Last year EMC’s Research and Projects team carried out a survey into how diversity and anti-racist pedagogy are approached in secondary English classrooms. Following the publication of the findings (which you can read in full attached to this blog) we decided to set up a working party with some of the teachers who had responded to the survey to investigate further the work they are doing in their classrooms.
We first met in spring term 1. Following a discussion about anti-racist education and the view that diversity and anti-racism are crucial to our practice as English teachers, the group set out to work on small-scale research projects, with the intention of sharing findings at a follow up meeting in the summer term.
The teachers devised their projects themselves, based on the context of their schools and their freedom (or otherwise) to work in particular ways. Here is a summary of the projects and findings from the teachers in the group.
Oliver from University of Birmingham School
Oliver invited us to visit his school to see the extensive work his department has done on diversifying their curriculum. it was exciting to see this in action and hear from students and teachers about the impact of the changes the department has made over the past few years.
In lessons, students were lively and engaged with a range of interesting texts. In Year 9, we saw two lessons from an anthology unit on ‘Identity’ that had been planned collaboratively by the department. Oliver presented on his leadership of this unit to the working group. He said:
I was keen for our curriculum to represent our students - it's always been a subject I've been passionate about. (Perhaps as there was so little diversity in my secondary (and tertiary) education.) The BLM movement was a catalyst in these changes.
Students enjoy the scheme. One of my Year 10s told me it was his favourite thing he did in English. The Muslim boys get visibly excited when they study Riz Ahmed and The Kite Runner. You can see that representation matters. They are also able to articulate themselves impressively on topics of identity, culture and belonging - they have something to say and like being heard.
The majority of staff love delivering the scheme. The nature of the anthology means it's fluid and we can be responsive to what is happening now. We've added a beautiful short story by a Palestinian author this year for example. Staff seem to like discussing a rich broad range of texts with their classes - it excites them from a subject knowledge perspective. The conversations the students have is also very enriching.
He also talked about the challenge of building confidence in the whole department in the delivery of the unit, as not all teachers felt comfortable facilitating these conversations. He plans to write some guidance and deliver some training on how to approach topics of race for his team.
It was particularly enlightening to speak with Oliver’s Year 12 class after their NEA lesson on the ending of ‘The Lonely Londoners’. The students expressed thoughtful and sophisticated ideas about their school context, the diversity of their classes and the relationship between diversity and anti-racism. Here are some of their comments from the discussion:
[English gives us] the freedom to benefit from our own experience
the books we study...mean we explore societal issues like racism and sexism
Because of the extremely diverse intake at the school, if students are “ignorant” about racism or diversity,“they’re taught more by their peers about what they can or can’t say”
The diversity of the classroom means “people are comfortable” talking about issues such as race and discrimination, and the students have “mutual respect” - “diversity has a big impact on anti-racism", “you can’t be anti-racist without diversity”
Students were positive about “the freedom we get in NEA lessons...we can put forth ideas that we resonate with”
Students said the anthology of poetry they studied was “very diverse”, which “changes your perspectives” and that reading a range of texts from across time “helps you to understand the present”.
Jo & Zaynah from Loreto College, Manchester
Jo and Zaynah worked together as a sixth form teacher and PGCE student with three Year 12 GCSE re-sit classes. They wanted to focus on creative writing responses because as Jo describes, they had noticed that:
[students’] current writing was almost exclusively about default white characters and had very few details of character or setting. [Students] also only imagined the characters they were reading about as being white, even if they were from somewhere that has a majority black population.
Jo had previously read Danielle Jawando’s When Our World’s Collided with her students, organising for Jawando, a black writer from Manchester and ex-Loreto student, to visit the school. Jo described the positive experience for her students, given that the author's life experiences were recognisable to many of the students, who all responded positively to her creative writing workshop.
Jo and Zaynah planned a series of lessons which focused on changing characterisation in students’ writing. They hadn’t explicitly addressed these issues of race before but found that students responded positively:
…students embraced the idea that they could write about characters and settings that were familiar to them, and enjoyed having this being valued and rewarded. They don't choose our course, unlike other subjects at college, so it's very positive to feel that students are looking forward to the lessons. Also, we've built a lot of trust in our groups since September, and created a respectful space so students can have freedom to question and explore ideas relating to diversity and equality - if students challenge something we say, we show them that this is welcome and valuable.
