One Year Later: lessons learned from a whole school approach to decolonising the curriculum

After a year of working with teachers across the curriculum to decolonise, I’d like to pass on some key lessons for new EDI Leads, Curriculum Leads, Lead Practitioners and anyone trying to do similar work in schools. Here are my top 10. Some of these I got right first try; others I learned the hard way. Hope it helps. 

1. General reading on the topic of anti-racism, decolonising, and education will give you the knowledge and confidence to have critical discussions, and wider frameworks for doing anti-racism work in schools will give you an idea of where to start. But the impactful work starts when you look at your specific school cohort, the data on ethnicity, outcomes and behaviour, and qualitative data on the experiences of Black and Asian staff and students. Know the specific and concrete issues in your institution. For my school, the issues were a lack of Black representation in the curriculum, the teaching staff, and in top sets. You can’t get people on board unless you can present the problem in cold hard numbers, and show that it’s in their immediate context.

2. Seek out local academics who are working on decolonising and race equality within the Education faculty of your nearest universities first, and those passionate enough to work with schools even if they are not in the Education faculty. Teachers are disciplinary experts, researchers, community workers and curriculum designers, but rarely recognised as such. Organising discussions between subject leads and academics working in the same discipline to tackle what decolonising looks like in their subject gives teachers this recognition. Academics have often done their decades in school teaching, and can bring fresh research and challenging ideas to the table. Teachers, in turn, get to practice criticality in the face of research and work out what approach would work best for them in their context. My first go at providing readings for decolonising Maths didn’t stick because it necessitated the addition of history content which the teachers felt was forced. But Prof Alf Coles pointed out that decolonised pedagogy was a powerful way to both respect students’ ways of knowing and improve attainment. Get the experts in!

3. Disrupt the school culture and curriculum by centering voices which have been previously marginalised. For example, I got Somali students to teach Somali to their teachers, and prepared form time materials, a whole-school assembly and a scheme of work on Somali contributions to UK communities and literature. Show people that the status quo can shift, and take the blinders off. You have to model decolonising work and show how it creates belonging, a more informed curriculum narrative, and a sense of excitement and discovery – THEN start getting people on board for work across the curriculum..

4. If you are white, find the Black and Asian staff in school and the academics and practitioners out in the local community who have been doing this work longer than you and with a far better idea of how and why it should work. Put them forward for the opportunities and pay that you are offered but which they deserve, and watch them knock the dust off your school. 

5. Model what colonial frameworks and lenses look like in textbooks and in practice – have discussions about the limitations of these, how they position the global majority and the Global South, and the way they reproduce racial hierarchies. So for History, Science or Geography, is the seizure of land from indigenous peoples, the extraction of natural resources and the pollution of their land, air and water presented as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of competitive capitalism and the discovery doctrine? Do you look at what established, indigenous science and resource management achieved and how this was exploited? Do you consider what fair trade and sustainable, mutual development might have looked like? 

6. Do form-time focus group and questionnaire research with the students so you promote discussion and give space for students to feed in anonymously. Use the collated data – like the percentage of students who want more Black representation – and powerful anecdotes from students as stimulus for planning. Go back to students with these plans , and check back after a term or a year to ask them how your school is doing. So often we ask for student voice and don’t keep students in the loop. Why not make them your associates?

7. Staff need reading and training on how to talk about race, and how to structure and deliver a curriculum that empowers rather than silences, humiliates and traumatises. Just like students, they need to see this modelled in their own discipline (not just yours). 

8. Students at my school said effective discussion facilitation was key to challenging racist ideas in their curriculum and providing a safe space for people to explore and develop more informed opinions without ego or defensiveness getting in the way. If oracy and explorative discussion isn’t explicitly taught in your school’s classrooms, this may seriously hamper your progress. 

9. Show off and celebrate the work teachers have done to decolonise the curriculum in your school on a public forum. Think newspaper article, conference, festival, exhibition, trust-wide INSET day. They are leaders and change agents, and deserve recognition. It will also inspire the people waiting in the wings to join in and make a difference.

10. You will soon realise that you have only scratched the surface, and that school priorities may change with the news cycle. This is unglamorous, thankless, difficult and ground-up work that has been going on for centuries. You are not a pioneer. Find and maintain your network – you will need each other. 

Sequencing a decolonised curriculum: using Picower’s six elements

I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer…education that connects the will to know with the will to become. ― Bell Hooks

One mistake I’ve made over and over again: teaching traumatic events in history without understanding the need to embed them within a wider, and more empowering, social-historical narrative.

Picower’s work on the six elements of social justice has helped me understand the importance of sequencing, so that

1. students do not internalise the trauma of these events, and /or

2. see these events as the fault or inevitable condition of the victims’ existence

3. nor do these events define a people as powerless, voiceless, or lacking agency

Picower’s work is open source so that teachers can access it. And unlike most EEF research, it is qualitative – looking into case-studies of elementary curriculum sequencing – to examine the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of teaching material that addresses social injustice. The American elementary context is only problematic in the respect that Secondary teachers may need to collaborate across disciplines whereas Primary teachers have more flexibility within their own practice. This limitation aside, Picower’s work is game changing for middle and senior leaders with curriculum development responsibilities.

Her six steps for sequencing material related to social injustice are as follows:

1. Self love and knowledge: “provides students with the historical background knowledge to recognize the strengths and resiliency of their communities.”
2. Respect for others: “students gain respect for the history and characteristics of people different from themselves. By building on the natural empathy of children, teachers encourage students to care about “unfair” conditions that have affected others.”
3. Issues of social injustice: “a critical examination of how identities impact people’s lived and material conditions. Students explore historical and current issues of social injustice, allowing them to identify “isms” and to decide whether they find these “fair.”
4. Social movements and social change: “teaches students about how people have fought against oppression through social movements. Students learn that things don’t have to be how they are; unfair conditions can be changed, and students can contribute to that change.”
5. Awareness raising: “students engage in activities that increase the awareness of others in their community about the social issues they are studying.”
6. Social action: “students have the opportunity to experience what it means to struggle for justice by engaging in social action themselves.”

At Bristol Cathedral, our Decolonising Hub is looking at how we can work cooperatively across all disciplines to ensure these six points are used in an order which empowers students to change their world for the better. We noticed that no 1 & 2 are often combined when we teach any of our subjects as global disciplines. History, English, Geography, Citizenship and PSHE seem best placed to address 3 and 4. Art, Drama and Music seem well placed to contribute meaningfully to no 5 and 6. This year our goal is an exhibit that celebrates student work across the curriculum following Picower’s six steps.

