In the lead up to the celebration of the bi centenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, and the opening of the International Slavery Museum in 2007, National Museums Liverpool (NML) partnered schools in Liverpool, Brazil, Haiti, Senegal and Sierra Leone, to explore slavery and its impact and legacy on communities along the trade route.
Within an on-line community, pupils met and talked about their own daily lives, interests and hobbies, undertook a programme of study on slavery, and then produced creative responses to what they had learned, using media including sculpture, dance and film.
The project was very successful with pupils, leading to an increase in knowledge and changes in attitudes and perceptions about slavery. Pupils also developed their ICT skills and produced outstanding creative and art work.
Pupils from Brazil, Haiti and Senegal visited Liverpool in 2007 to continue the project and to take part in the launch of the new National Slavery Museum and activities on Slavery Remembrance Day. The creative work from the wider project now has a permanent home in the Anthony Walker Education Centre within the new museum.
Make the Link, Break the Chain benefited from a partnership with Plan UK, one of the world’s largest child-centred community development organisations, and collaboration with the Guardian Newspaper, Gemin-i.org, Clapperboard UK, as well as its connection with the launch of the International Slavery Museum. This enabled some pupils to put politicians and celebrities in the ‘hot seat’, discuss issues with David Lammy, the then culture minister, and to meet eminent children's rights campaigners and civil rights activists.
'Make the Link, Break the Chain' won the international award at the UK Museums and Heritage Awards for Excellence.
Target Audience
Schools in Liverpool, Brazil, Haiti, Senegal and Sierra Leone:
Cardinal Heenan High School (UK)
De La Salle Secondary School (UK)
New Heys Community School (UK)
Shorefields Technology College (UK)
College Classique De La Croix-des-Bouquets (Haiti)
College Jacques Roumain (Haiti)
College Les Sages Racunis (Haiti)
Jose Alberto de Lima (Brazil)
Annie Walsh Memorial School (Sierra Leone)
Mariama Ba School (Senegal)
Aim
• Give an international perspective to the learning programme for the International Slavery Museum;
• Create a model for future international projects with schools;
• Develop pupils’ understanding about slavery and its legacy through opportunities to take part in discussions with peers around the world and through creative art work;
• Develop pupils’ ICT skills;
• Develop resources on slavery for use by teachers and pupils for Citizenship and History;
• Build confidence of teachers to deliver programmes on slavery.
Process
Why did the project take place?
The project was developed as part of the learning resources strategy for the International Slavery Museum, which opened on 23 August 2007. It was devised in collaboration with Plan UK, one of the world’s largest child-centred community development organisations, as a contribution to the Bicentenary Year of the abolition of the slave trade.
Make the Link, Break the Chain was ground-breaking and ambitious. It aimed to take education for citizenship to new and exciting places. Focussing on real life issues of racism and discrimination, it attempted to engage the energies of the young people and break down classroom walls in meaningful ways by offering them a global dimension to their lives, their understanding of the past and their hopes for the future.
Using the expertise of staff from the International Slavery museum, Plan UK and the website managers Gemin-i.org, the strategy was to create a series of shared learning resources to use with the students across the world. The resources were to be used on and off-line to stimulate enquiry, discussion and creative cross-arts work. Schools were invited to enrol classes of children aged 13-16 into the project.
What happened?
A project manager was appointed to work in the Plan UK office to bring together pupils from Liverpool with others living in some of the chief ports along the slave triangle in Brazil, Haiti, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The website management company Gemini-i.org looked after the technical aspects.
Working as an online community, communicating through Email and participating in on-line forums, the pupils got to know each other, sharing interests and hobbies, before moving on to discuss slavery and its impact and legacy for them and their communities. Conversations were carried out in English, the language barrier in Brazil being overcome by using Portuguese speakers in the UK to translate the pupils’ emails and send them on around the world to the others.
All pupils worked on a common learning programme developed from the themes of the International Slavery Museum and worked up into nine lesson plans by the project manager. They explored three core questions:
What is slavery?
What does it mean to be free?
How can we safeguard liberty?
As well as the history of the slave trade, the programme included contemporary case studies. It is estimated that around 20 million people, many of them children, live in servitude around the world today. The project engaged pupils in debates about how modern forms of slavery can be tackled now and prevented in the future.
The learning from the participating schools was captured and posted on the internet. As well as creating their own personal pages, introducing themselves and their schools, the pupils developed mind maps on slavery issues, and their own charters of rights. The various charters were subsequently combined and distributed by Plan UK to politicians around the world.
In February 2007, New Heys School in Liverpool hosted a visit by Chernor, a young Sierra Leonean champion of children's rights. He discussed his work and the political situation in Sierra Leone with them and shared some everyday objects from home such as money and newspapers.
Pupils also had the opportunity to put politicians in the hot seat, including the then Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, who took part in an on-line interview with pupils, who asked him about modern slavery, the importance of learning about slavery and preventing the trade.
In addition to following the on-line programme, pupils continued their studies off-line producing creative responses to what they had learned. In Brazil, pupils learned about graffiti art and Capoeira which are dances based on fight moves, first performed by slaves in the 17th century as an act of defiance and resistance to slavery.
In Haiti, the story of a child, enslaved by her aunt, provided the inspiration for a sculpture in metal, showing the child being beaten by her owner. In Sierra Leone, pupils composed anti slavery songs and recorded a video documentary.
