In my keynote at SecEd’s recent National SEND and Inclusion Conference, I began by exploring an aspect of inclusion that is not often discussed and debated – the effects of photonism on students with legatis.
I explained that photonism had an adverse impact on all students with SEND but that those with legatis were disproportionately affected. I referenced some data to prove the point but was met with a sea of blank faces.
And so I sought out a useful comparison: I said that the line on the graph I was referring to was similar in shape to the outline of the famous New Fountainville building in Smithson Square, Newmanham.
The chimney on the left represents those students with legatis – a clear outlier in the data, thus underlining the detrimental impact of photonism on these students.
As my audience frantically searched online, fearing they’d missed an important aspect of SEND affecting some students, I came clean – I’d made it all up. There is no such thing as photonism nor legatis.
So, why did I talk such gibberish?
I wanted my audience, a couple of hundred experienced SENCOs and school leaders, to know first-hand what it felt like to be excluded from the curriculum.
They had no prior knowledge of photonism nor legatis – as they are made-up terms! – and so they did not feel included in my classroom. The content of my “lesson” meant nothing to them; it didn’t talk to their prior knowledge or life experiences.
Some of them told me afterwards that they had panicked because they had feared they’d missed something important; others said they’d shrunk into their seats, scared of being the only person in the room not to possess some vital prior knowledge.
Of course, we often impart information to students in class with which they are unfamiliar. That’s why they are at school, after all: to encounter new information and learn new skills.
But to help them access and process what is new, we often make use of analogies and metaphors to compare the unfamiliar to the familiar. In other words, we help students to connect their prior knowledge to new knowledge, to forge new schema or mental maps.
That’s why I compared the data with which my audience was unfamiliar (because I had invented it) to something familiar and concrete – the New Fountainville building in Smithson Square.
But that analogy didn’t work either. Why? Because I’d made that up too: there is no such building or place. And so, my analogy didn’t “land” either.
My audience could not use their prior knowledge of the outline of a familiar building because that prior knowledge was not present in their long-term memory.
In this case, it was my design but often in our classrooms this happens by accident because we are unaware of the gaps in students’ prior knowledge and life experiences.
Knowledge begets knowledge. The more you know, the easier it is to know more. But the opposite is also true: the less you know, the harder it is to know more. And thus, the students who start school at a disadvantage in terms of their prior knowledge (what some would call “cultural capital”) are further disadvantaged by the school system and fall further and further behind.
In order to include the excluded, therefore, I posit a three-point plan.
Step 1: Assess starting points and fill gaps in prior knowledge
The first step towards including the excluded is to be more mindful of our students’ prior knowledge and starting points – or rather the gaps in their prior knowledge – and then work hard to fill those gaps.
This might require the pre-teaching of key concepts or words; it might necessitate the use of adaptive teaching strategies such as task-scaffolding to make our curriculum accessible to all, and it might entail the provision of additional interventions such as mentoring or funded access to extra-curricular activities to help equip students with the cultural capital they lack.
Step 2: Make sure the curriculum reflects learners’ lived experiences
The second step towards including the excluded is to ensure that the content of our curriculum reflects our students’ own lives and experiences. We want them to see themselves and their world mirrored in our curriculum so that they can access it, process it, understand it, and know that it talks to them.
This might take the form of ensuring greater levels of representation – both in the content we teach (the topics we choose to cover and the texts and resources we use to help deliver that content) and the examples we deploy in our daily teaching (such as analogies, metaphors, and stories); but it might also require us to think about how representative our school staff are of our students.
Do students see themselves not only in what is taught but also in who teaches them?
Step 3: Make sure the curriculum takes students beyond their lived experiences
The third step towards including the excluded is to ensure our curriculum celebrates diversity because mirroring our students’ lived experiences isn’t enough.
Once we have made sure our curriculum – and the examples we use to illustrate that curriculum – are more representative of our students, we then need to take our students beyond their lived experiences, to visit new worlds and meet new people, to celebrate differences and diversity.
