Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Hi, Nicole. It is so wonderful to E-meet you. I’m so glad that we connected on Twitter and that we get to have this conversation so quickly. So thank you so much for finding time, especially across time zones.

Nicole Ridley:        No, thank you for having me. It’s a really exciting opportunity.

SC:        Do you want to really quickly introduce yourself before we get started talking?

NR:        Okay. My name is Nicole Ridley. I’m a history teacher in Hull in England, and I run a blog called Tea and Learning with my friend and colleague Hannah Betts. I wrote a blog post on the lack of women in our American West specifications, which is what you saw, and how we might start to change that.

SC:        Yeah. And I remember like your tweet that’s something like this is going to — like part of my pandemic research project is going to be on Women in the American West. And that was so intriguing to me because I know not everyone has time to do research. And I said in my introduction like, “No pressure for those history teachers that don’t have that time”, but it’s kind of interesting that you thought of this time to do research.

So the first question that I’d like to ask is how you thought about history any different because of this time? And maybe it is, like, thinking about history differently brought you to the blog, or maybe just having the time to do other research maybe shifted your ideas about history. So, have you thought about history any differently during COVID-19?

NR:        I think I have started to think about it differently. I’ve been focusing on trying to make the history that I was delivering diverse and representative, which is a big focus of English history teachers on Twitter at the moment, on the back of work done by people like Helen Snelson, the chair of the Historical Association Secondary Committee, the network of teachers in York (YorkClio), and lots of other fantastic practitioners online. When the outbreak started and we got put into lockdown, I picked an area that I wanted to improve my knowledge or delivery of. That was the American West so I put that diverse, representative lens on it. Does it fit? Am I being representative and diverse? The answer was most definitely no, so I started research.

SC:        And so, why the American West? Because I also said in the introduction, I didn’t realize you were British until we started emailing. And so, why the American West?

NR:        It’s the topic where I’m the weakest, as a practitioner. I know very, very little about it and shockingly little about American history in general so it was something that I wanted to spend this time strengthening. Originally, when I’d been looking through it, I did find it interesting but I felt like it was a little bit flat as a history and I wasn’t really engaging with it, which I imagine the students picked up on. Then I noticed that in the textbook we use there are only 6 women mentioned by name versus over 82 men and that made me realise how much of this history and reality was clearly missing. Once I started to research women in this period, and I realized the scope of their experience, how nuanced it was, and how much impact they had on the story, I connected with it a lot more.

SC:        So what are some things then that you learned during your research that has helped you like — that has, like, that you’ve pulled out to be like these are definitely things I want to communicate to my students. These are the elements of history that my students are really going to be transformed by perhaps?

NR:        I think it was the amount of agency that women had in themselves. Every time I was reading, the story was that women followed their husbands across the Oregon Trail, they went with their husbands to do this and that, men took them to those places, and I was realising that this wasn’t the reality or lived experience in a lot of cases. Actually, the narrative was “I want to be a pioneer and if you want to go, I’m going to come with you.” Women refused to be a left behind and had real influence on the economic and politics of settlement, which is a significant difference.

I think it’s Luzena Wilson that I was reading about. When she got to California, she set up a business with her husband; they didn’t manage to get gold but they set up a hotel. Then her husband left her, so she just carried on. And there were successful women all over the West that I had no idea about and wasn’t teaching.

SC:        To me, whenever I engage with women’s history or — I mean, it’s just national history. It just features women. It reminds me of how much so much of history is based on our current perceptions, right?

So we like to think that, like, women we’re all docile and had no agency in the past, and then we dig into the past and we see that’s not true. Has this caused you to rethink other histories that you have taught because of the learning from the American West?

NR:        I definitely think it is going to. This was a moment of awakening, I suppose, for me because I was aware that I was presenting a very white and masculine space but at the beginning I thought that American West genuinley was a very white and masculine space because of what I’d read in the textbook. So, I’m kind of at the beginning of the process – I still have so much more to learn about the American West and the women in it, and especially the racial dynamic of it as well. For example, how is the experience of white women crossing the Oregon Trail different to Native American women? How does this compare to white and Native American men? How does the gender dynamic change as the nature of race relations changes? I think this is a question that I’ve learnt to ask and will take further down the school.

SC:        Well, and also, that there were quite a lot of black women too in the American West because — well, a migration after slavery, but also just ways to have — what’s that world I’m looking for? Like free communities. And so, again, like we don’t really get to hear about that. It’s interesting the digging that has to be done. And like, you hear about this word of digging through history a lot, what kind of sources are you using? Are they different than the sources you would have used if you didn’t have this time?

NR:        Yes. Yeah, I think so. I remember getting really angry at the beginning because I was like, “I should not be having to work this hard just to find some women’s names.” And I found a lot of white women straight away, obviously. It was hard to find black women and Hispanic women. I haven’t been able to find the names of any Asian women at the moment. And I was lucky in terms of sources that I have access to academic journals through my university alumni access.

So I was using a lot of them; reading academic papers, books, doing really deep Google searches into whatever primary sources I could find from American Museums or history blogs. But I think, particularly if you don’t have time or you don’t have access to the academic work, it’s an issue. Doing this from Britain as well, where we don’t have the sources coming up on a Google search, it takes a really long time to try and find any of this.

SC:        Yeah. I mean, I know that’s a barrier for a lot of teachers. The time to do research be like this sitting and just doing that digging and doing that exploring. And not all teachers will have time to do that, but if there is like this kernel of thing that they’re interested in, that there can be a world of stuff. And that’s why I think networks are really interesting and helpful. And it’s cool that you are interested in developing more of a network to share that, because you don’t need to do it as well as your colleague at another school, right?