In Senegal pupils re-enacted a contemporary story about a slave, featuring a child, working as a housemaid and the performance was developed into a short film.
The Liverpool pupils worked with ‘Clapperboard UK’ (a collaboration between Creative Partnerships Merseyside and BAFTA North in which professional writers from the film and television industry work with groups of students) to produce four films about the slave trade and its legacy. Their work is to be entered for a prestigious BAFTA Award later in 2008.
This ambitious on-line project was not without technical challenges along the way. In Haiti and Sierra Leone, the internet connection and power supply disconnected from time to time. This was overcome with the help of Plan UK who had some students travel out to their Country Offices to use their internet facilities. In other cases Plan delivered resources to the schools and once the pupils had completed their work, Plan staff inputted it onto the system for them, so everyone was able to benefit from their involvement.
The project culminated in August 2007 at the launch of the International Slavery Museum www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/index.aspx where the students' work was showcased in the Anthony Walker Education Centre. This new learning facility forms an integral part of the new museum, and is dedicated to the teenager who was tragically murdered in a racially motivated attack in Liverpool in 2005.
Three pupils, Christella, Raiza and Salimata from Brazil, Haiti and Senegal, visited Liverpool to help celebrate the launch, where they worked with Liverpool students and an artist to create a sculpture representing the theme of the Children's Charter. The girls also toured the Amistad slave ship www.amistadamerica.org, a replica of the famous slave schooner moored in the Albert Dock, as well as sampling aspects of Liverpool life, including a trip to see Liverpool FC play, a visit to the hairdressers and a meal at a Chinese restaurant!
Alongside the main learning programme led by NML, the Guardian newspaper linked in a wider group of young people across the country by running a Young Reporters competition. Nigel Reo-Coker, the West Ham United football club captain, helped to promote the competition by talking about his views on slavery, his Sierra Leonean heritage and his team losing to Liverpool in the FA Cup Final. Hundreds of young people submitted essays on themes related to slavery and freedom.
The prize was a trip both to Liverpool and Senegal, and the winning entries can be seen in the International Slavery Museum. Pupils from the programme, including the winners of the Guardian competition, met the then culture secretary, David Lammy at the launch of the museum, as well as renowned musician, civil rights activist and slavery campaigner, Harry Bellefonte.
Impact and outcome
On Teachers
Feedback shows that teachers liked the lesson plans which gave them a structured and interesting series of lessons to work with. Some teachers in Liverpool used the project as a workforce development opportunity for newly qualified teachers (NQTs). One NQT successfully encouraged his class to enter into a debate about freedom, before his students performed an engaging role-play.
Teachers in Senegal felt that their students benefited from this unique way to communicate and learn from others, and this was reflected in the quality of their work.
On Pupils
The best evidence of the impact on the pupils can be seen in their enthusiasm and commitment to the work of the project as identified in the work they produced. Examples can be seen at www.planed.org/learningcentre/antislavery/.
Some of the most powerful learning clearly came from the opportunity for pupils to communicate informally on-line, through which they were able to gain a deeper insight into the many forms of slavery and each others perspectives on its impact and legacy. Meeting high profile politicians and celebrities, as well as children, from other countries also impacts on attitudes and opinions. As you would expect, given a theme which produces emotional response, the impact was stronger on some than on others.
All this teachers confirmed in their own feedback:
"It was a great opportunity for the students at New Heys to hear Chernor talk about his experiences and his work, and then ask him questions."
"As the students work through the Anti-Slavery project, Make the Link, Break the Chain, meeting with someone actually from Sierra Leone was an invaluable experience, as well as being great fun."
On Partnerships and Partner Organisations
The project provided NML’s learning staff an excellent opportunity to work with international partners at the same time as developing an international slavery museum. It offered new perspectives and ideas for incorporation in the gallery and in the learning resources being prepared for it. http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/learning/learningresources.asp
Evaluation
Informal evaluation undertaken by NML and Plan-Ed learning staff, as well as the teachers involved, suggested that the project achieved its aims. NML staff are cognizant of the GLO evaluation methods and used these in an ongoing assessment of the project.
Future development
Following the project, the nine lesson plans were revised into schemes of work linked to each Key Stage of the National Curriculum and supplemented by resource material. Each scheme consists of four lesson plans and the relevant resources, some of which are materials created by students during the project. They are available to schools throughout the world via the World Wide Web, and explore the three core questions posed by the project in increasing levels of complexity. www.plan-ed.org/learningcentre/antislavery/. Take up of these resources is being monitored and will offer a much longer term evaluation of the project.
Many pieces of creative work produced by the project have a permanent home in the Anthony Walker Education Centre at International Slavery Museum.
During 2008-9 a traveling exhibition developed from NML’s pioneering former Transatlantic Slavery Gallery will be touring developing countries in Africa and elsewhere in a programme managed by UNESCO. See: http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=29008&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html for more information.
Materials developed during the Make the Link Break the Chain project will be used as educational resources to support the exhibition.
Also during 2008-9, NML will work again with its partner Plan UK using the same model of international partnership with schools to look at disaster risk reduction and climate change. Schools from Merseyside will be working with schools in counties including Kenya, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, Togo and Malawi. Details can be obtained from: mike.graham@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk
Project website [1]:
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/learning/makethelinkbreakthechain.asp
Case Studies