Multi-cultural Education
Skin analyses the impact and legacy of Multicultural Education.
Multicultural education was long considered a solution to the perceived attainment gap between West Indian students and other demographics. Originally conceived as a problem similar to the attainment gap faced by white working-class children, the expectation and consensus among the government and education authorities was that integration would gradually improve attainment levels in education for West Indian children.
In this edition of the LWT series Skin, leading West Indian educationalists (keen observers who would themselves come to be authors of educational policy) offer incisive perspectives on the effectiveness of multicultural education. They point out that it was not necessarily the fault of an ineffective curriculum but of prejudice within the teaching establishment and teachers who set low expectations for West Indian children. This was extensively documented in Bernard Coard's 1971 book, How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System.
The programme allows educators to reveal how schools have not sought to provide West Indian children with a robust learning environment - one of the critical findings of the influential 1981 Rampton report. Multicultural education began to take off. It purported to incorporate the diversity of the children's experiences to improve accessibility to learning material. Looking at Catford County Girls School as a test case, the programme investigates the efficacy of this change to the curriculum.
The legacy of discrimination in British schools had an enduring effect on the outcomes of Black children in education. This systemic discrimination was in recent times explored in the documentary Subnormal: A British Scandal by director Lyttanya Shannon and in the last episode of the historical drama Small Axe by Black British director Steve McQueen.
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How We Learned
From classroom to lecture hall to living room: a look at the many ways TV and video shaped our learning experiences over the years.
For most of us, the screen has been as much a part of our education as the blackboard or whiteboard. Early 20th century educators quickly saw that moving images could be a valuable teaching aid, and by the 1920s and 30s a thriving industry was delivering thousands of films for classroom use. By the 1960s, the small screen had largely taken over, and schoolkids would thrill at the sight of the teacher wheeling out a television set.
In the meantime, education was transforming, too, with grammar schools, secondary moderns and technical schools giving way to comprehensives, which in turn made room for academies and faith schools. Higher education swelled with new universities and polytechnics, while the Open University, launched in 1969, used video and television to reach students in their homes. Through television, informal learning has also helped those who missed out on traditional schooling, or who just want to expand their minds. Whether we spoke our first words along with onscreen puppets, studied along with Open University broadcasts or followed educational debates in current affairs programmes, television and video have always had a lot to teach us.
22 videos in this collection
1
2
Make It Count [22/01/78]
3
Elton Well Dressing
4
Bill Has Trouble with the Magic Box
5
Don't Ask Me [10/08/77]
6
School
7
School Leaver
8
Chalkface [04/07/82]
9
Adult Basic Skills: Entrance
10
Think Tank [18/08/81]
11
A New Choice of School
12
Children Talking 1 Assessing Spoken Language at Eleven
13
Teaching Science: Object Lessons
14
Able Children
15
Brighton Polytechnic Promo 2
16
Painting by Numbers
17
Multi-cultural Education
18
One Week in July
19
Introduction to Computers
20
Christmas Special
21
Dulwich College and Village
22