Working Towards an Inclusive and Diverse KS4 (GA Conference - Lecture)

One of my favourite sessions at the GA Conference was Vice President Hina Robinson's brilliant session on increasing the inclusivity and diversity of our GCSE curriculums. She is a Rights Respecting Schools and Diversity Lead so the amount of knowledge she has on this topic is vast!

She started off by telling us that the diversity of students studying Geography post-16 and beyond is fairly limited, despite that not being the case at GCSE. And perhaps one of the reasons for this is that students don't necessarily feel represented in the GCSE curriculum.

Hina highlighted three things that would improve this...

• Eroding the 'them and us' culture that often exists in geography lessons
• Challenging stereotypes - unfortunately a lot of our texts are still full of these and whilst we can't change all resources, we can certainly challenge them!
• Deconstructing colonialism and imperialism (which we know so many of the geography teacher community are working on at the moment)

Hina didn't spend much time talking about why it was important to do these three things - we all know why we need to do these things. But many of us struggle with how to decolonise our curriculums, which is why this session was so good, as for the rest of the session Hina gave practical tips on what to think about for specific topics. I am going to have a quick look at a couple of human geography topics...

Urban issues

Hina talked about how it is really important to think about why you are teaching about particularly cities as part of the GCSE specification and communicate that to your students, and that it is really important to include the historical context of your chosen city - this might not be in the demands of the specification but it is essential for student understanding.

She also reminded us that one area of urbanisation where misconceptions are common why population growth has occurred - students often fail to link a high birth rate in LIC cities to the youthful population, and instead write about families having lots of children as they are economically valuable, or are needed to replace other children who have passed away - which is not appropriate for the urban context. They also make huge generalisations around migration, assuming that push and pull factors are the same everywhere - but what are the specific reasons that people migrated to the cities that you have chosen? These will be very different for your LIC/NEE city compared to your UK city. And many of those reasons will be linked to colonialism, so this should be something you talk about in class. But of course, many of you will be teaching students from backgrounds linked to colonialism - you need to acknowledge this!

Finally, we tend to focus hugely on the challenges of living in LIC/NEE cities without much balance in terms of the opportunities that these cities present - Hina suggested talking about them together as students remember the challenges more. We also need to think about those projects in place to improve quality of life in cities - and be able to critically evaluate them - are they working for everyone?

Development

This is probably the topic with the biggest opportunity to challenge stereotypes - Hina reminded us that we need to be able to critique measures of development - what do they tell us? What don't they tell us? Students need to understand that development isn't simply about the economy - they need to think about the social, political and environmental aspects too. Do you present alternative measures of development to your students?

Hina also highlighted as geographers we often depend on photos to deepen geographical understanding - but we need to be critical of photos representing levels of development, even trusted resources such as Dollar Street, which many of us love, need to have a critical eye glanced over them.

She also talked about discussing the causes of uneven development - we need to make sure students understand just what a huge role colonisation played in this. But we also need to be careful the talking about this if we are referring to us as a group as 'we', e.g. 'and we went over to Ghana and ....' - remember that you might have students in the room who are not part of the 'we', and are from countries that were deeply affected by colonialism. Hina reminded us of the importance of knowing the backgrounds of the countries that we are talking and gave the great example that many of us will have used before - that Mali is poor because of environmental factors (e.g. climate), completely oblivious to the fact that this is inaccurate because Mali was once the richest empire in the world - something I didn't know until I sat in Hina's session!

A few other key tips that came up were avoiding generalisations for whole countries (the Nigeria case study at GCSE is a great example of this), thinking about representativeness and 'white saviour concept' of aid projects, and that the impact of globalisation isn't as straight forward as good impacts in HICs and bad impacts in LICs.

Finally, she told us to use our students if appropriate - lots of you will have GCSE classes with really diverse backgrounds - and often those students are really happy to share their own knowledge of the places they are linked to.

Remember I have just talked about a couple of the topics discussed - you can (and should) download Hina's presentation here - scroll down to the Friday 13.50 session to find the link where you will find excellent tips for all topics at GCSE.