Making history (and classrooms) more inclusive: Hotspur Primary School visit

Felicia visited Hotspur School in Newcastle to run two sessions with all year four children (a total of 60 pupils and their teachers). Based on the project’s focus on and research into East Asian porcelain, the workshops used hand-on material culture evidence to show children that art and history were always characterised by transcultural exchange. This is part of our project’s ambition to make contemporary classrooms more inclusive, by demonstrating that ethnic and cultural diversity which characterise contemporary society already existed in the past. This not only improves children’s engagement with history, art, and material culture, but ultimately fosters a greater sense of belonging and community in today’s ethnically and culturally diverse school environments.

The sessions combined history, art and geography, linking East Asia, Africa, Europe and South America to outline a more connected understanding of historical – and contemporary – exchanges. Children handled historical objects themselves and learned how even the “original” Chinese blue and white porcelain had been an intercultural Sino-Islamic co-production before it was further transformed, adapted, and appropriated in various locales ranging from modern-day Iran and Turkey to the Swahili Coast, Mexico, Britain, or the Netherlands. Children were then encouraged to reflect on their own sense of identity. Concluding that nothing ever comes from just from one place or culture alone but that you could nevertheless always make it your own, they then crafted their own “porcelain” plates, to express their own sense of identity and artistic creativity. This was an overwhelmingly positive experience. The children were absolutely brilliant: enthusiastic, engaged, and with a great sense of fun and adventure, they combined material-culture detective work about notions of “origin” and “belonging” with creative expression in a genuinely joyous response which celebrated that all identities and artistic expressions incorporate multicultural influences and inspirations.