Winter, C. (2023) The geography GCSE curriculum in England: a white curriculum of deceit. Whiteness and Education, 8 (2). pp. 313-331. ISSN 2379-3406
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
Keywords: | Whiteness; ‘race’; geography curriculum; school; global development; performativity |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Education (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 04 Aug 2022 14:46 |
Last Modified: | 25 Sep 2024 14:11 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/23793406.2022.2132179 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:189477 |
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