Teaching the "Voices of the Victorian Poor"

During the AHRC project grant 'In Their Own Write' we have collected a rich canvas of the voices of poor people and their advocates between 1834 and 1900, showing that even the very poorest members of society were literate, understood the poor laws, regulations and rules, and were able and willing to resist or contest the power of the national and local state. Moreover, we have established that there were substantial chronological and spatial variations in the nature, depth and tone of the voices that we have uncovered. Such material is allowing us to write the New Poor Law history from below envisaged as the core academic output from the original grant proposal. Yet our engagement with volunteer groups, those running workhouse museum sites, users of TNA, and the teachers and schoolchildren with whom we have worked as part of our engagement and impact activities from the original grant also reveals a much wider appetite for relevant teaching resources, including an easy-to-use and visual tool for understanding, accessing and representing (through tables, graphs or maps) the vast amount of raw data that we have generated during the project.

To meet this demand, a key part of the project will be a Teacher Scholar Programme, in which we will select a group of teachers from KS2 to 5 to train and develop in order for them to produce publishable lesson plans and other resources based upon the project's data. The PI, CI, other TNA staff and an Education Consultant will work with the teachers to produce detailed lesson plans, teacher notes and associated materials for different key stage levels. The group will then engage in a wider exercise to engage with and train other teachers in their use, creating a snowball effect and allowing us to have a deep and targeted impact on the school community.

The cohort of teachers from the TSP and other engaged teachers will also advise and guide the project on the development of an online data visualisation tool. The use of this digital initiative was not available to us when we wrote our initial application and developed its engagement plans. Because our data on the pauper voice is so rich and extensive it is suitable for use by teachers and school students at different Key Stages. Teachers will be able to tailor the resource to the different ages, capabilities, locations and curriculum interests of class participants. Employing a series of filters the user will be able to ask questions (for example) about the place of residence, age or gender of letter writers within the collection. Having annotated the data, constructed the online maps and simultaneously made available the base data in terms of pauper, would-be pauper and advocate letters and petitions, we will publicise the tool widely through existing TNA networks and mailing lists, TNA website, volunteer groups, workhouse websites, and the workhouse network, giving the project national and international reach and impact. All products of this project will be available for free online in perpetuity.

To reach the wider public the learning resources will be written into existing TNA research guides which are already well known. Indeed the four relevant TNA research guides on public health, poverty and workhouses, reach almost 30,000 researchers annually. We would update these guides to advertise the resource to researchers outside of the teaching community. These would include people in tertiary and long life learning.