Critical Thinking for Complex Issues: An Afternoon in Manchester with Jeffrey Boakye

Last month, close to 100 students, teachers and community members from throughout the North of England joined us in Manchester for our Critical Thinking for Complex Issues event.

The event began with an envigorating keynote from Jeffrey Boakye, a prominent ex-teacher-turned-writer who features regularly on the BBC and in The Guardian. His most recent book, I Heard What You Said: A Black Teacher, A White System (2022), discusses masculinity and everyday racism. 

Jeffrey’s wide-ranging and personal remarks touched on the nuances of his own identity, the social pressures he experienced growing up in a UK immigrant family, as well as discrimination that remains pervasive in UK schools today. There was a consistent tension, he said, between who he was and who he was told – or understood – to be.

After his keynote, in a Q&A led by Facing History teacher Sanum Khan, guests asked Jeffrey about what inspired him, why he loves writing and more about his personal story. Jeffrey, again drawing on his own experience, invited students to think of their multifaceted identities as pie charts – a metaphor we use often in our Facing History resources – and their pie charts as their own personal stories. His remarks were particularly inspiring to young people in the room:

The afternoon culminated in a classroom session on identity modeled after our Facing History pedagogy. Michelle Perkins, Senior Programme Associate, and Hannah Goldstone, Regional Programme Lead, led attendees through an insightful exploration of names and communities – drawing on poetry, literature and pop culture. 

Attendees considered questions like, ‘what’s in a name?’, ‘what is community?’, and ‘what does it mean to “live a life filled with colour”?’

The event with Jeffrey resonates with our Standing Up For Democracy unit, tailored for schools and educators in the UK. Over the course of 15 lessons, students engage with questions of mutual respect, identity, civic agency, justice and critical reflection – with the goal of inspiring them to renew their commitments to a more democratic world. The unit opens with an apt quote from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks: ‘Society is a home we build together’.