Researching frontiers between multicultural, anti-racist, global citizenship, and development education in an English school for 8-12 year olds using participant observation
Dr John Cameron
School of Development Studies
University of East Anglia
Abstract
This paper describes an experiment in an almost entirely “white” English middle school in a provincial city to explore the frontiers where multi-cultural, anti-racist, global citizenship and development education meet. The experiment lasted for about eight months and involved the whole school in a series of activities. The people conducting the experiment were drawn from the local university and the local Development Education Centre. As a result of the experiment, the conclusion was drawn that working with multi-cultural and global citizenship using relatively abstract, universal concepts may be possible with 8 to 12 year old groups of children, while anti-racism and development education might be best handled from more local, immediate, experiential starting points.
1. Background
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lively philosophical debate was conducted over the relationship between anti-racist and multicultural education. This debate can be understood to have been centred on the logical problem of presenting anti-racism as a universal, moral obligation for everyone, while a multi-cultural approach necessitates an element of moral relativism. This debate continues without clear resolution today, further complicated by the issue of whether being "white" is itself a complex ethnicity needing explicit recognition as a culture for effective anti-racist education (Gillborn, 1996).
Less discussed has been a parallel case that global citizenship as a concept stresses universal political equality, while development education as a concept stresses structural economic inequality with an implicit donative dimension. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was much effort in development education in the UK, partially because central government funding was available. Though this central government support effectively ceased in 1980 there was a time-lag before publications appeared (see, for example, Richardson and Poxon (1979), Oxfam (1980), World Studies Journal (1982), Hicks and Fisher (1984), Birmingham University and Development Education Centre (1984)).
Anti-racism and multi-culturalism, global citizenship and development education concerns in schools since then have developed unevenly in response to local and global events in the wider world. For instance, when national and local racist propaganda and actions by right-wing organisations to establish street and electoral credibility find resonances in a school. more benignly, media images in the middle 1980s were dominated by the appearance of a popular (populist?) anti-famine movement which had very mixed consequences for multi-cultural, anti-racist and development education (Cameron and Grant, 1988). In the 1990s, global environmental issues attracted the concern of many young people as global citizenship issues. The National Curriculum developments over this period have been silent on these issues, pushing such concerns to the margins of schools' mainstream teaching.
Putting the issues in a formal curriculum context, there are differing disciplinary emphases involved. The demands of multicultural education in schools can be understood as falling primarily upon the arts and humanities, while anti-racist education looks to politics and an element of biology; global citizenship education requires a basis in environmental science and peace studies, while development education puts a stress on economics with an element of geography.
But the shared concern of all these dimensions with facing up to values appropriate to living responsibly in the existing world order would appear to offer the challenge to combine all four issues as differing dimensions of a single approach, despite the fact there are clear conceptual and practical problems with handling the four dimensions in one consistent framework.
The focus of the research presented here is to present participant observation research of an attempt to enhance education in all four dimensions simultaneously in a school for eight to twelve year olds in the context of the England and Wales National Curriculum.
The fieldwork reported here used a mildly interventionist approach to examine how to resource, and how to understand the interactions between, the four dimensions in a school with about two hundred students. The research took place over five months working primarily with and through the school staff following their normal planning process and teaching patterns. The intervention took the form of introducing resource people from the local area and some non-human resources into the school. These resources were appropriate to the curriculum as laid down nationally and the associated implementation plan of the school staff - external resources involved about two hundred hours of people's time with a total financial budget of one thousand pounds. The inputs were delivered through a highly committed school staff, who were operating under the acute resource and inspection constraints of a state school in Britain in the 1990s.
Three interrelated techniques were used. Firstly, an attempt to assist the teachers in planning their teaching for a term. Secondly, a whole-school awareness day bringing a variety of resources into the school which were relevant to that term's work. Thirdly, using a child voice centred "magic microphone" approach with a semi-structured set of questions.
The results of the research are described and critically reviewed as a method of bringing limited resources relevant to multicultural, anti-racist, global citizenship and development education into a school for 8 to 12 year olds following a demanding national curriculum. The resources used were drawn primarily from the school's locality and cost-effectiveness was an explicit goal of the research.
2. The School
Wensum Middle School has two hundred and fifty pupils and is in Norwich, a provincial city with a population of about 120,000 people in eastern England. The pupils' ages run from eight to twelve years mainly drawn from the school's neighbourhood. The built environment consists predominantly of two to three bedroom terraced houses built about one hundred years ago. Most households would have lower to medium levels of income by UK standards. Both the city and the neighbourhood of the school can be seen as strongly mono-ethnically "white English" - the school itself had only three or four pupils who would be seen as ethnically distinctive, judging by physical characteristics.
While the term "community" tends to be over-used in highly "household-centred" British society, the school has the locational and physical characteristics of a community school. It stands in the middle of its catchment area built on a similar scale to the surrounding buildings. Parents have good reason to generally look upon the school as highly satisfactory, appropriate for their children and offering a good education. The very positive official School Inspection (OFSTED) report in 1996 confirmed this positive impression (and all the other positive observations made about the school in this paper) in the following terms:
Wensum Middle School is a caring school providing good support for its pupils...The school is well respected by parents and by the community it serves.
(Bancroft, 1996, 3)
The school buildings are about one hundred years' old, but in adequate repair with students' work widely displayed. The buildings are owned by the local education authority and the staff are paid by the authority. But a substantial amount of autonomy has been granted to schools over the past few years under arrangements known as LMS) - but Wensum Middle School has not joined the GMS system where the school is directly funded from, and accountable to, central government.