As an example of how to do this in one discipline, our History department addresses this sequence in KS3 by teaching Africa Kingdoms in year 7, the Bristol involvement in the slave trade in year 8, and the Haitian Revolution in year 9. Students first learn about the academic, artistic and economic achievements of African kingdoms before learning about how Black Africans were exploited – so the limited Euro-centric narrative of the white man’s burden is robustly challenged. We also consider the cost of choosing oppression / exploitation over symbiotic trade and collaboration.

With the Haitian Revolution, students understand how an oppressed people were able to overcome tyranny. Black people are not simply represented as unfortunate victims saved by British emancipation, but as having agency and preceding British emancipation with their own by three decades.

To apply a micro-lense to sequencing, I’ve used Picower to think about how I present disturbing context for English texts in single lessons. For example, in the EMC’s excellent collection Diverse Shorts, the story “Brownies” by ZZ Packer addresses white beauty standards and the impact on young Black girls in 1980s USA. I use a video of the doll test to help students understand and empathise with the Black characters in the story.

This video shows several Black children point to a white (as opposed to a Black) doll when asked which is beautiful and good. The moment when Black children each identify themselves as the Black doll afterwards is deeply upsetting, and could serve to normalise these attitudes further if not preceded by content which shows this behaviour to be the likely effect of racist representations in mainstream media – and therefore in error.

So this year I started with the Black Panther’s Black is Beautiful movement in the 60s, and we looked at several examples of Black beauty across film and art (Step 1: Self Love / Knowledge and Step 2: Mutual Respect). Once we had looked at the qualities of these examples and why they were so successful in influencing style, we then discussed their awareness of these movements, and the extent to which Black beauty is mainstreamed in TV, film and advertisements. At this point, I showed the doll test (Step 3: Social Injustice).

Students were just as visibly moved by the doll test as in previous years, if not more so. But in our discussion afterwards, there was less a sense of defeat and pity and more of an understanding that feelings of inadequacy are down to mainstream media, and how race is represented. If Black beauty and excellence were represented more in the mainstream, the doll test might yield different results.

This level of thinking is not only ‘top band’ in terms of contextual analysis, but empowers students to challenge unfair and harmful narratives on the basis that there are better, richer narratives.

Many curriculum designers now recognise the benefits of sequencing knowledge using narratives for long-term memory (i.e. evidenced learning). But Picower’s work is also needed to unlock the agency of students to use that knowledge for meaningful social change.

Decolonising Pedagogy: How race relations affect trust, effort and achievement

Why don’t we see a representative number of Black students at Oxbridge? Is it a problem with admissions or what happens earlier?

A recent student voice round-up yielded this account:

The lesson is on MLK. An older, well-respected History teacher is conducting a lesson for a room full of Secondary pupils. The teacher is white, and at the end of the lesson, as a sort of plenary, the teacher points out a Black student in the class: 

“So if it weren’t for MLK, [Black student’s name] probably wouldn’t be here.”

What is the teacher’s likely intent? Probably to bring the lesson home, make it feel immediate and meaningful. Probably to face students in his class with the shocking idea that their friend and classmate could be excluded because of his colour. Also, because the teacher is knowledgeable enough to know better, he likely skirted the glaring problem of MLK being American and his student being British to create a dramatic ‘moment’.

What is the impact? The Black student’s classmates turn to stare at him. He feels deeply uncomfortable. Suddenly he is lucky to be there, unlike his white classmates who naturally belong there. He knows this is not true, on an intellectual level, but he still experiences the dissonance of knowing his teacher thinks otherwise. He has to choose who to trust, and he no longer trusts this teacher. 

Many teachers are reading more deeply and widely to educate themselves and diversify their curriculum. Some even aspire to decolonise – to look critically at what they already teach and at the framing of their content, to reflect the global nature of their discipline. 

But pedagogy – particularly student-teacher interactions – must be addressed as well. In any lesson, a teacher’s personal knowledge and interactions with students are as much a part of the curriculum as the texts they teach.

Sally Haslanger (2014) discusses the issue of how white teachers teach Black students and the impact on Black students’ learning in her peer reviewed article “Studying while Black: Trust, Disrespect and Opportunity”. 

There are THREE key learning points for teachers here:

1. Students must see their teacher as more knowledgeable than they are, and also as a credible source of information. If a teacher is either over or under confident in their delivery, if they over or underestimate a student’s knowledge or ability, epistemic trust will falter. Moreover, if a teacher betrays a weakness in their assessment of themselves or others and then ignores or defends this rather than owning and admitting fault, epistemic trust will be damaged even more. 

Conversely then, there is an opportunity for the teacher in the example above to reflect and repair. But this depends on the teacher being reflective enough to see the gap between intent and impact, either because they recognised it afterward, or were challenged by someone to do so. We might also imagine a different plenary, where the Black student was asked to summarise the lesson in his own words, and the teacher engaged in an intelligent dialogue, adding new information where needed.

2. Managing strong emotions in the face of ignorant, insensitive or baldly racist treatment depletes students’ willpower, i.e. their employment of executive function to get on with school work which may be difficult or dull – but necessary for academic progress. People have a limited amount of self-control to choose the responsible options over the merely gratifying. Think doughnuts vs fruit. If we’ve been good all day at work, we are more likely to succumb to temptation when we get home as a reward. Similarly, if we’ve been calm and reasonable in the face of irritation all day at work, we arrive home worn out and more likely to make poor choices. This applies to students, too.  

Reflecting again on the example above, we might ask how much harder it was for the student to focus in his next lesson. Personally, my head turns to radio static for hours after I’ve been spotlighted like that. I need time to process the experience before I can move on. 

3. Another effect of racism on students is the depletion of ‘effort optimism’, or the belief that effort will improve your circumstances. If a school lacks Black role models, or persistently relates to Black students through stereotypes, it will become harder for Black students to see the point of academic effort. 

At the time the example above occurred, the school in question had no Black teachers. The primary value of the student in that lesson was his colour, to be used as an example to the rest of the class. He did not learn that he was there and doing well because of effort, but because MLK had saved a place for him despite his colour. 

If you are using student voice in your school, you will find your own examples of how white teachers can – intentionally or not – affect a breakdown in epistemic trust, willpower, and effort optimism. 

The flipside is that awareness and training can ensure the opposite happens. That epistemic trust, willpower and effort optimism can be nurtured for the benefit of everyone in the school community. Is this happening in your school?

Haslanger, S. (2014). STUDYING WHILE BLACK. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 11(1), pp.109–136.

