The geography GCSE curriculum in England: a white curriculum of deceit

ABSTRACT

The Black Lives Matter movement has increased attention paid to whiteness and education. This paper contributes to this attention by investigating epistemologies of Geography and their enactment in two ‘multicultural’ schools. Through textual analysis, lesson observations and interviews with GCSE Geography students and teachers, I inquire into the discourses of whiteness in the Geography GCSE topic of ‘Global Development’. Analysis showed three main technologies at work: ‘Dividing the World’, ‘”Race”, Whiteness and Colour-blindness’ and ‘Performativity’. The geography curriculum promoted an ‘us’ and ‘them’/’white’ and ‘Black’ narrative, with which students and teachers complied to achieve target grades. Students’ in-school and out-of-school narratives conflicted. Teachers avoided or deflected the latter by prioritising their ‘professional responsibilities’ to teach white knowledge. The findings deepen understanding of the constituent elements of whiteness in education more generally and in Geography specifically. I conclude by offering hope for the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• ‘race’
• geography curriculum
• school
• global development
• performativity

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the students, teachers, parents and governors who participated and to the British Academy/Journal of Moral Education Trust for funding this project. Thank you to Nadena Doharty, David Hyatt, Jackie Marsh, China Mills and Margaret Roberts for comments on earlier drafts and to anonymous journal reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. ‘Awarding’ gap replaces ‘attainment’ gap to explain how the ‘gap’ is not attributable to differential intellectual capacities of Black and white students, but to institutional practices and structural racism in society.

2. ‘Black’ and ‘white’ people are used to indicate people racialised as black or white.

3. GCSE is a two-year prescribed curriculum for 14–16 year-olds in England which ends with an externally assessed examination.

4. The term ‘awarding’ gap replaces ‘attainment’ gap to draw attention to the gap not being attributable to differential intellectual capacities of Black and white students, but to institutional practices and wider structural racism in society.

5. Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) regulates qualifications, examinations and assessments in England.

6. At the start, I worked with a research assistant, but unfortunately, they were unable to continue to work on the project.

7. Student (S) P.

8. Metaphors of colours are multimodal techniques which graphically reinforce dominant representations, in this case ‘danger’.

9. Reporting such extreme views may be argued to involve ‘development pornography’ that perpetuates and reinforces unjust, negative, stereotypes. After careful consideration, however, I decided to include this comment to accurately reflect the students’ words.

10. The #VoicesProject: working with marginalised voices in schools decolonising geography group and oral history project designed to develop narrative plurality and equitable classrooms https://www.thevoicesproject.co.uk/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Journal of Moral Education Trust/BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant [SRG18R1/180078].