Notes on Race and Citizenship Education

Rethinking the Role of Race in Citizenship Education

Issue 53 of the Journal of the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT), Spring 2021, focuses on race, racism, and citizenship.
The journal aims to reflect the diversity of membership, offer CPD, and support the struggle against injustice and racism.
Schools are seen as microcosms of society, uniquely positioned to teach equality, democratic involvement, and anti-racism.
ACT contributes to equality and diversity education forums and is a member of the Fair Education Alliance.
The journal includes articles, practical teaching suggestions, and information on CPD events and conferences.
The Fair Education Alliance consists of over 230 organizations aiming to make education fairer by prioritizing essential skills and wellbeing alongside academic attainment.
ACT staff and teacher members are invited to get involved with the Fair Education Alliance's collective work via their weekly bulletin.

Peace Education and Citizenship

Issue 36 and 53 are conceived as a ‘War and Peace’ collection, exploring Peace Education and its connection to Citizenship.
The edition includes articles exploring peace education and its connection to citizenship.
ACT will be producing resources and providing support to members regarding the new curriculum.
The journal welcomes opinions on the new curriculum for the next edition.

Challenging and Rethinking the Role of Race in Citizenship Education (Spring 2021 Theme)

The journal explores the critical contribution of Citizenship in enabling schools to engage with race and racism and to promote race equality and social justice, and thanks Amit Puni for his work as guest editor.
Citizenship was envisaged as a key response to the Macpherson Report.
The edition will explore the critical contribution Citizenship plays in enabling schools to engage with race and racism.
ACT's submission to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities is featured, reflecting the role of Citizenship in race education.
An interview with Southall Black Sisters demonstrates the impact of community organizations on reforms and public policy, stemming from the anti-racist movement sparked by Blaire Peach's death.
An article explores Critical Race Theory and Citizenship, arguing that Citizenship is ideal for tackling race education.
Personal reflections from David Elliott on teaching in a racially diverse school and resources to illustrate his approach.
The idea of breaking away from traditional negative narratives around slavery.
Kirsty West challenges to make Black History Month more meaningful and Ellis Brooks supports with resources to develop an inclusive and progressive approach.
Lee Jerome discusses decolonisation.
Amanda Thompson and Alice Bradbury share an eye-opening piece on how racism pervades in Early Years settings.
Zoe Baker and Jackie Sams explore underlying tensions in the classroom and share tips for teaching, followed by Kwame Boateng on the importance of racial literacy.
Reviews of materials around the topic of race.
Thanked all the contributors and the ACT team for their efforts.
Hope this challenges readers to re-think how race operates and how ‘we’ can address the issues within our own practice to ensure Citizenship reflects the world we share with our students.

The Language of Race

The language of race evolves, and Citizenship teachers should introduce students to a nuanced vocabulary.
Examples include:
- Indirect racism: Focuses on unconscious racism and reproducing stereotypes (e.g., micro-aggressions).
- Institutional racism: Deeply engrained within structures, outcomes, or behaviors in organizations, leading to differences in educational outcomes, criminal justice statistics, and health inequalities. The Macpherson report stated that processes that led to differential outcomes for different ethnic groups may well be racist, regardless of intent. The recent Sewell Report shifted the meaning by arguing many racial disparities are not institutional racism if they can be explained by other factors.
- BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic): Problematic because it lumps all minority groups together. Alternatives include BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour).
- Racial literacy: The knowledge that enables people to recognize and respond to everyday racism.
- Critical Race Theory: Seeks to explain oppression and injustice in order to pursue social justice.
- Anti-racism: Actively works against existing racism in society, contrasted with the color-blind approach.

ACT News and Updates

ACT builds strategic relationships with the Fair Education Alliance (FEA) and the Charter College of Teaching to improve education and support CPD events.
ACT marks 20 years in 2021-2, planning events, awards, and activities to celebrate high-quality citizenship teaching.
A new GCSE Teacher Support Network has been launched to support GCSE Citizenship Studies, with a Facebook page for sharing materials.
A new Early Career Teacher Support Network has been launched, offering knowledge enhancement sessions.
Members can watch sessions from the CPD conference with UK Parliament Education and Engagement on Select Committees.
Expert-led CPD Webinars with the Equality and Human Rights Commission and Bank of England will support the development of Citizenship subject knowledge.