Decolonising Pedagogy: Ubuntu Education Philosophy

What is it?

South African Prof Lesley Le Grange describes Ubuntu as originating “from the Xhosa expression umuntu ngumuntu ngabanye Bantu. There are similar proverbial expressions in Zulu, Sotho, Tswana and other African languages.Though not easily translatable, the proverb means that each individual’s humanity is ideally expressed in relationship with others and in relationships individuality is truly expressed.”

He writes that Ubuntu nurtures a “sense of wholeness and interconnectedness of self with the social and natural [that] by implication means that caring for others also involves a duty to care for nature. Ubuntu, is… an ecosophy that connects the self, society and nature (the three ecologies). Cultivating ubuntu by definition involves healing of self, society and nature.”

His seminar on Ubuntu and Indigenous Knowledge can be found here.

What is the relevance to my classroom?

CAT tests in year 7, then ultimately GCSE exams – we place young people in isolated competition at the beginning and end of their secondary school experience. In classrooms, however, our interdependence is undeniable. In lessons that work, students demonstrate mutually respectful behaviours like turn-taking, close listening and thoughtful questioning. 

From a student’s point of view, if you come into year 7 with limited literacy or numeracy, a classroom dynamic based on individualism and competition is humiliating. You dread being called on, you’re the last to finish a task, and you never get to answer the really good questions. ‘Differentiated’ questions on the board are supposed to be inclusive, but they mainly highlight your inferiority. 

Ever notice that disruptive behaviours flourish amongst low ability cohorts? Why would you want to play a game you always lose? Read Paul Willis’ ethnography Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977) for an illuminating study on how and why kids choose self-sabotage over competition with privileged peers.

Conversely, a classroom where empathy and structured collaboration reign can be transformative. Teach a mixed ability group some explorative, collaborative discussion skills and see what happens to the dynamic. Kids see themselves as part of a team. Failures are less face-threatening so they drop defensive behaviours; successes are mutually gratifying. Kids that used to seek dignity by trashing your lesson start embracing language like “I see your point, but there are some important exceptions…”

And it pays dividends in later life, too. To flourish as individuals in a collective society, we have to learn to collaborate with people of varying abilities, backgrounds and temperaments. Just ask any police officer what happens when people don’t learn these skills. Or when people grow up feeling isolated and humiliated.

How can I teach Ubuntu principles in my classroom?

Explicitly teach students to ‘check in’ with their emotional and physical state, and to be aware of how this can affect their interactions with others. My South African counterpart, //Kabbo Ferdinand, modelled this approach: use a few minutes of meditation, yoga or reflection at the start of lessons to help students recognise the way their physical and mental health can affect their ability to learn and socialise positively.

The key word is routinely: at first, many students will not be able to recognise or articulate their own physical, emotional or mental state. They will giggle through breathing exercises, scoff at talk of feelings. It takes practice and guidance before students begin to see patterns in their thoughts and feelings – and how this awareness can give them the power to make better choices (not just game the sanction ladder).

Then teaching empathy – are they aware and respectful of others? Do they know what good listening skills look like? The Oracy 21 Toolkit has an excellent ‘Listening Ladder’ to scaffold listening and questioning skills. Students can’t ask good questions if they aren’t thoughtfully engaging with the writer / speaker.

Use cooperative learning strategies, in which tasks are constructed to ensure mutual accountability through an interdependent role assignment. Mixed ability groups / pairs can accelerate learning in equitable ways if you scaffold roles for students. E.g. Reciprocal reading strategies of prediction, clarification, questioning and summarising can be assigned to individual students in a group of four, with sentence starters or prompts on the board to help them. Again, routine is key – working cooperatively takes practice and must be managed as closely as independent work. 

Prompt students to recognise and credit the helpful contributions of their peers in every lesson. Students love to hear their name in a positive context: “I thought what Esa said was really helpful because…”

Our relationship with nature is similarly interdependent. When my students read stories which position humans in conflict and competition with nature, they often become fatalistic. “We are a virus. We’re causing other species to go extinct and we won’t stop, so what’s the point?” But this doesn’t have to be this generation’s truth. Teach a kid some organic gardening skills and they learn from rather than about the plants. The relationship becomes a positive feedback loop rather than a story of dominance and exploitation, rewarding care and attention. Kids realise their power to nurture, and their self-worth grows along with the plant. See NFER’s research on school gardening projects and/or Prof Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book on indigenous botany, Braiding Sweetgrass for more on this approach.

Next blog: The impact of racial micro-politics in student-teacher interactions, and how this affects learning

LE GRANGE, L. (2012). Ubuntu, Ukama and the Healing of Nature, Self and Society. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(sup2), pp.56–67.

Tackling Racism in School through Professional Learning Networks – Part 3

Back in the late 90’s, my undergrad classes in ‘Native Studies’ woke me up to the shallow, liberal, tokenistic reality of  multiculturalism. See I grew up in the liberal dream of multiculturalism back when I was a kid in the Canadian prairies. I went to ‘Heritage Days’ in the park where we ate various forms of meat on sticks and watched people in colourful costumes perform traditional dances that we didn’t understand and didn’t really care to understand. Then we went back to our schools and neighbourhoods where racist slurs were tolerated and racial hierarchy went unchallenged: black kids and First Nations kids at the bottom; white kids from a Western European heritage at the top – whether you had money or not. If you were a poor white kid, you could still count on the racial hierarchy for relative self-esteem. 

That’s why I’m choosing to decolonise not diversify – the latter excuses racism while the former aims to dismantle it.

Decolonising the curriculum can involve interrogating white-centric texts by questioning the assumptions of white moral authority. This can be achieved by contrasting texts such as George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” with Ken Saro-Wiwa’s “Robert and the Dog”. In class I encourage students to reckon with their reactions: for whom or what are we made to sympathise – the animals or the people? Do some writers present the suffering of BAME people as an accepted norm? Do some writers position BAME people as less human than white people? How do they do this? Why? I regularly invite a critical perspective using texts that facilitate this approach – we English teachers love a difficult and important conversation. 

But eventually all teachers have to contend with the limits of their own perspective. Even when I’m being critical, I cannot wholly step outside my own biases and areas of ignorance. There are simply things that I cannot know – embodied experiences I’ve never had. And this limits my readings of, and ability to teach any text, let alone a decolonised curriculum.

This is where I’ve found a BAME-led Professional Learning Network useful for strengthening my capacity.