Jo recognised that the project was not an ‘instant fix’ and needed re-visiting regularly to embed this work into students' writing.
Priya from Bromley High School
Priya, a Global Action Research Fellow with the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools, was interested in the way the term ‘cultural capital’ was used in pedagogy and wanted to explore this further through the diversification of her school’s curriculum. In her presentation, she described how ‘literature texts have a transformative power to turn students into agents of change’.
In her project, where she taught the novel In the Sea there are Crocodiles to her Year 7 class, she found that when children get to study a text that is ‘authentic’ (she described how In the Sea is a story about a ‘real boy’) they actively wanted to engage with real world issues. Priya enjoyed the curricular links with PSHE and found that she had detailed and sophisticated discussions about a range of issues, such as what it means to be a child in our world. Students felt so passionate about the issues they discussed that they went out and found a refugee charity in Brixton, which they teamed up with to support refugees in England.
About the project, Priya highlighted:
It was important to me that the work being done was not tokenistic or superficial, and that the SOWs I was creating were reflecting (to the best of my ability) lived realities. I wanted students to gain global literacy and to be able to encounter subaltern voices which I felt were just as important to pay attention to as Shakespeare. I wanted to go beyond the canon so to speak.
Priya also found that her students were able to make thoughtful and sophisticated analysis of the novel, as demonstrated in these two comments from students about the experience of the protagonist:
As well as the positive impact on students, Priya found that the project led to collaboration between staff - in the first instance the librarians got involved in the project and incorporated research tasks into the library lesson curriculum and now the project has become a school-wide initiative with collaboration across the Junior and Senior schools with English becoming 'a hub subject by which we can explore a multiplicity of perspectives’.
On the challenges of the project, Priya said:
The biggest challenge was teacher uncertainty, especially when it came to teaching the refugee novel, which dealt with the Taliban. The most important message that we had to send out was that to be champion of diversity is not necessarily to be an expert. Creating a safe learning environment for both students and teachers was a priority, and that part of the process of diversification is to learn from discomfort and to create a safe space in which to negotiate challenges and difficulties.
Laura from Northwood College for Girls
Laura’s project was a Year 9 poetry unit, which she set out to diversify with the intention to increase student excitement and confidence in analysing modern poetry; bring poetry to life and move away from ‘well-worn’lessons or poems from earlier iterations of GCSE specifications. She also wanted the poets and poems to be more relatable to her students, over 80% of whom are of British Asian heritage.
She said:
It's important for students to read and hear from a wide range of voices, backgrounds and experiences. There is more freedom in the KS3 curriculum vs some GCSE specs and so I wanted to make the most of a moment when students have more intellectual maturity and are becoming more interested in the world around them. I also wanted to choose texts which helped to prepare the students for their GCSE skills development and to encourage them to become excited about English as a subject (if they were not already!), to see its wider relevance in sharing a message and reflecting on the work. Finally, I wanted to structure responses to the poems to emphasise the creative process and to encourage students to develop their own voice and pride in their own, plural backgrounds. I deliberately included some white, non-London based writers too, as part of encouraging an understanding further beyond the world in which my students operate.
The project had a significantly positive impact on students:
- Significantly increased enthusiasm for studying poetry - only 44% said they were interested or very interested in poetry before the unit, whereas after, 80% of students said they were interested or very interested in poetry.
- Students cited the relevance, relatability and variety of the poems as reasons for enjoying the module: every poet in the course was represented when asked for their ‘favourite’.
- Students enjoyed exploring different meanings in poems and developing their analytical ability and technical knowledge.
- Increased appreciation of the skill required to create poetry.
Some comments from students highlighted here:
“relatable”; “addressing modern issues”; “more relevant”; “a different angle on life”; “more interesting than I thought it [poetry] was”
“Easier to make links and connections with my life so it encouraged me to think deeper.”
“I could see the different struggles modern poets had and it made me more aware of everything.”
“They all were about different things such as culture, race, gender and love but all subtly connected.”
