Trainee is keen to make more use of historical artefacts, but struggles to incorporate them into worthwhile historical enquiries

Daphne Steele’s decision to pursue history was heavily influenced by the Windrush scandal, which first hit the headlines as she was making her A-level choices. Her immediate family had not been directly affected, but a friend of her grandparents had been deported and another lost his pension. Her father became very involved in campaigning for an apology and compensation, and Daphne began asking more questions about her family’s past and wondering why she had learned so little in school about Britain’s relations with the Caribbean, beyond the abolition of the slave trade. She went on to complete a history degree and is now part-way through her second placement in a school-based teacher training programme.

Daphne’s questions prompted her parents to start looking though family keepsakes and allowed her to assemble a small collection of artefacts that she thought might be useful in lessons. Daphne was excited to find opportunities to bring each of these items into her teaching. 

Unfortunately, after generating some initial intrigue, the lesson had become very confusing and disjointed. In talking to her mentor about what went wrong, and in thinking afresh about her previous experiences, Daphne concluded that even those earlier experiments with artefacts were pretty disappointing. Although they had both generated a lot of interest and questions about her family’s stories, they simply proved to be diverting interludes rather than driving the students’ learning...