The One Bristol Curriculum (OBC) is a city-wide project which aims to tackle the stark racial inequalities which were revealed in the 2017 Runnymede Report. Last July, Sibusiso Tshabalala invited teachers and BAME practitioners to the St Paul’s Youth Club to brainstorm lessons for the OBC, and share ideas about how we could incorporate these into the curriculum. The first thing that struck me was the experience and depth of expertise on offer, whether looking at history, dance, PSHE, or storytelling.

Being an English teacher, I made sure I got to //Kabbo first. //Kabbo Ferdinand is a Bristol-based South African activist, musician and storyteller who comes from the Griot tradition. He works on an ongoing poetry project and publication called Lyrically Justified to help people share their own unique and diverse stories via poetry. Together, we wanted to bring this ethos into the year 7 classroom – to help kids explore their heritage, and share this work in their own stories and poetry. But first, //Kabbo had to instill a sense of trust and empathy amongst new year 7 classes – not an easy task with 32 kids in a room.

Naomi Berry, the outstanding Head of Drama at my school, was so excited about //Kabbo’s objectives that she offered him the full half-term of Drama lessons for three year 7 groups. //Kabbo ran the sessions, and she translated these into Google slides and documents that teachers could use across the city. I did the same for some complementary English lessons, in which the explorations and oral work from Drama could find written expression.

Amongst //Kabbo’s approaches, two things stood out which positively challenged our pedagogy. He made time to do some basic breathing and body work to centre the kids before they interacted. This calmed them down, and made them aware of how they were feeling. And he always gave kids a choice – they could opt out of any exercise that made them uncomfortable.

Now, any teacher can tell you very good reasons why NOT to take the latter approach. I won’t bore you with these – they’re too obvious. But I will tell you a very interesting outcome. When the students were asked to give feedback on //Kabbo’s sessions, the only negative reflections were about their own contributions. So many kids wished they had taken more risks, trusted more. When asked what they had learned, they reported:

I‘ve learnt more about myself and how to calm myself and concentrate on whatever I’m doing. I’ve also learnt how to use my voice better whilst performing and telling my story.

I now know about different cultures, about myself and my classmates, and that you cannot fail because //Kabbo is so supportive and encouraging. There is something for everyone, and he will never force you into something.

Teamwork can achieve anything.

The finished product – their own dramatised story – was not as polished as we might have liked, or we thought we could have achieved through a stronger focus on obedience and a faster pace. But the next term when the regular teachers took over and pulled in the reigns, we had similar issues with time and final performances. The real outcome here was that //Kabbo’s patience and empathy, and his focus on developing trust and autonomy left the students with a better sense of their own agency and impact on others. This is valuable, but hard to measure or evidence in work. Our challenge now is how to improve the time management and outcome without losing the personal and social benefits of the pilot.

Many teachers may not have a formal PLN where BAME practitioners and academics can collaborate with teachers. My second foray into collaboration is an example of how to do similar work if this is the case. To develop my SoW on the Somali poetry tradition, I had to make my own contacts.

Through Dr Rafael Mitchell, a researcher specialising in African education, I made contact with Ugbaad Aidid, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Bristol. Ugbaad responded warmly when I asked her for advice on readings – she emailed several articles and an excellent anthology called War and Peace which discusses the complexities of traditional clan relations and the traditional function of war: to restore a more stable power balance and instil more effective mechanisms for keeping the peace. The articles Ugbaad sent described the conventions of multiple poetry genres and the traditional purposes of these genres. Essential reading which allowed me to make educated decisions about what to teach in terms of context and form.

I then needed guidance on how to teach this unit. Through Twitter, I met Abdihakin Asir, formerly a Director of Education in Mogadishu, and now a Bristol-based community leader and consultant who also studied for his MSc at the University of Bristol. Abdihakin met me for coffee and talked me through the best ways to sequence content from his perspective, and several pitfalls when teaching children about Somali history that can easily lead to misunderstanding, oversimplification, and offence. He also introduced me to another postgraduate student who specialised in Somali language and poetry.

Abdullahi met me in St Paul’s Community Centre to share some excellent, traditional poems with me that, unlike the poems I had found, were more accessible. And he also told me about the contexts of the poems, which had fascinating backstories about the writers – ones about challenging perceptions which I knew the kids would relate to. 

Examples of student writing from this SoW can be seen here from students who agreed to share their work (anonymously – no last names). I have included a final assessment essay and a poem chosen as one of the finalists from our in-class competition. The featured essay was written by a student choosing to focus on the darker aspects of the poetry. She appreciated the skill of using poetry to broker peace, and the themes of beauty, nature and family in the poems studied, but was most intrigued by the representations of anger and toxic masculinity – a personal choice based on her own concerns about society at the moment, and not one she attaches particularly to Somali culture. I think it’s important to note that the scheme allows students to explore a range of universal themes, thereby using Somali poetry as a mirror for the reader to examine themselves and their society, much like students learn to use Shakespeare’s texts. 

While the informal CPD I experienced through this process was highly rewarding, the problem was of course that the expertise of the people I engaged has not been paid for – and it should be, despite their generous offer to help me without compensation. I have submitted my SoW to the OBC; any remuneration offered for this work will be given to Ugbaad, Abdullahi and Abdihakin. 

I know that many teachers will not have the time to do the research I’ve done, and I’m not trying to set an expectation that ‘good’ teachers do this work. My hope is that universities, exam boards and teacher-training programmes will address the gaps in our capacity and curriculum, and enable teachers to deliver a decolonised curriculum from the outset. I also want to highlight that the ‘decolonising’ work described here necessarily involved drawing on knowledge and perspectives from those outside the teaching profession – developing relationships and mobilising capacities in an extended and informal PLN.

NB: The SoW on Somali Poetry, is here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1V28U4XG_uH2ZgI1D_6cOcaw0l1ZtSc-8CJFOkJbBYds

With some accompanying docs here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BJt7lnTAnIiorw5xFdPySC_rTK8SHhVAXuDiC5gOV3o/edit?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RAgDy15oZ24BhtbkhM7JAWHkWxmrJF81sdqWT4Rqe-M

https://drive.google.com/open?id=15OArxzZLzBhKvwR1QFtnUEenDpOO09Ta04eeFaJXW4Y

Order Warda Yassin’s excellent poetry collection Tea with Cardamom for the diaspora poetry section.

 

Tackling Racism in School through Professional Learning Networks – Part 2

In March 2019, I went to see Akala talk about his book Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire. My first two blogs about the lack of diversity in the GCSE English Lit curriculum had provoked some baffling confrontations on Twitter, and I wanted his insight.

