Working towards anti-racist school geography in Britain
Steve Puttick and Amber Murrey
Geography’s problem with race has deep roots: the subject emerged in part to as a tool of empire. Many have critiqued the discipline’s enduring whiteness. England’s problems with race are intertwined with these historical legacies as well as their persistence in the present, albeit frequently cloaked in the cultural context of ‘post-racial’ ideologies which cast racism as a thing of the past.
Yet, learning about geography in England should necessarily involve learning about the uncomfortable geographies of British colonialism and inequality. We can pull from intellectual resources of the subject to address ongoing issues of environmental racism, urban inequalities, international development, the uneven costs and rewards of resource extraction and more. As educators, we must ensure our curriculum supports students and young people to develop the knowledge, critical thinking and imagination to foster anti-racist and environmentally just futures.
Through the collaboration of an academic geographer (Murrey) and a former geography teacher and now teacher educator (Puttick), we look at the ways in which important strands of thought within geographical scholarship — including anti-racist, decolonial and Black geographies — stand to make precisely this sort of essential contribution to reorienting British geography school curriculum.
Through a comprehensive analysis of current school geography curriculum documents, we identified an acute gap on issues of race, racialisation and racism. The word ‘race’ does not appear, even once, in the Department for Education’s (DfE) Key Stage Three Geography Programme of Study. The term does not feature in the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) Subject Content. Nor does it appear in any of the related geography examination specifications for pupils of that age. The A level subject content, which is used to determine a student’s qualification for university entrance, is similarly lacking curricula content that addresses race. The omission is decisive, as we argue in our recent article, ‘Confronting the Deafening Silence on race in Geography Education in England: Learning from Anti-Racist, Decolonial and Black Geographies’ in the pages of Geography.
What should be taught in schools?
Influential answers to questions of what should be taught in schools have come through E. D. Hirsch’s ‘cultural literacy’ and Michael Young’s ‘Powerful knowledge’ in the British context. Both prize ideas about ‘knowledge’. While they are broad and contested concepts, cultural literacy might be summarised as giving students the vocabulary and knowledge necessary for them to read and understand newspapers. Powerful knowledge foregrounds academic disciplines, making access to disciplinary knowledge a key answer to questions about curriculum. We have opted to work within cultural literacy and powerful knowledge because they are established and recognised pedagogical tools widely used across Britain.
In England, the Minister of State for Schools, Nick Gibb, for example, goes so far as to state that no single writer influenced his thinking on education more than E.D. Hirsch. No single minister has served longer as Minister of State for Schools in recent times, and the adoption of ‘knowledge rich’ rhetoric as a marker of quality curricula has become widely embedded across policy and schools.
We argue that these pedagogical frameworks already set the stage for the centring of significant and innovative approaches within contemporary geographical thought, including the following:
· decolonial geographies, or the intellectual project seeking to understand the multiple (‘pluriversal’) human relations, multispecies relations and ways of being in the world outside or beyond categories informed by Eurocentric and colonial logic
· black geographies, or the transdisciplinary body of thought drawing upon the distinctive knowledges emergent from the multiple subjective experiences and orientations of global blackness, examining the contributions of geographers (and non-geographers) racialised as black to enrich our understandings of landscape, nature, place, space, social change and more
· anti-racist geographies, or the praxis-driven scholarship attentive to and critical of the changing and particular functions of racialisation (including whiteness and white supremacy) in informing space, place, geographies, economies and societies (and structural inequalities within and between them)
What types of knowledge, and what spaces, institutions, and actors involved in knowledge production make the content list?
The same month that our article was published, September 2020, the US President Donald Trump called for a ban on the kinds of knowledges produced through Critical Race Theory (CRT). They are, in his words, ‘racist’. In our article, we address shifts over time in racist ideas and rhetoric, including the dismissals of conversations about racial inequality with the accusation that speaking about racism is tantamount to racism.
The preference for non-racial terms is a reflection of wider illusions within ‘post-racial’ societies, amongst them, white discomforts with addressing race. Avoiding race invisibilises whiteness. This invisibilisation of whiteness does not eliminate its power, rather the white perspective persists unchallenged in the form of ‘the universal’, the ‘neutral’ and the raceless, and preserves rather than challenges institutionalised racial inequalities and racism.
There have been interests in mimicking Trump’s proposed bans on anti-racist teaching in England, with MP Kemi Badenoch criticising CRT and stating that the government is against ‘the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted fact’. Recent DfE guidance advises that ‘schools should not under any circumstances use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters’. These political debates are hyperbolised, given that our findings revealed the fundamental lack of curriculum content on race, racism and racialisation in British geography.
What counts as ‘extreme’, and who has the authority to determine such definitions, are fundamental curriculum questions.
Powerful knowledge approaches argue that academic geography has to play a role in answering these questions, including by encouraging students themselves to consider what counts as ‘contested’ and ‘accepted’. One way this works in geography is by shifting the debate from a simplistic binary between ‘accepted facts’ and ‘contested political ideas’ to a deeper understanding of knowledge as wrapped up in cultural and political contexts. The exciting potential of geography is to help us understand, uncover, and ultimately to transform these contexts.
For example, the current GCSE subject content in England includes wide-ranging attention to the UK, such as through the sub-section Place: Processes and Relationships, detailing
the [UK’s] physical and human landscapes, environmental challenges, changing economy and society, the importance of cultural and political factors, and its relationships with the wider world.
This seems like a great start, hinting at a dynamic, rich set of relationships for GCSE geography students to explore — from unequally-distributed environmental challenges; to employment prospects, prejudices, and biases; to culture and politics in the UK. But in each case, the lack of a foundational framework of the multiple and systemic ways in which race and racism have shaped these processes, limits students’ considerations to shallow and partial understandings. Attempting to understand the UK’s relationships with the wider world without an understanding of Empire, race and the racialised nature of these relationships is to foster an unclear and whitewashed representation of these messy, complicated and uncomfortable geographies of 21st century life.
Failing to draw on academic geography’s analyses of race, racialisation and racism means that school geography will not give students access to the kinds of cultural literacy and knowledge powerful enough to deconstruct the deeply unequal and racialised experiences of life in the UK. It also potentially shapes which students are compelled and motivated by geographical knowledges and which students are not, therefore influencing which students opt to pursue geography as a subject in secondary schools and into higher education.
Our research highlights a disconnect between the National Curriculum. On one hand, the Curriculum embraces the rhetoric of cultural literacy and powerful knowledge, while at the same time it does not give students access to the important lessons that Black, anti-racist and decolonial geographies have to offer on space, place and power. From Windrush to the Grenfell disaster, and from the uneven experiences and effects of COVID-19, to housing, education, international development and the environment, intersectional analyses and attention to race are vital for our understandings. And from football to Whitehall, it is vital that young people are equipped to recognise, analyse and interpret structural inequalities and racist ideas in order to work towards more just futures.
Amber Murrey is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment, and Fellow and Tutor at Mansfield College.
Steve Puttick is Associate Professor of Teacher Education and a curriculum tutor for the Geography PGCE and MSc Learning and Teaching, and non-Tutorial Fellow at St Anne’s College.
What next?
Follow us here on Medium where we’ll be publishing more articles soon.
Want to read more? Try our articles on: Being a minority at Oxford, ‘Oxford is a complicated place; it is both very diverse in some ways, and not at all in others’, and How to shine in an Oxford interview.
Are you a member of the University who wants to write for us on Medium? Get in touch with us here with your ideas: digicomms@admin.ox.ac.uk.
