Trainee sees no reason to include Black or Asian British history in his lessons

John Davinier took the decision to move into history teaching after ten years working as a university administrator. He is now half way through his one-year teacher training programme. Since his degree was in Ancient History, he has been very conscious of the need to develop his subject knowledge, particularly in relation to the medieval and early modern periods. Working within his current school’s existing schemes of work has helped to boost his confidence and he is generally doing very well in terms of the clarity of his explanations and instructions and the creation of a positive and productive classroom environment.

As part of his subject-specific training, John has recently been asked to plan, teach and evaluate a new sequence of lessons. Several of the other history trainees within his training programme have expressed a strong interest in developing a more diverse approach to teaching the early modern period, but John has told them that he can’t see any reason to divert from his school’s current schemes of work for this period. In part, his reluctance to engage with new scholarship about the connections between England and the wider world under the Tudors and Stuarts seems to reflect a lack of confidence in going beyond the ‘standard’ topics of the Reformation and the Civil Wars...