This might mean rethinking our curriculum to ensure it challenges students’ preconceptions and prejudices, and that it promotes empathy and tolerance; it might mean decolonising our curriculum and including more voices from across the social strata and from as many different cultures as possible.
What does this look like in practice?
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on steps 2 and 3. Regarding step 2, recent research from the National Literacy Trust (Picton & Clark, 2022) on diversity found that 39% of children and young people think it’s difficult to find books with characters or people like them.
Meanwhile, 35% of children and young people from white backgrounds say they struggle to see themselves in what they read, increasing to 45% of those from black ethnic backgrounds.
More than 2 in 5 (42.5%) of those receiving free school meals report finding it difficult to see themselves in books compared with just over 1 in 3 (35.2%) of their peers who do not receive free school meals.
And the same is also true of our school curriculum. The already disadvantaged or disenfranchised are further excluded by a curriculum that does not talk to them.
One strategy we can use to ensure our curriculum talks to our students’ lived experiences is schema theory. A schema is a mental structure or framework that helps students organise and interpret information.
Schemas influence how people perceive, think about, and remember information. Schemas can be activated automatically and unconsciously, which means they can influence our perceptions and behaviours without us realising it.
For example, if someone has a schema for a restaurant, they might automatically think of certain things such as tables, chairs, menus, waiters, and food. This schema helps them quickly recognise and understand new restaurants they encounter. Schemas can also be influenced by cultural and social factors, as well as individual differences. For instance, someone from a particular culture might have a different schema for a family than someone from another culture.
In their 1997 book Mosaic of Thought, Keene and Zimmerman argue that students understand curriculum content better when they make three kinds of connections:
- Text-to-self: Connections are made when students make highly personal associations between what is being taught in class and their own lived experiences.
- Text to text: Connections are made when students are reminded of other parts of the curriculum and of their prior knowledge on the same or similar subject.
- Text-to-world: Connections are made when students make larger associations between what is being taught in class and the world beyond their own lived experiences from knowledge that might have been garnered from television and films, newspapers and magazines, and the internet and social media.
However, in their 2000 book Strategies That Work: Teaching comprehension to enhance understanding, Harvey and Goudvis warn that merely making connections is not enough because students may make tangential connections that confuse and distract them from the information at hand. Accordingly, students need to be challenged to analyse how their connections are contributing to their understanding of the curriculum.
Regarding step 3, as I say above, once we have made sure our curriculum reflects our students’ lived experiences, we then need to make sure it takes them beyond those experiences...
The best schools reflect their local communities; they bring their communities into their schools and take students out into those communities. The best schools also look beyond their local communities and regard themselves as part of the national and international conversation. These schools teach students how to be active members of their communities and how to be good citizens of the world.
We can help students move beyond their lived experiences by ensuring the texts we teach include role models from all walks of life, and that the examples and case studies we use include minority voices.
We can bring a diverse range of people into our school to give guest talks and to co-teach parts of the curriculum, and we can take students out of school to visit the corners of our community – or the wider world – that would otherwise be out-of-bounds to them.
Final thoughts
Curriculums that are reflective of students’ own lives lend credence to those lives and make them feel included and – for want of a better word – “normal” or accepted. But curriculums that are also reflective of other lives different from students’ own help them to understand how other people live and lend empathy and compassion.
In other words, a good curriculum acts as a mirror – reflecting students’ lives back at them so they feel included – and as a window – allowing students to see other lives different from their own so they appreciate diversity.
- Matt Bromley is an education journalist, author, and advisor with 25 years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher. He remains a practising teacher. Matt is the author of numerous books on education and co-host of the award-winning SecEd Podcast. Find him on X (Twitter) @mj_bromley. Read his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/matt-bromley
Further information & resources
- Picton & Clark: Seeing yourself in what you read: diversity and children and young people’s reading in 2022, NLT, 2022: https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/seeing-yourself-in-what-you-read-diversity-and-children-and-young-peoples-reading-in-2022/