“Akala,” I began, “our GCSE English Lit curriculum allows a choice of 24 major texts, none of which are written by black authors. When I’ve spoken with other teachers on Twitter about the value of diversity, I’ve gotten a lot of resistence from some teachers who’ve called me racist for bringing it up…”

“Precious.” Akala interrupted, smiling grimly.

“…and I want to know what you would say to these teachers about diversity in the curriculum.”

Akala speaks in paragraphs, but I remember two very important points:

1. If you’re asking people to put Toni Morrison or Chinua Achebe on the curriculum, you’re hardly asking for tokenism, and

2. in a multi-ethnic society, teaching white kids that they have nothing to learn from anybody else, that they should never have to put themselves in the shoes of anybody else, how are you equipping these kids for life in an increasingly diverse society?

In other words, we don’t need a diverse curriculum to ‘save’ BAME kids, we need diversity because it yields powerful knowledge. If you’re doing business abroad, or writing any text for a diverse audience, or acting as a public servant in any capacity, you need the knowledge that comes from studying a range of perspectives.

In one Bristol school, the Senior Leadership enabled me to act on these ideas. Noting that the largest BAME group was Somali kids, I asked all of our students from a Somali background to meet me during form time to discuss what they would like to teach the school community about their culture and language.

Yes, as you’ll have spotted, I did not start by seeking the guidance of Somali parents, educators or community leaders – which resulted in me acting on some ignorant assumptions. (Some academics have noted that a symptom of whiteness is assuming that every lane is yours, and that your universal relevance prepares you to lead cultural projects even if you haven’t a Scooby what you’re doing.) 

Lots of these kids didn’t speak any Somali. Several did not want to be singled out by their ethnicity. And most importantly, the complexities within ‘Somali’ as a political and cultural identity require extensive knowledge and sensitivity, not the prodding of an ignorant Canadian who had read To Kill a Mockingbird and fancied herself an Atticus Finch.

Alongside support I also received some complaints from parents. But we took forward a really cool idea from the kids, which was to teach our teachers some Somali phrases and film this. This led to a series of short films which were shared during form time.

Loads of teachers signed up, and the power dynamic shifted dramatically between these EAL kids and their teachers. The teachers were struggling to pronounce basic words in Somali. The kids were patiently repeating single sounds, praising and correcting. You could almost see the ‘click’ when teachers realised what it’s like to be in an EAL kids’ shoes, and how impressive their multilingualism is.

Our student ‘teachers’ received Cultural Ambassador certificates, signed by Marvin Reese, which were awarded at a whole-school assembly. One kid’s mom threw a party for him to celebrate, and he decided he wanted to be Mayor when he grew up.

But the language didn’t stick, the impact was fleeting, and I knew why: I needed to do my homework.

Twitter is a terrible place to argue, but a fantastic place to get input. I curated a timeline full of eminent BAME activists and academics. Prof Olivette Otele told me to see Robin DiAngelo speak at Waterstones about her book White Fragility, which taught me about the continual work and reflexivity needed to successfully challenge white-centric views – especially my own. I discovered that Somalia is known as the Nation of Poets, because of its rich and sophisticated oral traditions. Dr Muna Abdi introduced me to Warda Yassin – also an English teacher in the UK and an award-winning writer of the poetry collection Tea with Cardamom.

Dr Abdi also taught me that “there is no such thing as a ‘hard to reach’ community, if you know how to engage them appropriately”.

A year of working with BAME practitioners via the One Bristol Curriculum and Somali researchers via the University of Bristol has left my inner Atticus Finch gaping in awe. We teachers are surrounded by brilliant and generous collaborators from a wide range of backgrounds. All we have to do is engage them appropriately.

In part three, I will outline the collaboration and approach needed to develop and teach a decolonised unit of study, and how to overcome the friction this can generate within a formal school setting. Spoiler alert: the rewards are immense.

NB: My personal output from my adventures in decolonising the curriculum, a SoW on Somali Poetry, is here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1V28U4XG_uH2ZgI1D_6cOcaw0l1ZtSc-8CJFOkJbBYds

With some accompanying docs here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BJt7lnTAnIiorw5xFdPySC_rTK8SHhVAXuDiC5gOV3o/edit?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RAgDy15oZ24BhtbkhM7JAWHkWxmrJF81sdqWT4Rqe-M

https://drive.google.com/open?id=15OArxzZLzBhKvwR1QFtnUEenDpOO09Ta04eeFaJXW4Y

Order Warda Yassin’s excellent poetry collection Tea with Cardamom for the diaspora poetry section.

Tackling Racism in School through Professional Learning Networks – Part 1

Back in 2018, a Somali student told me about letters being posted to Muslims around the city, threatening them with various acts of violence and humiliation that would occur on April 3 of that year. In response, the Easton Jamia Masjid made April 3 ‘Love Thy Neighbour Day‘ to welcome everyone with food and to talk about the role of the mosque in the community.

I got on the 24 bus with a fellow North American teacher to attend – we’d both been horrified by the stories of the verbal and physical abuse that our female Somali students face on their walk to and from school. These mainly from white men in cars, who can speed away from the consequences.

While my colleague and I were chatting on the bus, an elderly white man complimented our accents. Said he wished he could live in Canada or the States. I argued back – you can’t walk or cycle across the countryside, jump in a river, and then gorge yourself on Somerset cider and real Cheddar cheese in Canada.

“Ah well, the countryside is alright, but it’s all these Somalis in Bristol that’s the problem!” he replied.

The bus was packed with a diverse crowd, including Somali people, and no one even blinked. I merely looked at him like he’d pissed himself, which shut him down, though I wish in retrospect that I had conquered my shock and given him a bollocking.

The point is that when the 2017 Runnymede Report stated Bristol was the worst major city in the country for ethnic inequality, particularly disadvantaging Black African people, I was not surprised. Before this report, I had encountered casual, public hatred of Somalis a few times. Like all social problems, this is played out in schools, and the lack of staffing or formalised input from the Somali community means the problem is often hushed up rather than confronted.

I know of two schools, both in suburban, mainly white neighbourhoods, where the social segregation of Somali kids is so extreme, and racism so casual, that it has erupted in riot. One of the schools was put in special measures for, as some locals call it, ‘the Somali problem’. At the other, when a white kid repeatedly used the N-word to provoke the Somali kids, the conversation was snuffed out rather than opened up, to the disappointment and frustration of many staff and kids who wanted to confront the issue.

