Changing English

Studies in Culture and Education

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‘Miss, What’s Colonialism?’: Confronting the English

Literary Heritage in the Classroom

Humayra Iffath

To cite this article: Humayra Iffath (2020) ‘Miss, What’s Colonialism?’: Confronting
the English Literary Heritage in the Classroom, Changing English, 27:4, 369-382, DOI:
10.1080/1358684X.2020.1804323

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2020.1804323

Published online: 08 Sep 2020.

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CHANGING ENGLISH
2020, VOL. 27, NO. 4, 369–382
https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2020.1804323

‘Miss, What’s Colonialism?’: Confronting the English Literary

Heritage in the Classroom
Humayra Iffath
Institute of Education, University College London, London, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay explores some of the problems that emerge from the Literary heritage;
imposition of a very narrow conception of the English literary colonialism; mediation;
heritage on pupils across England. It considers the role of govern­ identity; representation;
resistance
ment and school policy – and of teachers and pupils – in mediating
set texts, and the ways in which problematic aspects of these texts
are questioned and resisted in the classroom.

Culture and the curriculum

For young people living in England, standardised testing means that almost every pupil –
however varied their experience of schooling may otherwise be – will eventually encoun­
ter the same few texts as part of their compulsory secondary education; namely, those on
the GCSE syllabus for English Literature. The GCSE specification characterises literature
as providing pupils with the ‘chance to develop culturally and acquire knowledge of the
best that has been thought and written’ (DfE 2013, 3). Yet its conception of ‘the best that
has been thought and written’ is limited to works ‘originally written in English’ and
privileges plays by Shakespeare, 19th century novels, poetry since 1789 and fiction or
drama from the British Isles from 1914 onwards, all with the aim of teaching pupils to
‘appreciate the depth and power of the English literary heritage’ (DfE 2013, 3). The
English literary heritage, then, is established as being rooted in works written in the
English language and, specifically, by writers from the British Isles – a position that, in
overlooking cultural production from former British colonies and the wider world,
ignores Britain’s colonial past and historical relationships with other nations.
This conception strikes me as evidence of what Bill Schwarz refers to as ‘a peculiarly
English fundamentalism’ – whereby, for the native English in a postcolonial world,
England (and, by extension, English language and culture – or ‘Englishness’) becomes
‘particular and exclusive’ and the source, ‘fundamentally, of meaning itself’; whatever
‘fails to conform to expectations of the nation – however these are to be conceived:
however random, however hallucinogenic – is rendered meaningless’ and relegated ‘to an
outer circle of darkness’ (Schwarz 2017). With regards to literature, Lucinda Newns
suggests that this attitude

CONTACT Humayra Iffath humayra.iffath.19@ucl.ac.uk

© 2020 The editors of Changing English
370 H. IFFATH

has a lot to do with England’s colonial past and the central role that English literature played
in shoring up ‘Englishness’ abroad, but it also has to do with the continuing perception in
the UK that non-white populations are newcomers, making them seem like ‘add-ons’ to the
established canon of ‘Great English Literature.’ (Newns 2014)

In ascribing ‘depth and power’ to its very specific version of the English literary heritage,
then, the national curriculum is perpetuating a narrative that is reminiscent of the
colonial era whereby other cultures are forcibly excluded from what it means to be
English and construed as indisputably inferior. This discounts the fact that British society
in the present day is multicultural – largely due to the legacy of colonialism – and that the
pupils who encounter set texts in the classroom will be from diverse backgrounds. In
positioning these texts as the source of culture and pupils as passive consumers of this, it
also ignores the fact that every pupil will bring a range of different cultural experiences to
their study; they ‘will, whether one likes it or not, arrive in the classroom [. . .] with
histories that will form their school identities and the sense that they make of school
knowledge’ (Yandell 2020). The position of each pupil as someone who also exists as an
individual in wider society is one that cannot simply be erased.
This conception of literature as it should be taught across the nation is, of course,
construed differently by different schools and further mediated by individual teachers in
the classroom. In this essay, I will consider some of the possibilities and problems that
emerge from different conceptions of what should be taught in English lessons, through
the lens of my experience, during my PGCE year, of teaching texts that fall within the
government’s remit of the English literary heritage but deal with the intersection of
‘Englishness’ and the ‘outer circle of darkness’.

Classroom conversations
In the last month of my first secondary experience [SE1] placement, I began teaching The
Sign of Four to my Year 10 class. This was the first GCSE text I had been trusted with
(aside from a single lesson on Macbeth) and I was looking forward to expanding my
limited experience of teaching older secondary pupils. I was excited about the opportu­
nity to introduce the text to the class and thus discover it with them, exploring it in light
of their – and my – wider experiences of the world.
The Sign of Four is a Sherlock Holmes story featuring a missing Indian treasure and the
search, by the descendants of two Englishmen formerly stationed in India, to recover it.
(There seems no question on the part of the detectives that the rightful owners of the treasure
are, indeed, these two Englishmen and/or their progeny, but this is a conversation for another
time.) The first chapter introduces the detectives; the second introduces the case.
During our class reading of the second chapter, we came across Miss Mary Morstan’s
introduction of her father as ‘an officer in an Indian regiment’ (Conan Doyle [1890]
2019, 8).

CHRISTIAN1: Oh, so was he Indian?

ME: No, he was English, but India was a British colony at the time so many Englishmen were
stationed there as soldiers. Colonialism meant that many English people were born in India,
like Miss Mary Morstan.
 DECOLONISING ENGLISH 371

[Maira slowly puts her hand up]

ME: Yes, Maira?

