EMC_Free: The English Curriculum: Race – Learning from the Past (Download)

Materials produced by the English Centre in the 1980s on anti-racist English teaching.

In the early 1980s the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) set up an initiative to examine the question of student achievement from the perspective of class, race and gender, with the aim of setting out firm proposals to improve the situation. English teachers across London were asked to contribute to discussions and think hard about their own practices in their departments and schools. The English and Media Centre (then the ILEA Teachers’ Centre for English Teachers) contributed significantly to this, producing resources for departmental discussion on all three aspects.

These resources have long been out of print. However, we have had them scanned in order to make them freely available again, as digital downloads, starting with The English Curriculum: Race. With a strong, renewed focus on issues of race in our classrooms (nowadays often described as decolonisation, diversification or reflecting students’ realities), it seems important to look back at the not so distant history of how these issues have been explored and dealt with in classrooms of the past. Though the language may have changed, (multiculturalism for instance having gone out of favour) and some of the ways of thinking have definitely moved forward too, there is still much in these 1980s discussions that remains highly relevant and valuable as a jumping-off point for current debates.

We think it will be invaluable for anyone researching race and education in the UK but also for English teachers who are thinking about their curriculum offer, their choice of texts, how to deal with racism in texts or in the classroom, and what attitude to take to students’ spoken language and use of dialects or additional languages. The questions for departmental discussion remain significant ones for all teachers in today’s world; the solutions of the past provide a context for new solutions.

It’s worth quoting just a tiny bit from the introductory Preface to give a flavour of the thinking behind the resources:

By the term anti-racist teaching we mean those strategies and actions which are explicitly designed to combat personal and institutional racism. Although it is somewhat cumbersome, we use anti-racist multicultural English to embrace both ends of the continuum: the ‘soft’ end, dealing with positive images, achievement and validation – and the ‘hard’ end which involves analysing oppression, inequality and conflict.

We hope you find these valuable and would welcome comment and discussion, as part of an on-going debate about this most important of issues.

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