Note: This was saved in my drafts and written last September, when I was still teaching at a school in Bristol, UK.
So the biggest task to undertake in the first step of de-centering whiteness/ decolonisation is to have a look at what is already there and see what can be done to improve it. I think the first salient point to make is that actually everyone should be doing a curriculum audit, no matter how diverse your curriculum seems at a first glance. From what I have read already (see my review blog posts – more to come soon!), I have come to the conclusion that this process will never have an end point. There is no such thing as a completely ‘diverse curriculum’ – life changes so rapidly and there is no way of predicting what will happen in the future (just look at what Covid has done to us!) Therefore, I really do believe that our curriculums should reflect life itself and should be regularly audited and checked. This task is too big to do in one fell swoop and it needs to be done as thoroughly and properly as possible, to ensure that all of our students benefit from the changes made.
This morning, my head of faculty sent round the beginnings of a curriculum audit, which I saw as a chance to get my head stuck into this work. I have been desperate to work on decentering whiteness in school, however during the first few weeks of term I simply had to focus on actually remembering what a teacher does and how to actually teach! She had already mapped out what we have in our curriculum already and had asked us to add in anything that was missing and suggest changes. Now I strongly believe that decentering whiteness/ decolonising the curriculum isn’t just about amplifying black voices, but it is about making sure that each student has a chance of seeing something about themselves reflected in the curriculum in an accurate way. (This links into the reasoning behind me choosing to use the protected characteristics as the basis for a KS3 non-fiction unit.)
However, this is such an incomprehensibly mammoth task and it is impossible to think about all the different strands in one go, so I have begun by focusing on the gender and ethnicity of the writers we study in English Literature units – and I’ll use our year 7 poetry unit as an example.
My head of department (the lovely @SusanSEnglish on twitter!) started with the following comments about this SOW:
Poetry Anthology – A selection of poems ranging from historic authors to current modern authors. Focus on themes: fathers and sons, protectiveness, lighthearted humour, messages about screen time, emotions relating to hope/grief/loneliness, love, juxtaposition between Western culture and own heritage, solitude, World War 2, Equality and diversity in the history of Britain, bullying. Poets covered: female, male, BAME.
The first thing I did was refer to the poetry anthology we use and quickly mocked up a few statistics:
Our anthology is currently
73.7% Male
21.1% Female
5.2% Non-binary (note: the poet publicly identified as female at the time the poem was published)
(And then using the ethnicity groups from the census)
84% White
0% Mixed/ Multiple Ethnic groups
5.3% Asian/ Asian British
10.5% Black/ African/ Caribbean/ Black British
0% Other ethnic groups
This really helped me to clearly see that our introduction to poetry unit is skewed towards white males. Thinking of next steps, I have suggested we reorder some of the poetry (when I taught it last year I definitely didn’t get through all the poems!) so that the more diverse voices are taught. Moreover, this year we could easily imbed into our work more de-centering. For example, explicitly teaching about Kae’s transition but also mentioning aspects of the poets like the fact that Benjamin Zephaniah is dyslexic, to make sure that we do not just assume they are cis-gendered or that they are completely able-bodied (if anyone can help me with my phrasing here that would be much appreciated – I am still learning!).
Long-term, it is clear that, for this unit in particular, we need to ensure we have more diverse female/ non-binary/ other gendered poets in order to level out the playing field to begin with.
So, after going through the statistics of all the other literature units, I started to think about the bigger picture. I believe it will be incredibly useful to look at our school’s context, thinking about what backgrounds our students have and how we can help them feel more represented in their curriculum. Now, the issue with this is that it is obviously a big task, but also the ethnicity groups we use in this country are very broad and don’t begin to touch on the surface of the differences between all the different ethnicities one can have. However, I feel that, by at least using the data as a starting point to consider different ways of diversifying our curriculum, this work could give us the potential to have our students really engaged with their work.
Along with the author, there are other things to consider too, such as how characters from different backgrounds are presented in stories (who is entered and is there any tokenism?) and are sources valid, in the sense that they are not just seen through a white lens.
I am a strong believer in my students and I do think it will be important to keep them a part of this narrative. I have often been guilty of underestimating how much my students enjoy/ care about what I am teaching them and I have had a few conversations recently with my lovely year 10s about representation on the GCSE curriculum (Believe it or not – they brought it up, not me!).Allowing our students to be part of the conversation will help us to ensure we are on the right path – particularly in our school where our English department consists of white women. My faculty is fantastic and we all have our students’ best interests at heart – but if we don’t know what they want from their curriculums, how can we even begin to make a valid start on this?
I will never forget one of my year 8 students, last year, asking me whether or not a black person was talking about the transatlantic slave trade when we watched a video about it. She caught me off guard and I had to admit I didn’t know, but I could tell from the way she explained herself that she deeply cared about the representation of black people. That one question allowed me to reflect on my whole practice, bringing something to the forefront of my mind that would never occurred to me as a white woman. This is why I believe it is so important.
Like the title of this post says, this is just a first step into the massive undertaking of de-centering/ decolonisation and my suggestions are literally just what I have done to take the leap and to start putting what I have been reading into action.
The Road to Inclusion 