Teaching about transatlantic slavery

Abstract

‘Teaching about Transatlantic Slavery’ was a three-year professional development project for teachers centring on the Historic Collections of Balliol College, University of Oxford, and the Museum of the American Revolution (MOAR) in Philadelphia. The project grew out of Balliol’s 2021 exhibition, ‘Slavery in the Age of Revolution’, which was inspired by the work of Fellows Sudhir Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: the epic life of Toussaint Louverture (2020 ) and Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: enslaved women, violence and the archive (2016). This paper discusses how we approached the aims of the project, telling a fuller history by foregrounding the role of Black people in the struggle for abolition and increasing awareness of the lasting impact of transatlantic slavery on the way we live and think today. We will address how some of the challenges of working with the material in Balliol’s collections became project strengths when we learnt to navigate bias and acknowledge and elaborate on the gaps and erasures in the historical record. We also acknowledge the diverse range of people who contributed and their importance to the consequent depth and effectiveness of the project. ‘Teaching about Transatlantic Slavery’ reached forty teachers and educators from the USA and the UK and has had lasting impact. The programme allowed teachers to practise teaching with objects, artwork, and primary source documents, deepen their subject knowledge, and develop skills for engaging in sensitive and difficult conversations around complex topics.