of this could be applied to other A-Level courses
spanning all or part of this time period).
Principles
for Planning
In approaching this work, I set out five specific
considerations I considered fundamental to my planning: specification,
narrative, ethics, voice, and audience.
In addition, conscious of the need to integrate Jewish history into the wider narratives of our course, I opted to weave a series of lessons through existing, broader enquiry questions, comprising something I dubbed “a scheme within a scheme”, focused on Jewish history but embedded within the wider history told by the 1H specification. This followed its own broad enquiry: “What was a century of reform, revolution, and conflict c. 1855-1964 to Russian and Soviet Jews?”
Approaching
Antisemitism
One particular concern I had was to unpick the changing
nature of antisemitism in a Russian and Soviet context, reflecting the understanding
of antisemitism (following a recent chapter by Pearce, Foster, and Pettigrew) as
“a transhistorical phenomenon”.
Using first the 1881-84 pogroms, then antisemitic outbursts
in the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Civil War pogroms of 1918-1920, and
finally the 1952-53 “Doctors’ Plot”, I proposed a model which conceptually divided
antisemitism as an official (i.e. government-led), popular (i.e. reflecting
broad societal prejudices), and intellectual (i.e. reflecting the prejudices of
educated elites) phenomenon.
Humanising
and Diversifying Russia’s Jews
At the same time, I was concerned to redress a narrative balance
which I felt, in the specification itself, was skewed especially towards Jewish
victimhood and left Jews as a broad, undifferentiated, and agency-less mass.
I offered a couple of examples of this. Firstly, a “walk
down the Jewish street”, in which students used a text drawn from the work of historian Zvi Gitelman to make sense of a broad range of images showing a diverse range of
Jewish experiences in late-Imperial Russia – craftsmen, Yiddish theatre,
synagogue culture, education, philanthropy, and socialist politics amongst
them.
Second, challenging the prominence given to Trotsky as a representative for Jewish politics (something I will post more on in coming weeks), I interrogated the political aspirations of Jewish politics through Jewish parties which took an active role in the 1917 revolution. This, I argued, highlighted several key areas of disagreement, foremost amongst them the question of whether to integrate into, or (self-)segregate from, wider Russian society. By doing so, I argued that the key trajectories of Jewish politics after 1917 could be highlighted, including the question of and responses to a proposed Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The Holocaust
in the USSR
Finally, I challenged the lack of discussion of the
Holocaust on Soviet territory, something virtually whitewashed from our course textbooks
and specification, despite both including length discussions of World War Two.
My point was that this huge, sensitive, and complex topic
should not be approached merely as an opportunity to reteach the narrative of Jewish
victimhood, but again to explore the diverse range of experiences Soviet Jews
faced during the Holocaust – including not only death through state-led genocide,
but also partisan resistance, reporting of atrocities, mobilisation into the
Red Army, and refuge in the Soviet interior.
Overall, I'd like to suggest that, by using the opportunities provided within the KS5 specification, and facing down the challenges that come with broadening and problematising what we teach at this level, decolonising the curriculum is absolutely possible.
In the case of Russia and the USSR's Jewish history, this can help us reconceptualise the experiences and roles of Jewish people, leading to a much more rounded, complex, and conceptually developed picture. In answering the enquiry question for my "scheme within a scheme", it provides a number of conclusions as to what a century of Russian and Soviet history was to Jews.
All resources from the presentation are linked through this post, and further posts will appear on this blog in the coming weeks, exploring in more depth the themes and ideas I was presenting. As always, it was an absolute honour to share my ideas with other teachers – especially at such an illustrious and star-studded event as the SHP conference!
If you use any of these resources (which you’re more than
welcome to), I hope they are helpful and open up new approaches to decolonising
your curriculum and/or approaching Jewish history.
I would be delighted to hear your thoughts, comments, questions, or critiques!
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