Teaching About Race Relations (RLE Edu J)

Problems and Effects

Lawrence Stenhouse, Gajendra Verma, Robert Wild, Jon Nixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136510106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is the report of two linked research projects: the SSRC Project on Problems and Effects of Teaching about Race Relations, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Project on Teaching About Race Relations through Drama. Its aim is to help teachers who will face race as a theme, whether it arises in the normal course of their subject teaching or is introduced as a separate topic.

The project worked with three groups of teachers, each of which adopted a different approach, and the results of the testing programme are given alongside a series of case studies of classroom teaching. The book includes a summary of the findings of the research, express as hypotheses and an account of the teacher-dissemination of the project's work; it concludes with reflections by the director of the project and a participant teacher.

1   INTRODUCTION

Lawrence Stenhouse

This is a report of the work of two linked research projects mounted at the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) of the University of East Anglia during the period October 1972 to September 1975. Their intention was to explore some of the problems and effects of teaching about race relations. One project was supported by a grant from the Social Science Research Council and the other, by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The programme was directed by Lawrence Stenhouse and involved a team of three researchers in the study of forty schools throughout the country. It combined a measurement programme on a pre-test post-test basis, designed and executed by Gajendra Verma, with a programme of case study, executed primarily by Robert D. Wild. The experimental teaching took place in the spring term of 1974.

Publication of the report has been delayed by several factors, including problems encountered by project staff and, more recently, problems facing publishing houses.

As will later become clear, the project aimed to study the problems and effects of teaching about race relations by working with three groups of teachers, each of which adopted a different approach. One group comprised teachers who used drama as a means of dealing with race as a classroom topic. The fieldworker responsible for studying these cases was unable, in the event, to deliver a report.

A further setback to the project schedule was the sudden illness of the project director at the climax of the dissemination phase in January 1976: he was prevented from returning to work until September of that year.

Despite the gap in the data and the problems of illness, the report was substantially complete by 1977. Jon Nixon, who teaches drama in a London comprehensive school and is a part-time doctoral student at the Centre for Applied Research in Education, contributed two drama case studies using materials held by the project supplemented by interviews with the teachers concerned. He also added three further studies based upon his own work and upon his own study of another teacher. By the same date a collection of teaching materials was also complete, based on those used by the teachers of the project but re-edited by a sub-committee of teachers working with consultants.

The original intention was to publish report and materials together, but it was not easy to find a publisher. When we did, he asked that the materials be re-edited from loose-leaf form to book form and be up-dated. This considerable task was accomplished and three books were prepared, edited respectively by Dave Dunn, Dave Sheard and John Waddleton with assistance from other members of the teacher team. The publisher began lay-out work on these books, but, in the face of revised estimates and declining textbook sales, finally found it necessary to withdraw from the contract.

The project report is now published by a publisher who does not have a schools list and to whom, therefore, the teaching materials have not been offered.

We have already been made aware, through our contacts with researchers and teachers, that the aims and conception of this project run counter to what the majority expect of it. Its purpose is expressed in its title. It seeks to throw light on the problems and effects of teaching about race relations to adolescents in order to strengthen the basis of teacher judgment. It does not hope to solve those problems and recommend a particular curriculum or method of teaching, since any school’s response will be influenced by its situation, and by the strengths and weaknesses of its staff. It would seem absurd to expect that the pattern of teaching in a school in Brixton or Moseley should be similar to that in a school in Lincolnshire or Cumbria. The most important decisions will be made by schools themselves: the function of the project is to inform those decisions.

Since there is a good deal of confusion about the issues at stake in teaching about race relations, it seems best to set these down as we see them.

Ours is, and will remain, a multi-racial society, and of course a multi-cultural one. Pluralism adds immensely to the social resources of any community; but it is also a source of conflict, and ethnic and cultural boundaries often coincide with boundaries of power and class and access to the good things society has to offer.

Not so far behind us is a society that was a confederation of much more culturally homogeneous local communities (still recollected in dialects), where the stranger in the inn was ‘outlandish’, at best the object of social caution, at worst of persecution. Still fresh in history is a colonial past with all its pressures towards a conception of hierarchical relationships among races and cultures. Its interethnic assumptions are embodied in English literature, from Macaulay’s ‘Essay on Clive’ to Biggies.

Schools have traditionally been concerned with transmitting moral standards as well as knowledge, and both moral standards and knowledge seem problematic in the area of race.

The problems that we find ourselves facing as teachers are potentially quite frightening and are not to be solved by mere goodwill. Personal and professional understanding and art in teaching are necessary, as is a modesty of aspiration as an armour against disappointment. Progress in educational practice is measured in decades – even generations – rather than in weeks or terms. Education will not solve the problems of community relations: adult society cannot delegate the reconstruction of culture to schools.

