School pilots course for pupils on black heritage

Sharon De Leonardis said she wants to focus on the word "heritage" and not "history"

A project to teach pupils more about black heritage is being piloted in a school.

The six-week course is run by Sharon De Leonardis, the chief executive of SpectaculArts, at the Samuel Whitbread Academy in Shefford, Bedfordshire.

She said she created the programme, which is for pupils who have a black or mixed heritage, because "I couldn't see myself in the history I was taught".

Ms De Leonardis wanted to educate those students more about their roots.

Sharon De Leonardis wants her students to talk "freely"

She said that the course was for pupils who have a black or mixed heritage "so they can talk openly, without having to think they might be offending somebody else who does not look the same as them".

Rudo, a student, said: "To get a black woman, who we can see ourselves in, to teach us history that is maybe not taught in the national curriculum is good and will help us in the future."

Sharon said that there was so much more to black heritage than people realise

Ms De Leonardis said there are many situations where history is taught from "one side" or is only "one part" of wider events.

She highlighted that Lewis Howard Latimer, who invented a method that produced carbon filaments for light bulbs in the 1880s, has never received the same level of recognition for contributing to the invention as Thomas Edison.

"If it was not for Latimer, it would just be a bauble," she said.

Sharon De Leonardis displays her artwork to students

Ms De Leonardis added that there were "thousands of years of rich history" before slavery and "it is about unlocking our full potential for everybody".

She wants the next generation of students to really "understand where they came from".

"These students are now seeing themselves in history as creators," she said. "They are no longer seeing themselves as showing the black community is just from slavery."