Citizenship - The Anti-Racist Curriculum

Citizenship was introduced in 2002 partly in response to concerns after the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
The McPherson report recommended anti-racist policies and education to deal with racism awareness and valuing cultural diversity.
The 2008 national curriculum update increased teaching about identities, diversity, and community cohesion.
The 2014 curriculum review maintained an important focus on diversity and mutual respect.
Students value citizenship education for increasing understanding of the world and preparing them for real-life issues.
Research suggests citizenship education can reduce social disparities in political engagement.
ACT has strengthened resources and CPD for teachers in these areas, including a course on teaching race equality in Citizenship.
Stephen Lawrence Day (April 22nd) is a day for reflection on equality and tolerance and Wyvern Academy has taken on the challenges set by the Stephen Lawrence Day Trust.
Explicit teaching about Stephen's story has been implemented at Wyvern Academy.
The 'Cit Up Straight' podcast featured Stuart Lawrence, Stephen's brother, and inspired the Pupil Leadership Team to design resources for Black History Month.
Continuing the conversation about racism and inequality is essential in society.
Increasing understanding and compassion can lead to a desire for an equal world.
Equal opportunity for all citizens is a crucial message.
A lesson from Stephen Lawrence Day with lyrics written during event

Community Organisations as Educational Resources

Community organizations are valuable examples of citizenship in action, offering inspiration, relevance, expertise, and practical resources.
Southall Black Sisters (SBS) is a grassroots charity with national and international impact, offering services, training, policy campaigning, and research.
Hannana Siddiqui declined an MBE in protest, fueling her work for 35 years.
Southall Black Sisters (SBS) emerged from the anti-racist movement in 1979, after Blair Peach's death.
SBS initially focused on race and racism but developed the notion of black feminism, addressing oppression of women within and outside the community.
SBS campaigned against virginity testing at Heathrow Airport and established the Southall Black Women's Centre.
SBS protested stereotypical gender roles, injustice, and the lack of state support for domestic violence in Asian communities.
The case of Kiranjit Ahulwalia, who killed her husband after years of abuse, was a landmark case for SBS, leading to changes in the law on provocation and raising awareness about domestic violence.
SBS worked with Michael O'Brien (Home Office Minister) to reform laws on immigration and domestic violence, known as the Domestic Violence Rule.
In 2012, SBS obtained changes in immigration laws for women on spousal visas with no recourse to public funds, known as the Destitution Domestic Violence Concession.
Current campaigns include extending reforms to women on non-spousal visas and addressing funding shortages for services.

Shifting the Public Discourse Around Multiculturalism

The Home Office Working Group on Forced Marriage was established in the late 1990s.
This shifted the public discourse around multiculturalism, emphasizing state intervention in minority cultures to protect women's rights.
The government now focuses on multi-faithism, social cohesion, and integration, requiring assimilation into British society based on shared 'British values.'
Progressive and regressive values exist in all communities, and intersectionality is essential for addressing discrimination based on race, gender, class, and religion.

BLM Movement and the Way Forward

The BLM movement has heightened awareness of racism and the hostile environment around immigration and everyday racism migrant women face.
One of the debates is what is ‘political blackness’. How do we as re-unite as African, Asians and Caribbeans in this struggle against racism, because there has been some fragmentation.
Lessons must be learned from the past, such as the need for strong collective unity to overcome institutionalized racism.
SBS has begun to think about how some of their experience can be distilled into teaching resources.
The case studies of struggles, defeat, and successes provide valuable lessons in applied citizenship and also help young people place their current concerns into broader historical contexts.

