Award-winning UK teacher aims to show adults their historical blind spots

Adults need to revisit their history lessons to learn where their “blind spots” are after schools failed to thoroughly teach them about colonialism and empire, according to a leading history teacher.

This is the aim of a new book, The History Lessons, by the award-winning teacher Shalina Patel, which spotlights the historical figures and stories left out of the textbooks – in particular those of women and people of colour – to challenge entrenched narratives.

“It’s good history to shed light on as many stories as you can, especially those which have been forgotten and to question why; why is it that certain figures or narratives have been accepted as mainstream understandings of these periods of time,” she said.

“That is my call to arms in the book, to get people to think: why is it that some of these people have been forgotten?”

Patel said she felt most anxious writing the chapters set during the British empire, especially the “dark areas” that were uncomfortable to talk about.

“I was really aware that so many adults say that’s the area of history they feel least confident about because they didn’t learn it at school. Lots learned about Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery, but not its role in the transatlantic slave trade. That’s seen as an American story. People are really aware now of where their blind spots are,” she said.

The relevance of the debate over the legacy of colonial history and racial privilege was evident in recent remarks made by the business and trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch. She told an audience in the City that it would be wrong to attribute the UK’s wealth and economic success to the empire rather than the birth of democracy and the Industrial Revolution.

Patel, citing Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors book and how it has “completely changed how so many of us view that period” as an example, said: “History’s really exciting, because how we view history is changing all the time. People are asking questions they weren’t asking before. So many brilliant historians are uncovering those [forgotten] histories.”

Patel first became interested in hidden histories when she discovered the story of Sophia Duleep Singh, an Indian suffragette who was “a bit of a celebrity at the time”, yet isn’t included in mainstream teaching about the movement.

As a south Asian woman, she was fascinated to learn “there was a suffragette that looked more like me”, and she has found that students in the diverse inner London school she works in “really love learning about her”.

With the support of her department, this prompted her to do further research into “so many fascinating people who have just been forgotten in history”. This included showing students the Indian soldiers who fought alongside the “tommies in the trenches” in the second world war, and the Chinese labourers who worked on tanks.

“We started taking those classic school contexts and thinking who else was there, what other unfamiliar stories can we tell from familiar contexts,” she said.

This drive led to Patel winning a National Teaching award in 2018 for a lesson she had taught on Noor Inayat Khan, a British spy stationed in France during the second world war who was killed by the Nazis. She set up a popular Instagram account, @thehistorycorridor, as well as consulting for schools across the country looking to decolonise their curriculums.

When the opportunity to write a book arrived, Patel seized it – but this time she wanted to write for adults.

“I wanted to teach the lessons I teach my students to an adult audience who maybe did like history, but don’t necessarily do anything with it, or people who really didn’t like history because maybe it didn’t resonate. I hope it’s a gateway for people to delve into specific aspects of history,” she said.

The book, which is intended to be accessible and non-academic, breaks down large periods of time into smaller chunks, with each containing the story of a person whose experience sheds light on the era.

To introduce this approach more widely in schools, Patel thinks that history teachers need to be given the time and resources to explore hidden histories and develop their subject knowledge, for instance by working with university lecturers.

“What would be brilliant would be having training out there for teachers, having time for that. A network with teachers to share the stories they’re teaching to students would be really powerful.

“The more funding that can go into resources teachers can access, more textbooks, online resources, would really help. The other thing would be for these stories to be embedded into exam specifications as well, demonstrating to our students that they are valued and important,” she said.

The History Lessons by Shalina Patel is out on 9 May (Icon Books).

Hidden histories: the figures left out of the textbooks

Dorothy Lawrence
An English journalist who was desperate to report from the frontlines of the first world war, but was refused the posting by her editors on the grounds of her gender. She took matters into her own hands by posing as a male soldier and journeying to the Somme.

But her health took a turn for the worse in the trenches, forcing her to reveal her gender after 10 days, out of fear that if she needed medical attention those who helped her would be punished. She was arrested and interrogated, suspected of being a spy or a prostitute before being sent home under agreement not to write about her experiences.

Patel has used the notes Lawrence kept from the war to tell her story.

The Ivory Bangle Lady
Patel’s book opens with the Ivory Bangle Lady, a skeleton thought to be of a high-status woman from Roman York uncovered in 1901.

Researchers have analysed her facial features, the chemical signature of the food and drink she consumed, and the evidence from the burial site to determine she was likely to have been wealthy and of north African descent.

Her remains, dated to the second half of the fourth century, were found with jet and elephant ivory bracelets, earrings, pendants, beads, a blue glass jug and a glass mirror.

Nur Jahan
Patel says that one of the historical contexts that people do not know a huge amount about is how Britain took over India. She tells this story by teaching her students about Mughal India, which was the ruling power at the time of British colonisation.

She spotlights Nur Jahan, a 17th-century Mughal empress who is thought to have been the real power behind the throne, rather than her opium and alcohol-addicted husband. As well as receiving the rare honour for a woman of having coinage struck in her name, she was famed for her tiger-slaying abilities.

Sophia Duleep Singh
An Indian princess and goddaughter to Queen Victoria, Sophia Duleep Singh fought for women’s voting rights in the UK. She was part of a delegation of 300 suffragettes who marched to parliament in 1910, and was among the 119 arrested after police beat the protesters in a day that has come to be known as “Black Friday”.

Although she was considered a celebrity in the UK at the time, she remains a little-known figure in India, the country of her ancestry.

Patel described her as “very fashionable and stylish”, and she often featured in pictures with her prize-winning pomeranian dogs.

Noor Inayat Khan
Also known as Nora Baker, she was a British spy stationed in France during the second world war who was betrayed, captured and killed by the Nazis.

Under the codename Madeleine she became the first female wireless operator to be sent from the UK into occupied France to aid the French resistance during the second world war.