The significance of the LMS arrangements for the research is that training and innovation money has been largely devolved to the school level. But under pressure of cuts in local authority spending and rises in basic costs, these funds are limited to a few hundred pounds a year, unless parents are able to contribute. In such circumstances, experiments such as that conducted here only requiring about one thousand pounds (that is about four pounds per pupil) strain the funding capacity of a school in a relatively low income catchment area.
The staff of the school were impressive in their level of commitment and motivation with no obvious staff room tensions. The head teacher had been at the school for three years and appeared to be respected and liked. As in many schools of this type, the staff were mainly women with the head teacher and one other teacher being men. The staff all look ethnically "white British" but most showed elements of non-conformity in dress and style, thus distancing themselves from a staid middle class, "white British" image.
Class sizes were between twenty five and thirty pupils a class, that is two for most year groups, each with its own room. Class rooms were non-regimented in layout of furniture. The teachers tended to work in year group teams of two. The internal walls of the school were decorated with art work by the pupils, photographs of school activities, and material relevant to the current class work. The environment of the school was clean and orderly without feeling oppressive - a place where one might expect children to feel physically secure. There was a parallel impression that this was also the psychological impact of the school on most of the pupils.
In many ways the environment of the school was admirably, happily unproblematic with a strong humanist moral agenda - a credit to the school and the parents. The school was also active in creating extra-curricular learning experiences. The school was described in the following terms by a person teaching temporarily at the school in part of the research period:
"so much is happening at .... It is the busiest school I have ever been in. So much goes on. Other pupils might not have responded so well, but because .... pupils are so used to change they coped"
But multi-cultural, anti-racism, development education, and, global citizenship were not issues which appeared in the day-to-day life of the children or staff - though a wide-ranging questionnaire survey of pupils just before the research period had indicated that the "white" children felt racism was not an issue, while the few "non-white" children felt it was. In this sense, the research concerns were external - the origins of the work came from a meeting on global development addressed by the researcher at which the Chair of School Governors happened to be present.
Thus the research risked bringing up issues that were not relevant to the majority of children's lived lives involving levels of abstraction that were not appropriate to the levels of child development in an 8-12 age group school. To minimise this risk, the research was undertaken in a non-directive, flexible style in full consultation with the school staff.
3. The Curriculum
In contrast to the mode of funding state schools which has become more decentralised, the curriculum in England and Wales has been undergoing a dramatic process of greater standardisation and centralisation in the 1990s. The subjects to be covered in the year 1994/95 under The National Curriculum Orders followed disciplinary lines classified as follows:
"English Geography Art
Mathematics Design & Technology Music
Science Information Technology Physical Education
History
Modern Foreign Languages"
(SCAA, 1994)
The topics in these subjects are laid out in Key Stages, broadly corresponding to years of study, and each Key Stage has specified Attainment Targets in various general skills. The specification of a new curriculum in disciplinary terms for so many subjects with demanding targets left relatively little room for manoeuvre in terms of time-tabling and teachers' creative energy.
The debate in the UK over the implicit implications of the National Curriculum for the fundamental philosophy of education is well captured by Carr (1994) and Alexander (1994). Certainly it would seem that the pressure of the National Curriculum is eroding the potential for sensitive value-oriented, child-centred experiments in schools.
The pressure of the Curriculum tended to force the research issues of multi-culturalism, anti-racism, development studies and global citizenship to be couched in terms of particular subjects so as to make them manageable for the hard pressed teachers. The rigidity of the Curriculum meant the four research issues could not be taught in their own rights.
The Curriculum made teaching quantitatively almost unmanageable in terms of the time, and qualitatively relatively inflexible in terms of encouraging a sense of self-reliance and responsible citizenship in the pupils - more so as children became older. One goal of central government education policy was to discourage a child-centred teaching style, and the National Curriculum as practised in 1995 for 8 to 12 year old children contributed to this policy aim. However, the staff were still sufficiently child-centred and enthusiastic to allow the research to experiment in crossing disciplinary boundaries - though this could not be to the extent originally intended.
The problems previously encountered in subject discipline-centred schools for older pupils were now found in a school for 8 to 12 year olds. The issues of development education and multicultural education tended to be ghettoed into geography and history. Global citizenship found a limited place in science of the environment. Anti-racism was a subject for school assemblies.
It proved simplest to start from a development education dimension, the school staff were happy to offer topics for each year. Efforts concentrated on working on Ancient and Modern Egypt with year 4, India with year 5, the Aztecs and Mexico with year 6, and Energy and an African village with year 7.
Overall, there was a qualitative tendency for the research to be pushed by the curriculum and staff pre-conceptions into the most obvious topic areas - a ghettoisation familiar to anyone involved in development education. But also crucial was that the quantitative time and energy demands on staff trying to meet the changing curriculum targets left them little time and energy to reflect and innovate, especially as the school year neared its end. The strain of coping with the curriculum and normal pressures of staff absence was palpable, even for such a well motivated school.
In addition, there were understandable confusions among the school staff and the volunteers over the precise goals of the research as a multi-dimensional exercise. The initial simple aim of a one-off development education event was overtaken by more complex goals due to the enthusiasm of the researcher, the school and the local development education centre. This widening meant that everyone was working in uncharted territory - though only the two key facilitators were fully aware of this!