Citizenship Education, Critical Race Theory and Schools

Goal of empowering young people, equipping them with means to study power dynamics of political and social forces that govern.
Citizenship education is and ought to be a vehicle of social justice education.
Race equality is a key pressing issue that we face, racism.
Schools should not be using or teaching resources from anti-capitalists groups such as BLM and XR.
Critical Race Theory (CRT): is an academic field of study and a conceptual lens used to make sense of the social world.
A key aspect of CRT is about anti-essentialism and a critique on the concept of modern western life, which seeks to break the lie that racism no longer exists.

Outlines five key concepts of relevance to educational research that comprise this larger umbrella term of CRT:

Racism is ordinary – racism is so heavily engrained.
The social construction thesis states that race is not fixed or inherent scientifically.
Differential racialization is the idea that society racializes different minority groups at different times.
Intersectionality refers to the categories of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and age in combination.
The methodology of CRT draws on both social statistics but also personal narratives or ‘Experiential Knowledge’ of lived experiences.

This framework provides a critical lens to make sense of the racialized outcomes produced by institutions.

The Role of Citizenship Education in Anti-Racism

Lord Blunkett: ‘much more needs to be done to promote social justice in our communities’.
Citizenship can be transformative, critical and edgy, question power dynamics, recognise who’s voices are heard, and who is over-shadowed.
CRT should be a means to critically analyze race relations and social justice issues.
Good citizenship can play a role in addressing issues of race.
Education cannot compensate for society but schools have a moral duty to try.

Curriculum

There is national curriculum pupil should be taught about diverse identities and the need for mutual respect. Discuss fundamental British values.

Embrace Pedagogy of Discomfort

Conceptualized having two dimensions (i) an invitation or inquiry, to explore our discomforts, and (ii) a call to action to discuss and engage with them.

Exploring Power Relations

Key role of Citizenship is to understand, and recognise power relations disrupting power relations. Racism, is a political power relation.

Active Citizenship

Students are afforded the opportunity to engage with an issue they are passionate about and raise awareness or affect change.

Teaching the Roots of Racism and Anti-Racism

2020 was marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and the rebellion against racism.
Covid-19 exposed wealth, health and race inequalities in British society while Black Lives Matter demonstrations highlighted impact of racism on every aspect of our lives.
Thousands of people together from the Shetland Islands to Portsmouth and forced a national debate about racism in the UK.
Citizenship education can bring the debate around racism and decolonising the curriculum into schools and classrooms.
Commitment from schools needed to increase teachers’ ‘racial literacy’ and understanding about how race and racism works in society.
Racism is still an issue at all levels of education and broader society (50 years since Bernard Coard & 22 years since Mcpherson report.)
Citizenship curriculum covers some aspects of discrimination in the UK but does not explicitly engage with the root causes of racism and its manifestation at different levels e.g. individual, institutional and structural.
Racism should be contextualised by exploring social, cultural and economic impacts of the British empire, colonialism and the Transatlantic slave trade and their social in relation to colonisers and colonised - This should be linked to present day structural, institutional and individual casual racism.

The Many Faces of Racism

Racism explained as a changing phenomenon as it does not move tidily and unchanged through time and history.
Each epoch has developed and identified its own ‘alien’ or ‘undesirable’ section of the community and racism frequently linked to skin colour.
Minorities have faced racism in different forms, moving from skin colour to creed, culture and religion.
Islam and Muslim racism normalised by Government Policies (Prevent) and the media while Pre/Post Brexit, a hostile environment emerged towards some European immigrants' Roma and Polish communities.
These changes should be explored by looking at structural, institutional and individual racist practices within the educational context.

Challenges

Curriculum design and education policies have been a battle ground for political ideologies since the 1980s.
Teachers’ autonomy to explore and teach their subjects has been eroded by successive governments via exam-based education policies and the academisation of schools.
Teaching of root causes of racism and anti-ram is not high on agenda for policy makers.
The Sewell Report (CED, 2021) claimed that there is no institutional racism in the UK and the Equality minister, Kemi Badenoch, claimed that the teaching of Critical Race Theory would violate the law (Murray, 2020).
Teachers do have imagination and can find ways to deliver what is missing from the curriculum to demonstrate what a just society might look like.
There are a few activity ideas to help initiate discussions about the roots of racism and the ways in which racism persists in British society.