There is, of course, a case for attempting in schools to increase pupils’ respect for and interest in people who are culturally or ethnically different from themselves. This is true whatever the identity of the pupils may be, though the need in Britain is probably greatest for the white majority. One can see that in primary schools much can be done through careful choice of materials for reading and of themes in art and the social subjects. And throughout the school system, this is to an extent still true. When a school is itself multi-cultural or multi-racial the quality of its life as a community is of first importance in terms of influence on race relations.

This theme is not, however, the one pursued in this research, which by its brief is restricted to the problems and effects of teaching about race relations to adolescents. Such teaching will normally take place within a subject department or an integrated faculty, and will be an aspect of its general teaching. In the last resort we do teach about our multi-cultural society and race relations within it not because of a sense of social mission (though some may), but rather in the light of an educational aim. We encounter race as teachers of social studies or humanities, of sociology or history or art or music or literature or drama. To avoid the topic of race in such areas is to falsify the relationship of our subject to real life outside the school. And in one way or another, race and inter-racial attitudes arise in all these subjects, and enter into many O-level and CSE syllabuses.

The aim of this research is to help teachers who will teach about race relations in the fourth and subsequent years of the secondary school by documenting the problems and effects of such teaching. Its assumption is that the teacher concerned would wish, so far as possible, to contribute to inter-racial respect and to combat racism. But how much can be achieved in changing attitudes and values is, it must be conceded, questionable.

We imagine, therefore, that the majority of teachers will wish to teach about race in their subject areas because it is there -like war or social class or the family. Although they will hope to influence attitudes for the better, and will try to do so, in the last analysis they will teach race in their subject so long as they are not shown to be doing harm.

In our project teachers have gone a little further than this. They have been prepared, in the hope of obtaining positive results, to emphasize the theme of race in their teaching of humanities, social studies or drama for a specified school term. They have done so to make it possible to study the problems and effects of teaching about race relations. The aim of this study has been to help all teachers who face race as a theme, whether it arises in the normal course of their subject teaching or is introduced as a separate topic.

Perhaps a good starting point is to clarify criteria of decisionmaking. As a teacher, would you teach subjects or topics (the Black Hole of Calcutta or ‘The Merchant of Venice’, for instance):

(a) even if this led to a deterioration in inter-racial respect?

(b) only if this did not lead to deterioration in inter-racial respect?

(c) only if this led to improvement in inter-racial respect?

We assume that some of our readers will take position (b), though some will take (c), and some who take (a) would teach reluctantly in the face of evidence that the results of part of their teaching were unhelpful to racial harmony.

A further point. This project is about teaching not in multi-racial schools, but in all schools. And the issues dealt with are socially important for all schools. The condition of race relations in Birmingham, Bradford or Brixton could be in the hands of voters in Brampton, Bournemouth and Boston.

The report we offer falls into two sections: the measurement results, and the case studies of classroom teaching. Our aim is to write for teachers and for those interested in education rather than for researchers and those interested in research, though we hope we have given the latter sufficient information to support critical responses.

2 THE TEACHING STRATEGIES WITHIN THIS PROJECT

Lawrence Stenhouse

One group of teachers in our project, those employing teaching Strategy A, as we called it, worked within the tradition of the Humanities Curriculum Project (HCP). There is a story behind this and it would be misleading not to tell it.

The Humanities Project – of which I was director – was, like most patterns of action research in education, complex and multi-faceted. Its occasion was the raising of the school-leaving age, and its justification in political terms (for policy and pedagogy must both be satisfied in education) was seen in the possibility of its offering an ethical basis for the accountability of teachers to pupils, parents and society for their handling of contentious controversial issues in the classroom. Its definition of content was ‘controversial human issues of universal concern’, and on the difficulties of handling such content was built its pedagogy: a discussion of evidence in which the teacher acted as a chairman aspiring to procedural neutrality.

This is not the place for an extended discussion of the project, but it is probably worth making two asides which relate the work of that project to the work of this one.

First, the context of the Humanities Project was the raising of the school-leaving age (ROSLA). In that context, it might be seen as a bid for an area of mixed ability working across the whole school in the fourth and fifth years. There are schools that have used the project materials and teaching style in this setting; when discussion groups contain the full range of ability, the challenge of difficult reading materials can be met, and met to the advantage of pupils at all ability levels. Schools that have responded to ROSLA by streaming or banding in humanities seem to have created problems for themselves; and they are the majority.

