‘We are the Borg….We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.’ (Star Trek: First Contact) Khor, 2009
The most basic recommendation that this research will put forward is that tutors and schools will need to continually engage in training and continuing professional development (CPD) on aspects of diversity and inclusion in order to try and ensure a levelling of the field for Black students; both in school as teacher trainees and whilst training to be teachers. However, this conclusion alone would be facile in its statement and mask the complexity of the task at hand. Lander (2014) stated the importance of ITE implementing training and holding seminars that would allow staff and students to challenge stereotypes and help uncover their unconscious biases. I recently facilitated such a session by a visiting lecturer that looked at the unconscious biases we all hold and how they might affect the teacher in the classroom. The stories that the students came out with, both Black and White, all female were shocking in the sense that they were subjected to racist and sexually derogatory language whilst still secondary school children. Their teachers had abused their positions of power:
‘I felt it was almost like a child and mother relationship that we had, it wasn’t I respect you as someone, as a student, someone that’s training to be a teacher, there was a power relationship…it was stressful…a power struggle or someone clearly got more power over you and they use it’ (Keisha)
123 In addition, being professionals teaching in 90s and 2000s, they were teachers that would have had ample access to CPD on race and gender awareness. Nevertheless, what stood out most powerfully from this session was the overwhelming need for a safe space to open up about experiences and help support the students’ mental health.
I felt the need to apologise to the visiting lecturer when, in response to his asking for questions, only one response came back inquiring about his reading list. However, once the group were within the safe space of their seminar room and the safety of a group they were comfortable with, their testimonies came flooding out. It would be a useful innovation for the University to implement the notion of a safe space, whether that be physical as in a room you would go to and speak to someone, not unlike the sanctuary of a confessional. Or, the safe space could be found within a person, such as a mentor. The latter choice would have to be given careful thought. What might be the criteria to determine whether someone could act as a safe space? Would ethnicity, gender or age have to be considered? And who would be charged with determining that? The complexity around this was illustrated by John when he asked me whether he could speak ‘in blunt terms’. He was asking whether it was safe to talk to me (Leonard and Porter, 2010), his Black tutor yet also a representative of an establishment steeped in Whiteness and White privilege.
To halt and then perhaps reverse the tide, there has to be a willingness on the part of the policy makers, who inform teacher training institutions and schools, in their creation of the rubric teachers have to adhere to. The Teacher Standards (2007)22 had particular provision for inclusion and diversity within the classroom. Q18 stated that, as part of their professional knowledge and understanding, teachers had to demonstrate knowledge of how children’s ‘progress and well-being are affected by a range of developmental, social, religious, ethnic, cultural and linguistic influences’ (Birmingham City University, 2007). This was further substantiated by Q19 that outlined the ‘promoting [of] equality and inclusion in their teaching’ and Q25a that stipulated that teachers had to:
‘Use a range of teaching strategies and resources including e-learning, taking practical account of diversity and promoting equality and inclusion.’ (Birmingham City University, 2007)
124 With the advent of the Coalition government (2010), new teacher standards were introduced (DfE, 2011) to replace the ones from 2007. Whereas it can be argued that there was some emphasis on equality and inclusion in the 2007 version, the stand-out aspect of the 2011 version is its focus on fundamental British values (Lander, 2016) and the implementation of the Prevent strategy23; a facet which has been argued as being divisive in conception and counter to the spirit of inclusion (Kahleeli, 2015; Sian 2015). Lander (2016) refers to the:
‘stratification of citizenship into those who really belong, namely the indigenous majority, those who can belong, namely those of minority ethnic heritage who have assimilated or integrated and those who really do not quite belong, or those we tolerate up to a point, namely the Muslim ‘other’. (Lander, 2016, p.275)
This can then engender the uncomfortable scenario where Black students (and lecturers) are placed in the situation of having to engage in a discourse where their right to be, let alone be here and in the role of educators, is put under question. Combine this with:
• The continuingly poor retention of Black teacher trainees (Basit et al. 2006; Evans and Leonard, 2014),
• Ofsted no longer focussing on race equality provision and so aiding in the presentation of a non-racialised system (Wilkins, 2014).
• Along with significant evidence that White students still perceive their Black colleagues as ‘Other’, (Picower, 2009; Lander, 2011b; Pearce, 2012; Wilkins, 2014). This leads one to question the training and educational environment that is being created and sustained.
This is further substantiated by the introduction of School Direct as the government’s preferred training route for teachers. This was a significant change to the Teacher Training landscape. First proposed in 2011, one of its main aims was ‘to give schools the ability to influence the way in which ITT is delivered’ (Teaching Agency, 2011, p.2). Ruth and Sewa were School Direct salaried students. One of the potential problems in the School Direct scenario is what to do if a student feels that they are being discriminated against within that setting? They are both student and employee of the school with a financial need and occupational obligation to their school/employer. This might then make it challenging for them to, in effect, question and oppose the school system; a system, embedded in Whiteness and White privilege, that is also supposed to police itself in terms of fair treatment.