Teaching Citizenship: My Cause and Our Choice in the Wake of the Pandemic

Whilst the contexts of the UK and US regarding race are different, they’re not too dissimilar. Women’s suffrage, the Human Rights Act 1998 and Equality Act of 2010 and its protected characteristics, even the proposed amendments to the Domestic Abuse bill and amidst the protests that forced the public to examine and protest the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill; are all causes that have been debated or linked to the progress of laws and freedoms related to how people and groups identify themselves.
Great because it’s an opportunity to genuinely lead progress against the generational and societal pandemic of racism; yet saddening because each wave happens after an act or situation of disproportionate, irrational, unfair and unjust treatment of black people that far too often ends in either death or a miscarriage of justice; sometimes both - anti-racism is oxymoronic.
Creating units would explore these issues in-depth, with the sole purpose of bringing people together to a place of mutual understanding and inclusion.
Teaching in a diverse and multicultural school that alumni does provide some extra motivation Senior Leadership Team helped shape and implement the units and share the practice with the rest of the staff body so that they might also improve representation across the school.
Make me alumni teacher offer a unique connection. Make those bespoke conversations are out the realities of growing up the area; you know key areas and local figures, you even have the same colloquialisms.
Authentic experience that has given me a degree of cultural intelligence and, better yet, friends for life and the ability to explore the variety afforded by the human experience.
A classroom allows for sure experience between the teacher and my students, space for us to explore and analyse the world from a plethora of views difficulties the outside world can be transformed into challenges.
The first is about why I teach and how I choose an achieve the dance the second is related to why racism like the other issues concerning protected characteristics needs to be discussed in schools.
As the Wiradjuri proverb states provides and prepares our students with the wisdom of knowing how to live well.
From non-racist to Anti-Racism task.
Here's the lesson activity form his scheme of work we use the table below as the main resource then we work through three staged stage of thinking.

Delivering a Meaningful Black History Month in Schools.

Black history month (BHM) and the black excellence and contributions within on month of the year.
There's lots of work need to be done until diverse experiences, contributions and stories of black people are properly reflected within subjects across the curriculum.
The Black History Month offer in many schools is a downloaded TES slideshow and a well meaning senior leader delivering one, or maybe two assemblies to students about the importance of Black History Month, possibly tied loosely to another value word of the week like ‘resilience’ or ‘courage’.
Every student in the UK need to learn about how civil rights in Britain were fought for by Black and Asian people.
Students needs to learn about migration to the UK before world war 2 and the stories of black people lived in Britain as far back as the Roman era
Black trauma can be very damaging for all; it can perpetuate narratives that are unhelpful for the celebration of Black history month but these should not be the focus.
I feel privileged to work in a borough that is rich in diversity Celebrates PM across borough.
Black History Month should be led by the experts. What better experts are there history team or art or science?
Finally, and most crucially, remember that this month is not just an opportunity remind students of all the struggles atrocities face black people. This month is a celebration contribution black people from across the diaspora to Britain.

What can be done to make BHM more meaningful in your setting?

Start planning before the day preferably in July by July this gives an added time to research and learn about the area of history.
Have a clear theme example black first: focus on black British trailblazers for first to achieve on something. Local Black Heroes: focus People black origin that have left important legacy a new area of your school - Black British academics: focus on famous black academics from different disciplinaries.

Why Teaching About Slavery Goes Deeper Than You Think

Modern Slavery Studying Modern Slavery can illuminate citizenship learning because without active citizens, it will never be challenged and this huge crime will never be exposed
Founded as the Anti-Slavery Society in 1839, ASI can trace their roots to the 18th century abolitionist movement but needs to be incomplete without ignoring the actions of slaves and former slaves resistance
Britain Compensated Its Slave Traders handsomely for the cost to industry.
Combine with current Black Lives matter movement with and not to ignore more recent issue and not exactly historic slavery .
BLM the clearly has their agenda like Black lives matter global network foundation and a couple action and innovation these are winning immediate improvements in our lives.
Despite patchy reporting by school records show 160100 recent incidents for the last five years.
Teachers should integrate current events and that can be said before that they are just for the current status of each is new.
Bring About That violence in and you' can use as a cultural violence you clean the bike that by police by direct but it's only when you challenge the cultural and structural violence.
. Also find people Action for justice Take action and that be is always about something they should do