Following a visit to this school, I got on a bus with kids on their own way home. All the white kids went upstairs. The black kids stayed downstairs, and surrounded me. Headphones were of no use – they were rowdy and LIVID about a recent sanction given to a Somali girl.

When I took my headphones off, told them I was teacher, and asked what was going on, they told me: a Somali girl and a white girl were partnered for a Science lab. They both chatted at the end and didn’t get equipment put away in time, but only the Somali girl was sanctioned. The white girl protested, said she too was at fault, but this was ignored.

There were over 20 kids sat around me, and apart from the speaker, all became silent, calm and respectful. They explained the situation in empirical and rational terms. They were mature and reasonable. They just needed to be really listened to. I reported this back and recommended a Somali community leader who could help, but it wasn’t picked up.

Like the first school I mentioned, some members of this community locate the problem in the Somali students themselves, noting religious conflicts with Sex & Relationship Education (SRE) and evolution in the curriculum, though having taught SRE to year 11 students myself, I find it odd that anyone would identify the religious views of Somali students in particular and in general as a problem.

Somali kids are not distinctive in their response to SRE – most kids are open and pragmatic. A few, from a range of backgrounds, will find the content challenges their conservative social views.

The real intent of highlighting Somali students is that it positions the whole community as “backwards”. The narrative goes like this: we feel for these people, we can’t imagine what they’ve come from, but they bring their extreme religious views and trauma and violence here and ….

It’s White Man Burden stuff. Actually these students bring what most students do: engaged and hard-working parents; an urge to fit in and do well. A culture and perspective that, if respected, can bring great value to the curriculum and the school ethos.

In another very different school, there was an unfortunate assembly after the New Zealand mosque shooting. The speaker had already prepared a talk on ‘the importance of forgiveness’, and news of the shooting came minutes before his delivery. He acknowledged possible sensitivity, but delivered it anyway, saying that it was perhaps even more relevant.

One female student I knew expressed her anger and frustration after the assembly. That the tabloid media had represented the shooter as an angelic child who had gone mad. No sign of the terrorism label that is applied when the culprit is BAME.

She was angry that she and her friends are regularly harassed, that they don’t feel safe on their walk to school. That Asian and Somali Muslim boys deny Islamaphobia “is a thing” because they don’t want to challenge their white male friends or look like they’re “attention-seeking”.

But on this day, she and her friends were really mad that they had been asked to forgive a man who had shot innocent people in the back while they were praying. They wanted acknowledgement that this was an evil and horrific act. They wanted anger and real talk and real solutions.

So I arranged a meeting between this student, her friends, the speaker at the assembly, and the Principal. And I gave her a signed copy of Baroness Warsi’s book, The Enemy Within, for preparation.

She didn’t need it. The white male school leaders listened to her and her friends with deference and respect. They were shocked, humbled and also galvanised afterwards.

The result? Assemblies run by these female students across 7-11 year groups, changes to the Religious Education curriculum, visits from Muslim community leaders, and changes in mind-set and the distribution of leadership. In short, a very real commitment to change that has manifested in ways I will discuss in part two.

NB: My personal output from my adventures in decolonising the curriculum, a SoW on Somali Poetry, is here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1V28U4XG_uH2ZgI1D_6cOcaw0l1ZtSc-8CJFOkJbBYds

With some accompanying docs here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BJt7lnTAnIiorw5xFdPySC_rTK8SHhVAXuDiC5gOV3o/edit?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RAgDy15oZ24BhtbkhM7JAWHkWxmrJF81sdqWT4Rqe-M

https://drive.google.com/open?id=15OArxzZLzBhKvwR1QFtnUEenDpOO09Ta04eeFaJXW4Y

Order Warda Yassin’s excellent poetry collection Tea with Cardamom for the diaspora poetry section.

Reference in title to:

Brown, C. (2020) The Networked School Leader, (Bingley: Emerald)

Somali Poetry: resources for a SOW

Rationale

This year I want to develop a year 8 poetry SOW on Somali poetry. Why?

1. Somalia is known as The Nation of Poets in Africa, and has a long tradition of oral poetry which is enjoyed and created by all. I want to challenge students who see poetry writing as an artistically elitist or narcissistic endeavour, from which the pragmatic shy away. So the Somali tradition is a gift.
2. I have a large cohort of Somali students, and I want to recognise and share the cultural capital they offer.
3. The bulk of racism I have witnessed here in Bristol has been aimed at Somalis – being both black and Muslim, they take the brunt of our media’s racism and Islamophobia. It’s my job as a white ally and a teacher to promote appreciation and respect over ignorance and hate.

Context

The context I would recommend for time-poor teachers is Al Jazeera World’s documentary on Somalia before the civil war, and since. The two-part documentary, Somalia: The Forgotten Story, can be watched online in classrooms. As English teachers, we must balance context with content, and so I would recommend the opening of the documentary which gives crucial cultural context, and only sections you deem appropriate and necessary on the war. I will focus on those which challenge dominant perceptions.

A fascinating account of early Somali-British relations is recounted first hand here in the diary of Somali seafarer Ibrahim Ismaa’il: from Cardiff to the Cotswolds.

Finally, an enlightening documentary on traditional and modern diaspora poetry is Somalia: Nation of Poets, which includes incendiary and beautiful poetry in Somali (subtitled) and English.

Poetry

The Poetry Translation Centre is a trove of diaspora poetry written in the original language, with initial and final translations on offer so you can explore how meaning is distilled in the process, and also use the original in a class with Somali speakers to explore key terms via translanguaging. This could be a powerful way to introduce theme and context, as well as explore the use of sound, and how translators have worked to preserve sound features.

Some background on metre may be of use. Here’s an excerpt from Martin Orwin and Maxamed Cabdullaahi Riiraash’s ‘An Approach to Relationships between Somali Metre Types’, published in African Languages and Cultures, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1997), pp. 83-100

The study of Somali metrics was revolutionized in the mid-1970s with the publication, in the Somali national newspaper Xiddigta Oktoobar, October Star, of a number of seminal articles by the two Somali scholars and poets Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’ (referred to in this article as Gaarriye, except for bibliographical reference) and Cabdullaahi Diiriye Guuleed, who made the long-awaited breakthrough in Somali metrical studies, apparently independently. These two scholars noted that Somali poetry scanned by counting vowel units, or moras, which were arranged in specific patterns according to genre. In other words, they showed that Somali has a quantitative metrical system in which only the vowels count, and that the lines of different genres vary in the number and pattern of those moras. They also differed a little in their approaches to understanding the metre, but all subsequent work on Somali metrics…is founded on these original articles. Since the mid-1970s, further work on Somali metrics has been ongoing and now the patterns of individual metres are well understood, as are the rules by which various vowel sequences may count as long or short. The most recent studies on Somali metrics (Johnson 1996,Banti & Giannattasio 1996) have included work on the musical aspects of the performance of poetry, which has deepened our understanding of the link between the rhythmic aspects of performance and the realization of the abstract, metrical patterns in certain verse instances.

