Five years on from Black Lives Matter: The fading echo of curriculum change

Adrian Fernandes

Five years after the Black Lives Matter movement reignited powerful student demands to diversify the English literature curriculum, Writers Make Worlds reviews where we stand now. Our initiative, which rose from diversification interests emerging in the 2010s, reported on the Oxford protests as they happened. The conclusion is clear: the vibrant, student-led energy that pushed for a literature syllabus reflecting students’ lives has collided with institutional rigidity. The promise of 2020 has faded, stifled by deeply embedded barriers.

In 2020, the demand for change was unignorable. Students and young people, with London organisers as young as 18 and 21, orchestrated the largest antiracist uprising in decades. Their emails to headteachers offered detailed critiques, linking the white literary canon to colonial history and systemic racism. For a moment, transformative change seemed an exciting possibility.

Today, that momentum has been absorbed. Recent research with English teachers reveals that, whilst examination boards expanded reading lists, the crucial architecture for implementation was not built. Teachers report a vacuum of training and material resources, forcing a return to (in one participant’s words) a “tried and tested” canon. The white canonical texts by Dickens, Priestley and Stevenson are in the book cupboard, and their familiar schemes of work offer a safe bet in a system that prizes examination grades.

The entire burden of enacting curriculum change was placed upon individual teachers, who simultaneously navigated institutional hostility. Some faced performative allyship – schools that, as one participant said, “chatted a lot but acted little.” Others encountered direct retaliation for their efforts to create change. One teacher, who found a lack of representation after a curriculum audit, was directly threatened by their manager with the words, “If you show this to anyone, I will see you fired.” Where support for addressing change did occur, minoritised teachers were often saddled with unpaid diversity labour, automatically positioned as “the race expert” against their will.

Back in 2020, the profound student engagement with representative texts was neatly reflected in one participant’s joyful remark on reading a minoritised text: “This story feels like my family!” Now, without the institutional will to provide resources, training and support, possibilities for change seem to have dwindled. The secondary education system awaits sufficient courage and support to execute change in a more thoroughgoing and meaningful way.On 9 June 2020, over a thousand protestors gathered on Oxford’s High Street in front of Oriel College’s statue of Cecil John Rhodes, calling for its removal. An offshoot of a wave of protests that have swept the globe following the murder in the US of George Floyd, the protest represented a resurgence of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement’s Oxford chapter, 2014-16, which asked the College to remove the statue of the former imperialist whose controversial past is often associated with ambitions of white supremacy and the atrocities of imperialism.

Up to two hours before the protest, the only clue that it was imminent was the quantity of journalists and the police, whose presence around the statue could be felt throughout, with police horses down each of the side alleys and vans regularly patrolling up and down. However, as 5 o’clock approached, peaceful protestors started to congregate around the statue. The street, originally meant to stay open, was steadily blocked up as chants such as ‘Rhodes must Fall’, and ‘Decolonise’ started to reverberate around the street. Placards and banners bore such important messages as ‘Silence=Violence’ and, resonantly for this website Writers Make Worlds, ‘Postcolonial Attitudes Matter’.

The various speakers, amongst them Oxford’s own Associate Professor of African Politics, Simukai Chigudu, repeated messages conveyed in a letter written by the city councillors that ‘the presence of this statue on our high street is incompatible with our city’s proud internationalist heritage and commitment to anti-racism’, whilst also making broader points about the institutional racism that still plagues systems worldwide, not least in Britain.

Perhaps the most impactful scene of the day, however, was that of the protestors all sitting down or taking a knee for the length of time, 8 minutes and 46 seconds that it took for George Floyd to be brutally suffocated by police. The buzz and chanting that had made the street so loud previously was replaced within seconds by a respectful silence that was maintained throughout, as the protesters reflected on the embodiment of Oxford’s colonial history that stood before them, and the changes that would surely follow in the coming months.

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An open educational resource hub for Black and Asian British writing today

Five years on from Black Lives Matter: The fading echo of curriculum change

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