Antiracist education

Visit antislavery International Website to learn more about modern slavery.
The migration museum has a bank resources is on immigration migration about migration for more about migrants diversity.
Lender minding Network had a great material for unpacked the supplies and all goods including the phone cycle game.
Journey of justice use amazing often under explore stories of action
This show can be teachers and their students that's stand up to bigotry and he and hate.
There are people think hard about How we frame the discussion race and racism a school in which can be challenged

Decolonising and Diversifying the Citizenship Curriculum and Student Voice

In 2020 young people took to streets during black lives matters Protest my action drawn to an open letter to the sir John Cole fox Academy from 224 student.
What student said what not providing many of us ignored so the racism injustice black indigenous people people of colour face.
Negative implications if ignoring student voice as you can see the number in a 2000. Why students academy practice a curricular uniformed policy will think they were racist knowledges and and the citizen. The knowledge we teach I think we do need to review three questions to know curriculum you should be included should your collect the citizen
Three questions: first, what people case studies what moments in for how we see that what we connect the curriculum student needs to be in it 34 where do my I come From what of beliefs in the democracy I'll see the to consider student

Skills and processes in the Citizen curriculum.

In regards to deculturing the curriculum, we Need to Ensure group of students working. Provide opportunity to learn about about 1 student we needs to have a system for open that students in good
Citizen teachers recognise should be that in current another opportunity is a bigger Role of the school in the the potential to struggle social to the agency to go through

Why Race Matters in the Early Years

nursery and reception classes may seem an unusual place to be dealing with the complexities of racial equality
Those clichés about early years belie our experiences of the complex and fascinating world of classrooms of children aged from three to five.
the unspoken presence of Early Years and racism (Black teachers or with practitioner or white with a few challenges are vital elements of the practices)

Racial Realities in Early Year

early years is often inclusivesector; policy overlooks inequalities that persist ,example the assessment introduced in 2015 do not allow children to assess with language at all like assessment -teachers have concerned about for children with low scores . Also there are issues and disparities with experience in early years, by ethnic groups, children from some minority backgrounds as well, they have many things not met with a good level if there is in development at least the age of at least to.
We have witnessed there is penalties in are applied this disproportionately to be black challenge.Black kids is and some early in class or in school and some Black girls are penaliities the point where you have the ability

Early Years

The early years sector sits within an education system which is largely white because of 93% of head teachers are White British in which 6% of schools that have teachers has a bad of of background is no more to take take challenge and can have something better
That the colorblind narrative do not and not get it done and the exception to for it it does little to give and to give give an edge.
We would argue there is a need unpick from how is it and be what can be shown? By now not by and what? Also can come through and not there.

The Discomfort

Many feel that many talk and and for with you in the what to do for a child there is something for it in the end.

Race, Citizenship Education, and Rurality

Race education must occur in a different manner.
One that is empowering, reaffirms a national identity and provides pupils with the understanding that to be British, to be a British citizen, is as much about difference as it is about similarity.
First: why is there a need to teach racial literacy.
Second: how can we embed racial literacy sustainably within citizenship education?
The Department for Education that it should prepare them you have a new and they don't have you and don't have you.
There are 2 of those in there what people and also has to go for those
Teaching The Race and human rights may seem relatively uncontroversial: the case students that we select Can Make It Better
Teaching It's all really to see how their is the for those We has to take with it take challenge and and you what what what? We have to give all to it give it what and can. There what We can get all to take and do well.The best is what he has to do and is there all
ACT Senior Representative Profile by Madeleine Spink I am excited to represent student teachers on ACT Council this year!
I feel like I have come full circle to training as a Citizenship teacher!"