125 The notion of the school self-policing is troubling to me in the same way the definition of institutional racism in the Macpherson Report (1999) was when it referred to the ‘unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people’ (op.cit). If an action is carried out unwittingly and in ignorance, it would be difficult for the person or institution, to make conscious changes to avoid an issue they are unable to ‘see’. So a willingness and ability to engage may be impaired.
As previously mentioned in chapters 1 and 3, the notion that schools should be seen as paragons of non-bias and impartiality is naïve and unrealistic. CRT recognises that racism is endemic to society and teachers are people who function and are part of society. They then create and execute the school ethos and, as since 2010 (Talwar, 2012), schools are no longer under any legal obligation to report incidents of racism to the Local Authorities, it is questionable whether incidents of racism will be recognised let alone dealt with when the incidents are seen, but not seen, due to being viewed through the lens of Whiteness and White privilege. So, it could be argued that the need for training, discussion and reflection by students, teachers and tutors is as important as it ever was.
When training is carried out at my institution, both with staff and students, there is an assumption by so-called liberal-minded academics, myself amongst them, that the lens that all students will finally view the matter through, is the one that we/I am looking through, the one that we/I am projecting, one that is informed by a CRT-influenced epistemological stance. However, I have no influence over how sustainable the concepts I put in place are or if they have even been interpreted or accepted in the way that I would have wished them to be. The inclusion of the quotation from ‘Star Trek’ highlights the paradox I believe to be inherent within the discourse of what needs to take place in ITE in terms of CPD, the training of students and staff so as to level the playing field for Black students. As with the Borg, I think it can be argued that once you become part of a system, you take on board the mores and processes of that system i.e. you become assimilated. Or, you leave before you are painfully (r)ejected because you do not fit in with the prevailing ethos of homogeneity, whether that be in terms of culture, ethnicity or gender.
To take a rather pessimistic view would be to subscribe to Hobbes’s (2008) view of human nature as quite venal, that humans are not naturally egalitarian and are always in pursuit of
126 power above another human or group of humans. Brooks (2007) encapsulates this by suggesting that ‘We’re tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups’ (Brooks, 2007). In the testimonies gathered from the students, it is evident that, for the most part, they formed the ‘out-groups’.
Yet is resistance of this status quo a futile and Sisyphean task? Having to re-tread the same experiential ground would seem to suggest that what is being engaged in is a permanent and unrelenting battle for fair treatment that is essentially imbalanced from the outset. Referring back to the canon and the fifth and final rule of Racial Standing (1993), it would seem to suggest that resistance is, if not futile, is needed to confront the implacability and inexorable nature of the workings of racism.
So what is the role of the University in this? Equality policies that the University and schools have in place are designed to deal with overt examples of racism but are not imbued, linguistically or otherwise, to deal with the subtle acts of racism the students have had to deal with. The notion of non-performativity (Ahmed, 2004), if not in a speech act but in the written word of policy documentation (Kimura 2014), also undermines the credibility of these documents and lends them an air of Fool’s Gold.
Trying to pre-empt potential difficulties could be done by gathering the students together before they go into school to discuss the kind of situations they might encounter. Or, introducing sessions around the issues of race so as to prepare students to deal with issues around racism (Bhopal, Harris and Rhamie, 2009). Forewarned is forearmed but how would this not be another example of ‘Othering’? An isolating discourse around alterity and non- inclusivity would immediately have been entered into and one led by the tutors, representatives of a system that can be seen as being symbolic of Whiteness present in education. Plus, there is no simple binary of ‘White-majority schools = bad/Black-majority schools = good’. That is too simplistic a view and assumes a lack of complexity in world- view and intersectionality of experience of the staff involved, as illustrated by Clarisse:
‘The first thing that I wanted to say is I was talking to Kiara earlier about identity and how you feel and everything like that. And we were saying how ironic it was that in my first placement I was in a school in Peckham, and obviously there’s a lot of Black people in that area, most of the school was Black…there was a lot of Black staff but all of them, bar one, were TAs and stuff like that. For the teaching staff
127
there was only one Black teacher, who happened to be a teacher that was in the class that I was in. So I definitely felt that I was a Black teacher when I was at that school…[VP: Black first then teacher?] Yes, definitely…I kind of felt isolated and I really felt that my race played a part in it. And it was quite weird because obviously the pupil population was Black but it seemed like there wasn’t that expectation that you would progress to teacher status, for some reason. But the placement I’m in now…it’s predominantly White, but I don’t feel like a Black teacher; I feel like a teacher…you’re intelligent, that’s [the] expectation, you’re a brilliant teacher, great, that’s what you should be doing…when I walked in to the school the first time I thought it was going to be a nightmare. But it completely changed my way of thinking, yeah, my perception.’