In the UK, the educational failure of Black and Ethnic Minority young people, is largely blamed not on systemic racism, but on a lack of ‘role models’. Multiple initiatives exist to diversify the teaching workforce justified on the basis of the need to provide more role models to inspire young people. These initiatives contain naïve assumptions of culture matching, and gender matching. They simplify the relationships between teachers and students to ones of mimicry and ignore the experiences of the teachers involved. A new study by Patricia Alexander (pictured), focuses on teachers’ experiences. In this post I summarise what she found when she spoke to Black and Ethnic Minority teachers who identify as role models.

Ansgar Allen read Heather’s blog on this site yesterday, with interest. It reminded him of a question he faced just recently, namely: What can be done to stop teachers abandoning the profession? This question is the starting point for this guest post from him.

 

 

We are now coming to the end of the reality TV series Tough Young Teachers. This show, screened by UK publicly-funded youth channel BBC Three, focuses on the lives of six beginning teachers in ‘challenging’ London schools. We see these new teachers taking their first lessons. We hear their frustrations and their triumphs. We follow their progress through the ups and downs of the year. This makes good television, as the number of excited tweets each week using #ToughYoungTeachers indicates. However, among the enthusiasm is a strand of critique and concern coordinated by TeacherROAR, for the show focuses not on any first year teachers but on those who enter teaching through a relatively small but rapidly expanding route into teaching: Teach First. Politically popular with both the Labour party and the Conservatives, Teach First brings many fantastic – mostly young – people into teaching. So why the resistance? While Michael Gove may see this as yet more evidence that many teachers are leftie ‘enemies of promise’ more interested in ideology than in supporting young people, in this post Heather shows why we really should be concerned about Teach First and its celebrity teachers.

On 15th October we held an interim workshop in which we shared our findings so far with practitioners drawn from a range of fields, including teaching, youth work, media and careers education. In the lovely surroundings of C4CC and with delicious food provided by Itadaki Zen, we discussed connections between our work and ways that findings from CelebYouth could be made useful for practitioners working with young people. Above you can see photographs of the event taken by Brunel’s Sally Trussler. You can watch videos of our presentations at the event below…

Jon Rainford is a Teacher of Art in a large Secondary School in Buckinghamshire. He came across the work of the Celeb Youth through their twitter account and through happy coincidence was at a digital sociology study day where some of the early findings were being discussed. This sparked an interest in finding out if these ideas resonated with the young people he works with in a pastoral role. In this blog post he describes what happens when he asked his teenage tutor group about celebrity culture…