In short, it would be wise to examine stress, assonance and rhythm when looking at Somali poetry, as with any poetry which is meant to be encountered in voice rather than text. As students will be reading the poetry in English, I will only touch on the complexity of genres and moras to develop the sense of tradition.

Maxamed Ibraahin Warsame ‘Hadraawi’ is a good place to start, being regarded as ‘the greatest living Somali poet’. I would use ‘Settling the Somali Language‘ to establish the link between identity and language, and explore tensions around the dominance of English. Important ideas here linking to the documentary Somalia: Nation of Poets.

The work of Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’  is an excellent example of the power of poetry. Note this excerpt from a Guardian article:

The power of verse to cause social upheaval is not something we’re very familiar with in the UK, but in Somali culture it’s taken for granted. One poet starts a theme, others take it up, then a chain develops, drawing people into the arguments. “I wrote something against tribalism that became an attack on the president,” Gaarriye explains. “Within four months the chain was more than 70 poems long.” And that was when the secret police came to visit. Shortly afterwards he fled to Ethiopia and an exile that lasted until 1991.

His poem ‘Seer‘ explores the nature of poetry through repeated metaphors.

Asha Lul’s ‘Harmony‘, is a strong example of the speaker’s embodied knowledge of her land, and uses both imagery and sound symbolism to locate the reader in a vivid sensory experience of Somalia. I would abridge and use the first verse – it’s a long one.

On love and self-knowledge, many students will relate to ‘Taste‘, and both the sense imagery and topic will yield rich discussion.

Looking at poetry written in English by the diaspora, my first experience was Warsan Shire’s ‘Home‘. This video, with simple but emotive animation, featuring Shire’s breaking voice is likely to bring a class to tears. I totally lose it EVERY TIME. Warning: there are references to rape and use of the N-word, and I cut these bits when teaching the poem to years 7 and 8.

Finally, I will use a poem entitled ‘Sheffield Children’s Hospital’ from Warda Yassin‘s seering collection Tea with Cardamom. You can buy the collection at Waterstones or online. The poem itself is two seven-line stanzas about a boy pretending to be a man, who swears that “people only care when you are stabbed, in prison, or dead.” Like many of Yassin’s poems, this one forces you to imagine the details in order to put the story together, and uses some Somali words to hold hands with heritage as you traverse a terrifying new terrain.

Actual lessons and questions will be shared when I’ve learned more. At this point I need feedback and suggestions from those with a good knowledge of Somali poetry. At the moment I have six poems, but looking to expand with suggestions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Year 7 Baseline: modelling and metacognition

First, here’s the baseline, with the mark scheme at the end, pages 11-12: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3ew7dvh5qctzj6c/Year%207%20Baseline%20Test_%20Reading%20Fiction.odt?dl=0

The reading is the short story ‘My Polish Teacher’s Tie’ by Helen Dunmore, and can be found here: https://genius.com/Helen-dunmore-my-polish-teachers-tie-annotated

It is also published in EMC’s EXCELLENT new collection, Diverse Shorts: Literature to promote critical thinking: https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/publications/diverse-shorts-literature-to-promote-critical-thinking-print. I cannot recommend this text enough – our department will be using it throughout the Autumn term with year 7 to study reading skills, discussion skills, and stimulate writing about their cultural heritage.

The rationale for this style of baseline:

My department was using the AQA KS3 Language tests to baseline and check end-of-year progress, but problems quickly became clear. The kids couldn’t handle the long answer responses, so we were setting them up for failure and getting no information about which discrete, micro-skills we needed to work on to build them up. We needed to get their writing issues out of the way so we could see their reading skills up close.

I was thinking about using MCQs to model and assess students’ skills, when @Xris32 beat me to it with his impressively clear and well-designed prototype, which can be found here: https://learningfrommymistakesenglish.blogspot.com/2019/06/diet-gcse-english-language-or-gcse.html?spref=tw. Without this to work off of, mine would have been considerably weaker in terms of format and focus. So big ups! My version overlaps, but is also quite different in terms of what is being assessed. It’s fiction, for starters, and based on an entire short story.

What I’m assessing:

I’m asking kids to work out the meaning of words from context, to find the best textual details, and to read and choose the best analysis of both language and structural features. Evaluation skills are in there too. The distractors are meant to exemplify different, but common ways that kids get it wrong, or bluff their way through: “makes the reader imagine it in their head”, etc.

Also, I am modelling rather than testing terminology. Examiner reports affirm that kids need to pull back and look at the meaning of the whole text rather than talk about techniques as if they occur in a vacuum. The best answers are ones that connect a detail to patterns of meaning, approaching theme.

How I will use the baseline:

Lesson 1: Students read the story in groups, one paragraph at a time, round robin. The EMC text has good discussion questions to help kids access theme and author intent.  I’ll use these to facilitate explorative talk on plot and theme using techniques from Transform Teaching and Learning through Talk, found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Transform-Teaching-Learning-through-Talk/dp/1475840683. 

I want to observe their reading abilities, and oracy skills. There is no explicit teaching here – just the chance for kids to read the story slowly, in chunks, and talk out their own understanding.

Lesson 2: The baseline. A full hour.

Lesson 3: Mark IN CLASS. Here’s where the explicit teaching and metacognition comes in. Kids swap papers, and we compare the thought process of those who got the best answer and weaker answers. The point is that kids choose wrong answers for all types of VALID reasons – it’s important to unpick this reasoning, poker-faced, developing consensus on answers that show clear understanding of the question itself, and the writer’s craft, intent, and meaning.

I will also mark them myself afterwards to ensure I have accurate data, and that I know where everyone is in terms of strengths and weaknesses.

Hope this helps. Questions and feedback welcome – it IS a first draft, and has not yet been piloted.

Macbeth for Low Ability Sets

Those just looking for resources, skip to the link at the end – I hope you find them helpful.

Those of you interested in low-ability setting issues and how to teach low ability sets, please read on and let me know what you think – I’ve got lots to learn!