NR:        Yeah. Well, Hannah and I originally trained in York where the Yorkclio network inspired us, and we want to create that spirit in Hull in a network where we can share the different experiences of the history teachers and what we’re interested in to try and plug each other’s gaps. There’s a lot of — Hull has really strong links with slavery and abolition because that’s where William Wilberforce lived, so we’re quite familiar with that content, but by contrast there’s the American West that Hull as a city knows nothing about, so it’s useful to be able to share.

SC:        Yeah, that’s great. So do you think then through your networks or even just individually, do you think that teaching history will change after this point? Do you think that people will have had some time and space to engage differently and transform their teaching practices after this?

NR:        Yeah, I think so. We’ve had time to reflect and get ready for next year. We have had to adapt to a different way of working and I think what the Coronavirus — what I’ve seen is that it shows really starkly the variety of experiences that you get when an event happens or when the government makes a decision. Everyone has suffered in different ways and everyone has contributed in different ways, and we have to be really careful not to put a hierarchy on that and say “your contribution was better than theirs so we’re only going to talk about you” because everyone is part of the whole. And I think that applies to history teaching because we can’t ignore sections of society just because we see them as secondary or not as consequential when everyone contributions to moments in history.

SC:        I really love that point that we have to make sure that we’re not doing this priority that some people — you know, there is this article going around in the CBC, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, right now that says like, the privilege of the pandemic, right? Some people don’t have time to engage in any education, let alone research projects. And that’s why I think, especially being able to network in community — like, to develop community after this can, to some point perhaps, make a little bit more equitable the experiences so that everyone can kind of catch up as much as possible together.

So, to me, this goes into my third question really well about the notion of imagining a new we. So my work is about how we can think more inclusive narratives in our classes and recognize a more inclusive community of students in our classrooms as valuable knowledge holders. Has this time shifted how you think of imagining a new we during this time or after this time? And do you think that that will shift your teaching practices at all?

NR:        I think so. It encourages you to break down the definition, I guess, in who are the we – who is included, who’s contributing, and not to be judgmental about who can be included in that. It’s everybody and it’s everybody that’s working towards whatever goals they have. I think particularly for the way that I deliver the American West, it’s about recognizing that everyone has a specific role because they’ve chosen it and that’s their area of specialty. They perform as best as they can, whether it’s a woman in the home or a man going out to work, running a business or a pioneer in a homestead. Everyone performs their role. They contribute and that is what should be recognized.

SC:        Yeah. And that those roles also aren’t — there aren’t so steadfast, that if we recognize the ways about all the roles work in society, that we also have to be aware of the ways that we have to fill in the gaps when there are gaps in the ways that we need to support each other in continuing to fulfill those goals like you said.

Nicole, this has been so interesting to talk with you and to hear your perspectives. Is there anything else you wanted to share about your hopes for history teaching post-pandemic before we close?

NR:        I hope that it can just become wider. With the American West in particular, we really need redesign for the curriculum to be representative and diverse. At the moment, it’s very — we see everything through a lens of white masculinity, particularly with this topic, and it’s preventing us from teaching good history. And if — I mean, if I struggled to get over that barrier, and I’m a trained historian then 15-16 year olds are not going to be able to do it, so we need to be delivering something that is much more obviously, starkly representative.

SC:        Yeah. I love that concept of wider. That we need to be — one second, there is a truck. I love this idea of wider. That we need to think of wider narratives and that we need to — one of the things that’s coming up in a lot of the videos is how the pandemic has really shown the inequity of so many of the structures that free more lives and — did you see the cat? Anyway, the cat just [inaudible]. That shaped so many of the structures. And when you’re saying wider, to me, that really demonstrates that we need to think so much beyond those structures to include more histories and to challenge the white masculinity of so much of our history.

So thank you so much for doing that research. Thank you for talking with me. Can you tell people where to find information about your blog, although I will have a link below the video?

NR:        So the blog is at www.teaandlearning.com, or it can be found on my Twitter page which is @RidleyHistory or Hannah’s Twitter page, which is @MissHBHistory.

SC:        Can you say that one more time?

NR:        All of it?

SC:        Yeah, yeah. Sorry, the cat. Sorry.

NR:        So the blog can be found at www.teaandlearning.com, or there are links to it on my Twitter page, which is @RidleyHistory or Hannah’s Twitter page, which is @MissHBHistory.

SC:        Okay, that’s great. All of those links will be below the video. And so, I hope that this can broaden some of that network that you’re doing, and it was wonderful to talk with you. And please tell anyone in your network that it would be great to hear what they are doing on the other side of the pond, if you will. I am actually —

NR:        I will.

SC:        — at York University in Canada. And we have a — there’s a room in one of our 1960s buildings that was created and dedicated by the University of York. So we have some —

NR:        In England?

SC:        — [inaudible 0:16:48.3] connections.

NR:        You do? Such a coincidence.

SC:        Yeah. So —

NR:        [inaudible 0:16:57.5*But, yeah, you have a whole new host of British fans too.]

SC:        Okay. Well, great. Well, British fans, come and let’s do another little interview. I hope Nicole [inaudible 0:17:06.2] like, very easy and not intimidating because I think I’m so interested in what you’re doing in England, and I really love this idea that you already have this network that are thinking about diverse histories. And yeah, I would love to hear more about that work. So thank you so much, Nicole.

NR:        No worries. Thank you.

SC:        Okay. Well, see you later. Bye.

NR:        Bye.

SC:        You don’t have to hang up. Sorry, I meant to tell you that before. It’s a fake —

NR:        I was already about to click.

SC:        I know. It’s a fake goodbye.