Conference Agenda

This symposium consistes of 3 papers.

Paper 1:

This paper presents the four-year (2015-2019) journey of Nabah, a young Bangladeshi-British Muslim woman. Her story lies on a spectrum that runs from being a ‘science refuser’, through ‘science hesitancy’ to ‘science responsive’, and then to being a ‘science habitue’. The group we call ‘science refusers’ is substantial in the UK. It includes those who are virulently anti-science, who, for example, believe the earth is flat, that the Covid19 pandemic is a government ploy to microchip the country’s population etc. (Watts, 2023). However, more germane to our discussion here, this group also contains people who find science inhibitively difficult, for whom science makes little or no sense at all. More importantly, for some, science is simply ‘not for them’ because they belong to racially and economically underprivileged British backgrounds, and so they reject science education/career status (Archer, 2018; Wells, Gill and McDonald, 2015). For this group, science is seen as counter-intuitive and fails any personal cost-benefit analysis. We have coined the term ‘dysciencia’ (Salehjee and Watts, in Production) to describe anti-science beliefs because ‘symptoms of disaffection…are grounded in a person’s functional worldview’ (Holton, 1993, p.145).

Paper 2:

This paper develops the inclusion of organizational hierarchy and contemporary leadership in discussions around the decolonisation of the curriculum by use of a critical realist approach (Thorpe, 2019) that helps to identify hierarchical fragility and the dominant leadership approaches that support hierarchy as a mechanism to justify privileges and maintain racism and other forms of injustice. The paper outlines how modern leadership’s roots can be traced back to the accounting practices of the slave plantations (Rosenthal, 2019) and managerialism (O’Reilly and Reed, 2010) with its wish to create and maintain hierarchy even in its discourses, such as collaborative leadership, that appear to offer liberation (Lumby, 2019). It then identifies how much energy has been expended in seeking to eradicate fragility in organizations with the goal of improving efficiency through ‘strong leadership’, before moving to link racism and hierarchy as constraints upon the decolonisation of the curriculum.

Paper 3

This paper calls for the continued raising of cultural awareness through diversity training at all levels of education, through kindergarten / nursery into further, higher and adult education (Race, 2015). Maria Montessori obtained her doctorate and worked at Sapienza University in the 1890s. Her approach to learning that focuses on developing independence amongst learners and personal development in the classroom is still very much applicable today. It is this application of the Montessori theory and method in Italian and international contexts that needs to be encouraged and developed (Williams, 2021; 2022). But that, or any development, has been affected by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The need to educationally adapt in unpredictable times provides both challenges and opportunities for professional practitioners. UNICEF (2020) encouraged the use of multiple delivery channels with 68 out of 127 countries reporting in relation to remote learning with Covid-19. Access to content is the key to remote learning but also to provide children with psychosocial support and encourage the safe use of technology. Gilead and Dishon (2022) talk about the possibilities or adapting educational practice, but future predicted crisis situations hinders both change and wider transformation. Within these European and Global climates, how to be continue to advocate multicultural dialogues within multicultural education?

In voicing Nabah’s story, we have aired the sense of a ‘dysciencia syndrome’, wherein people exhibit inability, incapacity, disinterest, low motivation and poor self-esteem in relation to the learning of science. Nabah’s a story, in Hanson’s (2008) words, is of a young woman swimming against the tide. To maintain the metaphor, while social waves roll over her, there also exists a powerful undertow of personal perceptions and beliefs. She began as a girl in science refusal, as dyscientic, and ended (so far) as a young woman in growing personal agency in science acceptance – moving from one end of our putative spectrum to the other. In this, it is also a story of a movement from self-exclusion to self-inclusion. Nabah’s future lies, of course, in the future. We sincerely hope that she succeeds in achieving her science habitué. We gathered a collection of Nabah’s self-perceptions through interviews between 2015 and 2019. Over these four years, we used several different methods to work with her, primarily collecting her self-told, reflective stories. Other approaches included six short questionnaires and classroom conversations between October 2015 and August 2017 that explored Nabah’s aspirations, engagement, perceptions about school and out-of-school science. In addition, we conducted two semi-structured interviews, one in August 2016 and the second in July 2017, and a further open-ended conversational interview in March 2019.

Archer, L. (2018). “An Intersectional Approach to Classed Injustices in Education: Gender, Ethnicity, ‘Heavy’ Funds of Knowledge and Working-Class Students’ Struggles for Intelligibility in the Classroom”. In Education and Working-Class Youth (pp. 155-179). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Charmaz, K. (1999). “Stories of suffering: Subjective tales and research narratives.” Qualitative health research 9(3): 362-382. Clandinin, D.J., & Connelly. F.M. (1998). “Stories to live by: Narrative understandings of school reform.” Curriculum inquiry 28(2): 149-164. Hanson, S. (2008). Swimming against the tide: African American girls and science education. Temple University Press. Holton, G.J. (1993). Science and anti-science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Salehjee, S., Watts, D.M. (In Production) Dysciencia to Science: The story of Nabah,. in Race, R. (Ed.) Evolving Dialogues in Multiculturalism and Multicultural Education. London, Open University Press. Wells, C., Gill, R., & McDonald, J. (2015). “‘Us foreigners’: Intersectionality in a scientific organization.” Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 34, 539–553. Watts, D.M. (2023) Science and anti-science. In Debates in Science Education, 2nd edition (pp. 85-98). London: Routledge.

