When we had finished writing Football’s Black Pioneers it soon became clear to us that the stories we had uncovered, almost by accident, spoke volumes about the black British experience over the past 130 years. The book garnered many favourable reviews but this is one that reflected much of what we felt we had achieved:
‘Bill Hern and David Gleave, authors of Football’s Black Pioneers, say they set out four years ago to write a dip-in-dip-out tome that would appeal to sports fans. Yet the result is only ostensibly about the (not always) beautiful game. Rather, what emerges over 92 wildly different mini-biographies, is a far wider social history about the black British experience over the last 130 years, touching on everything from slavery to Windrush and black lives mattering’
The Independent
We felt many of the stories had tremendous educational value and, when we floated the idea to teachers, their response was overwhelmingly positive.
But the stories, good as they are, were buried in the various chapters of the book. We know that teachers are incredibly busy and so, if they were to make use of the material, we would have to present it in a way that could be easily used in the teaching environment.
We had stories we wanted to ‘get out there’ but no clear idea of how to do that. Quite by chance we stumbled across an organisation called Sporting Heritage at just the time when they were on the lookout for sports-based educational resources. It was a marriage made in heaven and, together, we have developed a teacher resource pack based on the story of Viv Anderson.
We chose to focus on Viv initially because his story, and that of his family, is a great illustration of the history of the Windrush generation. If teachers are looking for a way of talking about changes to British society since the Second World War then this is a great way to do it.
I am not a teacher but I found myself presenting sessions to Year 4 children recently. ‘Hands up if you are interested in history’ I asked. Hands went up, perhaps a little reluctantly with people looking around to see who else had their hand up. ‘Now, hands up if you are interested in football.’ The reaction was immediate and enthusiastic, the energy levels shot up. So, naturally, we spent the next hour talking about history (!), using footballers’ stories to illustrate a wide range of topics. Although we covered a lot of history there was some Geography and even some maths thrown in too; I believe that a ‘proper’ teacher (i.e. not me) could have brought out even more.
The Viv Anderson resource is aimed at Key Stage 3-5 (secondary school) but could be easily adapted for use with younger children.
The full pack can be downloaded for free from the Sporting Heritage site (and there are plenty of other resources to check out while you are there):
If you use the resource do let us know how you get on, you can use the contact page of this site or email us at historycalroots(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)gmail.com
