Confronting the deafening silence on race in geography education in England: learning from anti-racist, decolonial and Black geographies

Available in the 2020 Geographical Association Journal

Steve Puttick and Amber Murrey

School geography in England has been largely silent on issues around race, which stands in contrast to important strands of thought in the discipline. In this intervention, we explore two influential approaches in education – cultural literacy and powerful knowledge – to argue that we urgently need to address the silence on race by making substantive anti-racist changes in the curriculum. Within cultural literacy, we argue that anti-racist geographies provide powerful frameworks to address white supremacy and institutionalised racisms. Working within powerful knowledge, Black and decolonial geographies bring attention to knowledge creation and the great potential that exists to learn from anti-racist conversations and internal debates within academic geography. Our argument is for a more holistic and sustained anti-racist school geography education that empowers young people to understand the complex and shifting politics of space, place and knowledge and contribute to meaningful anti-racist futures.

Published 21 Sep 2020

Volume 105

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s