Innovating Racial Literacy Teaching
I am working with Dr Christine Winter and Dr Yinka Olusoga on a project that aims to raise awareness of racial literacy and to address issues of racism underpinning whole school geography. We hope to be able to make some recommendations to support student teachers and their ITE mentors to develop anti-racist teaching resources for geography classrooms which will benefit school geography pupils.
Research has been qualitative, through the use of interviews, yielding very rich data. We have analysed some of the published resources used in schools, such as examination questions and textbooks. We have also created a resource to support student teachers and their mentors in exploring issues of racial literacy in the classroom.
In analysing our data we have adopted a thematic analysis to review the transcripts from the interviews of student teachers and ITE mentors. We have used a form of discourse analysis, the discourse historical approach, to examine some of the published resources used in schools.
We are beginning to disseminate preliminary findings, initially through three conferences: the APSE MA Conference at the University of Sheffield (January 2023); the Geography Teacher Educators’ Conference online (January 2023) and the Geographical Association Conference at Sheffield Hallam University (April 2023).