“It [writing their own poetry in response] makes you think like a writer”
Laura described the biggest successes as being:
- A buzz about poetry and a greater appreciation of the complexity and potential for modern verse forms.
- A more sensitive understanding of different people's life experiences.
- Increased appreciation of poetry as a craft.
- Students in Year 10 are less fearful of the work when faced with the GCSE poetry anthology than was previously the case: they are more open and more willing to explore and embrace the poems. (Teacher report from bottom set)
She found that initially getting the students to write their own poems was a challenge, but through carefully scaffolded tasks building to more creative freedom through the SoW they produced some amazing work, such as these poems, that Laura shared with the group:
Student 1: inspired by an identity poem: ‘I am’
I am Turkish.
I am the evil eye amulet,
I am a Muslim.
I am not promoting violence,
I am a sibling and advice giver.
I am a rug of patterns and stories,
I am the future my family with relive
I am a map of my culture and history.
I am a girl,
I am emotional.
I am emotional when I flip the pages of my book.
I am the sweetness of a baklava
I am the different layers of a borek.
I am not delighted with Turkish delight.
I am a younger version of my sister.
I am the fourth wheel of my world,
I am unexpected to fill the noughts,
I am not the mirror of the world’s thoughts
I am independent but depend on others to teach me
I am a teenager
I am not posh
I am Bri’ish
I am me.
Student 2: inspired by Seamus Heaney’s ‘Blackberry Picking’
Swinging high in the summer air,
Metal chains, laughter we share.
Playground dreams, innocent fun,
But time slips away, the race has begun.
Seesaw days of childhood glee,
As we soared, wild and free.
But shadows lengthen, daylight fades,
A reminder that your youth will not make.
Swing sets whisper tales untold,
Of fleeting moments, young and bold.
The creaking swing, a rhythmic beat,
Marks the runs of hurried feet.
From giggles high to thoughtful sighs,
Time's swift passage, a surprise.
Innocence slips, like grains of sand,
Grades of joy held in a small hand.
So cherish swings and childhood's dance,
For growing up, a fleeting chance.
In the playground's echo, memories cast,
Hold on tight, for youth won't last.
Laura intends to continue to build up some mini-anthologies of poetry, so that students can read a wider range of poems than they study in class. She also plans to invite some of the poets in to talk to the students and give writing workshops.
Kate from Putney High School
Kate adapted her GCSE curriculum to teach a text less commonly taught and specifically for the purpose of including a writer of colour: ‘Crumbs from the Table of Joy’ by Lynn Nottage. Her department decided that the question of what language was suitable/acceptable for the classroom needed to be addressed before studying the play, as it contained language that some students and teachers found uncomfortable. They devised a preparation lesson where teachers were explicit about why they had chosen the play and they gave students a chance to respond to prompts in a journaling task and anonymously complete a google form with their views, as in the image below.
The results of the form were then made into a class agreement for the discussion and reading of the play going forwards. This meant that students felt comfortable and clear on the expectations around reading racist language out loud and had also discussed why the writer included this language.
About the unit, Kate said:
[Students responded] very positively. We have taught 'Crumbs' to three consecutive GCSE groups now, and they have really enjoyed the play for its humour, pathos and portrayal of family dynamics. The introductory lesson created a sense of confidence in both teachers and students, which allowed us to go on to study the play in a way which recognised racism as an important strand, but equally to appreciate the many other ideas Nottage was interested in exploring.
We were really happy with our 'Crumbs' scheme of work, which we developed collaboratively as a department, without many external resources available. It built our confidence in teaching new material, and we will definitely choose to do this again. (At the same time, it's good to see that there are now more resources available, which means more schools must be choosing to study the diverse texts exam boards are increasingly offering.)
Conclusions
These case studies show the positive impact changes can have on students when diversity and anti-racism are included and prioritised in the English curriculum. The beauty of the projects outlined here, are that they are personal to the teachers involved. Students across the schools enjoyed the changes these teachers made and examples of developed and thoughtful student work evidence the possibility for this kind of work.
However, many of the teachers reported a lack of confidence or reluctance from other members of staff, and it is a clear that there is need for change to exam specification texts and training to make these changes more widespread and not just the work of individual teachers who are passionate about the issue.