Working Their Way Into the "Circle of Trust": Black Boys' Experiences of Education in London

• In Event: 33.069 - Moving Beyond the Bricks: Using Educational Documentary and Dialogue to Address the Challenges of Reaching and Teaching Black Male Students in the United States and England

Abstract

The latest UK report to investigate the situation of Black boys (REACH group, 2007) was commissioned by the department for local government, not that for education. Although it echoed previous concerns (London Development Agency, 2004; Gillborn and Gipps, 1996), that Black male students were more likely to face negative experiences of schooling, and fared less well in educational achievement, although statistics showed some improvements in the latter, schools featured in only one of their five recommendations, and they entrusted change to the official schools’ inspectorate, which does not have a reputation for promoting social justice. Experienced academics have continued to voice their concerns about Black male students’ unjust challenges (Ladson-Billings, 2011) yet Government seems to be complacent, so we wanted to see if Black boys themselves would be confident that their chances were improving and their experiences were positive and just. This was therefore a phenomenographic study of what the boys perceived to be their reality, not their response to a specific intervention.

The focus group interviews took place after showing the film ‘Beyond the Bricks’ in one inner-city London boys’ school, where c65% of the boys come from Black backgrounds. The school had a difficult time ten years ago, falling into the government category of failed schools, but had shown significant improvements in the last five years: inspectors had considered it ‘good’ in the most recent inspection (January 2013). The forty-two Black boys were volunteers from the older years, and were divided into mixed-age focus groups, each led by one of the academics in the team; two were Black women academics, one British and the other American, and the third was a white British male academic, who was known to some of the boys because he works as a consultant to the school’s social sciences faculty, and also had met some of the boys working with a Black male English teacher whom many of them liked and trusted. It was felt that these three adults would be able to secure the trust and engagement of the boys in quite long focus group discussions, of about ninety minutes each.

There were four key themes that emerged from the data about the Black male students: their engagement with family; their engagement with teachers; their engagement with literacy and academic study; their engagement with themselves as young men in British society. The paper reports on each of these aspects, but here we mention just two significant points that emerged. Firstly, the young men were clear that teachers needed to fulfill a role in their lives that went beyond ‘curriculum delivery’: “they have to support you as a man… ” and “it’s just all the presence of bonds.. you (teacher) have to welcome them (Black boys) with open arms.”. Secondly they encountered some teachers who would not initially regard them as equal to white students: “you had to work your way into her kind of circle of trust.” The findings are significant in challenging the complacency of the ‘color-blind post-racial’ thinking of too many schools and teachers.

Author

• Robin Whitburn, Institute of Education - London