When applying a critical realist approach to the decolonisation of the curriculum by drawing on the concept of white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) that exposes the hierarchical fragility in educational organizations that maintains social injustice and inequalities. In my contribution to a collection of proclamation and provocations about decolonising the curriculum, I argued that ‘the decolonising of the school curriculum must involve the removal of oppressive authority. A focus on the content of the curriculum is not enough unless aligned from the beginning with a challenge to hierarchy in schools and other education organisations… as learning about a liberating content when filtered through an oppressive authority will not decolonise the curriculum’ (Race et al., 2021, p. 89). Hypothetically, transforming authority has to produce a change in culture which will not only allow all education organisation to change in relation to decolonising curriculum but also addressing white privilege, thereby increasing understandings of colonising processes in different countries, but how we can use teaching and learning from top to bottom to address how we can transform education for a more social, multicultural and equitable profession (DiAngelo, 2021). A critical realist understanding of mechanisms and structure is used to connect Kellerman’s (2012) argument about the change in the balance of the power between leaders and followers that leaves the former more fragile with the concept of white fragility leads to a new understanding of fragility within hierarchy and how this works again the decolonisation of the curriculum, whilst acknowledging how appealing leadership discourses can be for those seeking curriculum reform and greater social justice. The ambiguity involved in the legitimation of hierarchy as a form of control embedded in struggles around matters of diversity and inequality (DiTomaso, 2021) is used to argue that things need not be as they are and that the challenge to hierarchy must remain an important aspect of all attempts to decolonise the curriculum.

DiAngelo, R. (2018) White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Boston: Beacon Press. DiAngleo, R. (2021) Nice Racism. How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, London, Allen Lane. Kellerman, B. (2012) The End of Leadership. New York: Harper Business. Lumby, J. (2019) Distributed Leadership and bureaucracy. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 47(1), pp. 5–19.  Race, R., Gill, D., Kaitell, E., Mahmud, A., Thorpe, A. and Wolfe, K. (2022) Proclamations and Provocations. Decolonising curriculum in education research and professional practice. Journal of Equity in Education and Society, 1(1), pp. 82–96. Rosenthal, C. (2018) Accounting for slavery: Masters and Management. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. Thorpe, A. (2019) Educational leadership development and women: insights from critical realism. International Journal of Leadership in Education 22(2), 135-147.

It is important to report that evolving dialogues continue in academic literatures relating to multiculturalism and multicultural education (Baptiste and Writer, 2021; Race, in Production). However, it would be naïve to belief how politics has shaped or moved policymaking to more integrationist and assimilationist based ideas. Within this paper we will look at the Trojan Horse affair, Fundamental British Values and the Prevent Policy and Channel Processes (Bi, 2020; Winter et al, 2022; Elwick and Jerome, 2019). Miah et al (2020: 232) argue that the Trojan Horse affair can be interpreted through the prism of ‘security as a discourse’; a discourse through which certain groups in society are securitised.’ What does this mean for groups that are ‘securitised’ or stigmatised? Fundamental British Values develops the debate. Britain contains four unique countries with four different education systems. FBV should be international in its education application but does the curricula and professional practice focus on one rather than four countries histories and cultures? Prevent and Channel also returns to how groups are ‘securitised’ with the fact that more Channel multi-agency groups are set up for extreme right-wing radicalisation concerns is greater than referrals for Islamist concerns (Home Office, 2023). Is this information being taught in schools and universities? Another important education issue to be highlighted is (under) performance in the classroom. Within wider international perspectives, the OECD (2018) focus on the nature of education performance and argue that the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged which develops from the age of 10 years old. The impact of well-being on performance is also examined. The report highlights that one in four of disadvantaged students across OECD countries are “socially and emotionally resilient”, meaning they are satisfied with their life, fell socially integrated at school and do not suffer text anxiety. In Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, the Netherlands and Switzerland, the share of such students is among the largest (30% or more) but in other European countries, including Bulgaria, Italy, Montenegro, Portugal and the United Kingdom, the share is comparatively small (less than 20%) (OECD, 2018). Specifically, we will look at the recent developments within the Ministry of Education and Merit in Rome, Italy to see whether recent education policy covers a multicultural, integrationist or assimilationist agendas (MoEM, 2023).

Home Office (2023) Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme statistics, 2021-2022, Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk), last accessed 29th January 2022. Ministry of Education and Merit (MoEM) (2023) Italian Government Home Page, Ministry of Education and Merit - Miur, last accessed 31st January 2023. Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD) (2018) Equity in Education: breaking down barriers to social mobility, Equity in Education: Breaking Down Barriers to Social Mobility | en | OECD, last accessed 7th November 2022. OECD (2021) Better Life Index – Italy, OECD Better Life Index, last accessed 7th November 2022. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) (2020) Promising practices for equitable remote learning Emerging lessons from COVID-19 education responses in 127 countries, IRB 2020-10.pdf (unicef-irc.org), last accessed 13th October 2022. Williams, M. (2021) The Contribution of “A Sister of Notre Dame” and the “Nun of Calabar” to Montessori Education in Scotland, Nigeria and Beyond. Rivista di Storia dell Educazione 8(2): 123-134. doi: 10.36253/rse-10344m, last accessed 13th October 2022. Williams, M. (2022) Becoming an International public intellectual: Maria Montessori before the Montessori Method, 1882 -1912/, British Journal of Educational Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2022.2108757, last accessed 13th October 2022.