Second, the procedural neutrality of the teacher as chairman rests on the premise that he is not personally neutral. He adopts a procedural neutrality to avoid asserting his views with the authority of his position behind him. He is likely to adopt the stance of neutral chairman because he believes that it furthers discussion as a search for truth and avoids the shaping of view by mere conformity or rebellion. Simply, he will be seen by the pupils as listening more than teachers generally do and not taking sides in pupil discussion. It is appropriate to claim, not that the HCP style of teaching is the right or the only way to teach, but that it is an intelligent, professional response to the problem of pupil discussion which is designed to promote autonomy and responsibility, and to the problem of the school’s responsibility to parents in the circumstances of a pluralist society.

For an account of the Humanities Curriculum Project the reader must go elsewhere (Humanities Project, 1970). Here there is space only to clear up two areas of potential misunderstanding.

Within the Humanities Project there was a good deal of discussion as to whether or not Race Relations should be tackled. True, it was a human issue of universal concern: but was it in a political sense controversial? Did the existence of race relations legislation justify politically the schools’ taking a line on race relations irrespective of the feeling of parents? The project staff were divided as to whether the project’s logic held in this topic area.

However, the staffs of the Schools Council and Nuffield Foundation urged the project to include race relations among its themes. They had apparently been under some pressure to see that an appropriate Schools Council project did explore problems and possibilities of teaching in this topic area, and they believed that the non-authoritarian stance of the Humanities Project was likely to be effective to some degree in improving inter-racial respect.

Presumably, the argument would be that part of the problem in race relations is prejudice, in a literal sense: a disposition to make ill-founded judgments or experience uncritical reactions before examining the evidence. If so, the examination of evidence under neutral chairmanship might be conducive to the undermining of prejudice and to reconsideration.

Although there is a reasonable expectation that reflective discussion of evidence might be expected to undermine inter-racial prejudice, it is important to notice that this changes the logical basis of the Humanities Project. The initial justification for the HCP strategy was based on the school’s accountability to parents and pupils, and was thus essentially political. The educational advantages of the stragegy could thus be explored in the experiment rather than assumed to justify the experiment. Essentially, the educational (as opposed to the political) justification of HCP came from the results of the experimental work.

In the event, the Humanities Curriculum Project did experiment in teaching about race relations – but cautiously. This was unique among its themes in being evaluated separately, and the experiment was mounted in three schools inexperienced in HCP as well as in three of the experienced experimental schools. Some of the results of the evaluation have been published (Bagley and Verma, 1972; Parkinson and MacDonald, 1972; Verma and Bagley, 1973; Verma and MacDonald, 1971); others are available for consultation at the Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

The findings were summed up by Verma and MacDonald (1971) in the following passages:

We have thought it important to stress the limitations of the programme, to ensure that the data obtained are treated with caution, but it may still be useful to summarize the trend of the results. Given the prudential nature of the concern which motivated the setting up of this pilot study, the major finding is that no marked deterioration in the attitudinal or personality characteristics of the pupils was manifested in their test responses after exposure to the teaching programme. The effects of the experiment, although not generally significant, tended to suggest a shift in the direction of inter-ethnic tolerance.

The combined picture of the results seems to indicate that there was no general tendency towards intolerance after a seven- to eight-week teaching programme. There is no evidence to suggest that the students generally became less sensitive to or tolerant of members of other racial groups. These results cannot be considered as constituting proof. Analysis of the pilot study along other lines is incomplete, but a decision has already been made to proceed with the editing of a full collection of materials on race, on the grounds that none of the problems encountered in the course of the study would justify the abandonment of further research. No teacher involved in the programme abandoned the course, or found it necessary to reject any of the premises described earlier. In February 1971, each of the schools which participated sent team members to an evaluation conference at which they expressed willingness to undertake the teach...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The teaching strategies within this project
• 3. The design and logic of the research
• 4. Sampling
• 5. Measurement
• 6. Results throwing light on the background to the teaching
• 7. The general effects of teaching on inter-racial attitudes
• 8. Education and indoctrination
• 9. The school: Unit of decision-making
• 10. The case studies of schools in Strategies A and B
• 11. Case study 1: Strategy A
• 12. Case study 2: Strategy A
• 13. Case study 3: Strategy B
• 14. Case study 4: Strategy B
• 15. Introduction to the Strategy C case studies
• 16. Case study 5: Strategy C
• 17. Case study 6: Strategy C
• 18. Case study 7: Strategy C
• 19. Case study 8: Strategy C
• 20. Case study 9: Strategy C
• 21. Case study 10: Strategy A. An experimental school revisited
• 22. Pupil reaction
• 23. A researcher’s speculations
• 24. A teacher’s reflections
• 25. Aftermath
• Appendix
• Bibliography