Issues around low ability sets

Some people hate teaching support or “bottom” set, or hate the idea of these sets altogether. The reasons given are as follows:

1. Setting dooms disadvantaged kids to low expectations, traps them with kids that are disruptive, and excludes them from the higher level discussions experienced in ‘top’ sets.
2. Kids being set by behaviour rather than ability, which turns the set into a dumping ground rather than a means of giving more differentiated support.
3. There is often a disproportionate number of BME and working class kids in these sets.

First off, I’ve seen all of the above – either in research or in person – especially in my first year of teaching in the UK. It was awful to watch, but I think this was mainly a result of poor departmental policy and poor teaching. Some teachers saw these classes as a doss, though they cared for the kids, because the FFTs were low so they could “relax”. I saw a teacher spend most lessons telling boring, self-involved anecdotes and half-heartedly teaching punctuation; it galvanised me to do a lot better.

So while I understand and agree with some of these complaints, I personally love teaching support sets because smaller numbers means you can have seminar-style lessons, and make discussion skills an explicit part of your curriculum.

Explicit rules are key though. When I teach Macbeth, I’ve already established expectations for behaviour, but I still start with a thematic discussion to reinforce them. We talk about what makes a good king, and we follow these rules:

1. Stay on topic.
2. Don’t steal all the talk time – it’s not the [insert name here] show.
3. Invite others to contribute / respond, by name.
4. Refer to specific comments by others, using their name.
5. Agree with an additional point.
6. Disagree by first showing respect for the speaker’s ideas.
7. If you don’t understand, ask the speaker to repeat, explain, or give an example.
8. Steal all good ideas for your written work, but thank classmates afterwards.

Kids with lower ability often find learning to be a humiliating and isolating experience, and these rules help to turn things around. Kids quickly recognise the diversity of strengths and weaknesses, and learn to empathise: it feels good when another kid uses their name to credit their idea; it feels even better to return the gesture – powerful, even.

Trust in strangers, as default, is a trait found in research subjects who demonstrate social intelligence (Yamagishi et al. 1999) and helps develop social capital (Fukuyama, 1995 p. 25), yet many kids in low ability sets have learned NOT to trust as default, and this has a growing, negative impact on their educational outcomes and employment (Braithwaite 2004 p. 89). While some may find it controversial, I feel that small sets are conducive to overcoming these issues if teachers create a safe space to think and discuss literature.

I’ve also found that discussions go deeper in small groups, because of the intimacy and cohesion that a small group discussion creates. Bronfenbrenner explains the transformative link between relationships and achievement as an effect of the reciprocity in a ‘dyadic relation’. The concomitant mutual feedback of discussion generates momentum, which motivates participants to persevere and take on more difficult challenges, and this increases the pace and complexity of learning processes (1979 p. 57). Of course this process will only work if enough individuals are receptive and responsive enough to maintain the feedback loop, but the longer they do, the more they demonstrate trust and trustworthiness. What is striking about this interpersonal model is that it describes a learning process that generates its own direction and motivation without the imposition of formal targets. And this, in turn, leads to astonishing outcomes.

Caaliyah and the Witches

One example is a Somali girl I teach, who I’ll call Caaliyah. Caaliyah was put in a low ability set because she had disengaged with school and her written work had shown this for two years running. Her FFT is 5 (for what it’s worth), and her CAT score is average, however, her work was averaging a level 2.

So in year 10, she found herself in my class with an interesting bunch: some had complex medical conditions which severely challenged their short term memory and ability to communicate, others were challenged by severe dyslexia, or moderate learning difficulties plus EAL or Asperger’s which made them conceptually bright but not so great at writing clearly for a reader. Basically they were like the rest of us – substandard at some stuff, but with a label that advertised it in neon lights.

Caaliyah was horrified – she wanted to work her way back ‘up’ to the bigger ‘middle’ set. It didn’t matter that the teacher was less experienced or the class had more negative and destructive characters. It didn’t matter that she was actually getting more bang for the taxpayer’s buck, because she could get more personalised input, more live marking, more direct discussion with an informed, interested and challenging adult. The stigma was humiliating, and she wanted out.

But here’s the thing: she became paralysed by self-doubt when she began to write. Her brother had ended up in jail and she was the family’s last hope. Her relationship with her father was infuriating, putting her in dark, distracted moods. She was in a high achieving, mainly white middle class school where white girls interrogated her about her head scarf, and some white boys made obscene, bigoted comments about Muslims. No wonder she had a crisis of confidence when writing essays.

So I kept Caaliyah in my set, rewarded intelligent answers with tougher questions, and stayed with her after school till she got through essays she couldn’t finish in timed conditions. Or failed to submit for homework, though she cried in anger and shame at herself, for letting her family and herself down. We talked about the deep stuff – she was fascinated by the witches and Lady Macbeth. She, like Macbeth, had had a crisis of faith when she was younger – what those suffering from anxiety call ‘intrusive thoughts’. Her intrusive thoughts were not about killing a meek king, but about whether God was real or not. For Caaliyah, Godless women who exist only as reviled outcasts were powerful spectres.

Macbeth became a way to talk about these issues of faith – especially between the two Somali Muslim girls in my class. Shakespeare’s suggestion, via the witches prophesies, that our fates were predetermined angered them. But on the other hand, the prophesy about Birnam Wood and its arrival on Macbeth’s doorstep was designed, by Shakespeare and his witches, to give Macbeth his anagnorisis (moment of recognition and regret). In other words, the witches taught Macbeth to feel ashamed of his arrogance – they were doing God’s work. As Caaliyah noted – evil is God’s creation.

I recently marked Caaliyah’s Macbeth mock, which happened to be on the presentation of the supernatural. She wrote confidently, and originally, about her theory that supernatural evil was characterised by masculine traits: beards on the witches, Lady Macbeth’s famous ‘unsex me’ soliloquy, her commanding use of imperatives… Ultimately, she said, Shakespeare blamed masculinity which overstepped its bounds – not women. She got a 7. When I told her in private, she cried – only this time with happiness.

The weird thing? We’d never even talked about this particular theory of hers before – it was just her next logical step from the momentum of our class discussions.

Macbeth stuff for low ability

In the linked folder below is a PPT for low ability students in Open Dyslexic font on a light blue background (sceptic hiss heard faintly in background) with gap filling and matching galore. Basic comprehension and analysis is covered for the whole play – hope it’s helpful. Much of it was stolen from colleagues, AQA resources, revision guides, etc. Also a ‘WOOSH’ to introduce or recap plot and get kids into the ‘theatre’ of Macbeth. And some other bits along the way: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vabx9e4dp7gjx4m/AAAsx5o6LF9RDgdkBwsMOdY0a?dl=0