MAIRA: Miss, what’s colonialism?

ME: . . .

In that moment, confronted by this question from a pupil nearing the end of her
secondary education, I was unable to frame an answer that explained, in simple terms, the
meaning of colonialism. I could not reduce years of studying and thinking and debating
into a single definition that might satisfy Maira but would not do justice to the sig­
nificance I believe learning about the history and legacy of colonialism has. I appealed to
the rest of the class:

ME: Who can help Maira out? Who knows what colonialism is?

Not a single pupil answered. Not a single pupil even attempted to (and there were
pupils in this class who were not shy about venturing answers they were not sure of). And
I could not find it in myself to be surprised. How could I hold the pupils in this classroom
responsible for not knowing something they had never been taught? How, when the
national curriculum did not (does not) provide space for explicitly teaching about
Britain’s colonial history and relationships with other cultures, could I really expect
these pupils to have heard of colonialism? And how, when the education system was
designed in such a way, could I do my job as their teacher?
A large part of my dismay was rooted in the fact that this school was in Newham,
minutes away from the docks where slave ships once arrived in London, and where –
within our parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes – ships carrying cargo from the colonies
landed (White 2020). Although the twenty-two pupils in the class were of diverse back­
grounds, at least twenty-one had heritage from former colonies (British or otherwise);
approximately half of the class were classed as ‘newly-arrived’, having not completed
their primary education in the UK. Regardless, the fact remained that – whatever their
heritage – these pupils were living and growing up in Newham, in Britain, in a society
that has been shaped by colonial exploitation, by slavery, by racism, a society where UK
taxpayers’ money was being used to compensate former slaveowners and their descen­
dants as recently as 2015 (Manjapra 2018). Surely this is a history that should have been
addressed at some point during these pupils’ schooling?
I do not remember if or how I answered Maira’s question in that lesson. Instead,
I remembering enquiring if the class had maybe learnt about colonialism in History,
and – in the face of many blank stares and shaking heads – setting a homework task to
research colonialism before our next lesson together.
After the lesson, I relayed my experience to other teachers in the department (none of
whom seemed particularly surprised that pupils in Year 10 had never encountered the
concept of colonialism in the course of their formal education).

YVONNE: Wow. So now you’ve got to teach them colonialism?

EMMA: You seem really concerned. Why are you stressing about this?
372 H. IFFATH

ME: I think what I’m worried about with teaching about colonialism is I don’t know how to
do it in a way that’s not just Colonialism Is Bad.

What I could not adequately explain to my colleagues was an anxiety that arose from
my having to stand before a class as a visible, embodied representation of the formerly
colonised and somehow articulate – in a balanced, nuanced way – the meaning of
something that impacted, and continues to impact, the lives and deaths of millions.
Colonialism is inextricably linked to identity and my heightened awareness of my
embodied presence in the classroom as a person of colour made me question the ‘cultural
credibility’ my teaching about colonialism would have (Hippisley 2019). I had little desire
to be accused of ‘making everything about colonialism’, a frequent comment from my
undergraduate days when there was a clear demographic difference in students who
chose optional postcolonial modules and those who avoided them – I worried that the
inclusion of anything that did not substantiate the national curriculum’s conception of
‘the depth and power of the English literary heritage’, even as it related to a heritage text,
would be construed as wilfully tangential.
Thinking back to my own school days, I struggled to remember colonialism being
explicitly addressed in any subject – despite the fact that I attended a state school in the
inner-London borough of Tower Hamlets, where the vast majority of my schoolmates
were, like me, of Bengali heritage, with family histories (including the very fact that that
we were living and growing up in London) shaped in many ways by the colonial
relationship between Britain and India and the lasting ramifications of this – until, in
Year 9, my class had an Australian History teacher. As someone who grew up in a former
colony and therefore had a very different understanding of Britain’s sense of itself and its
relationships with other nations, she was able to present us with a different historical
perspective, an alternative narrative to the one we had encountered in our studies thus
far. She, coming from outside our education system, was able to identify flaws in it that
she attempted to address when she later became Head of Department [HoD] – she
shaped the GCSE and A-level History modules that many of us went on to take with
a focus on British colonialism. Of course, she was still limited by the topics on offer in the
first place – we would, after all, be assessed according to the national curriculum.
I remember her expressing a desire to teach us about various countries and conflicts
that she felt were important, and regret about not being able to ‘fit them in’.
If these were the challenges facing a HoD, what could I hope to achieve as a mere
student teacher? I felt responsible for properly introducing colonialism to my pupils, but
I was not sure how to go about this. Fortunately, the edition of The Sign of Four that we
were using as a class included a preface. Under the sub-heading ‘Empire’, I found:

In 1890 London was the capital of the largest political and economic power in the world, the
British Empire, which controlled around a quarter of the world’s population.

While today many question the legacy of European colonialism (the policy of extending rule
over other territories between the late 15th and mid-20th centuries), for most Victorians ‘the
empire on which the sun never set’ was a source of pride.

Not only that: ‘all things Indian’ were fashionable, as attested by the settings of both The Sign
of Four and The Moonstone, also about a stolen Indian treasure. (Toop 2019, in Conan Doyle
[1890] 2019, vi)
 DECOLONISING ENGLISH 373

This seemed a straightforward way of introducing colonialism to the class: it presented

a basic summary of what colonialism entailed, it referenced the fact that the colonial
legacy is a point of contention in the present day, and it related these concepts directly to
the text we were studying. I used this, and the research that pupils did for homework, as
the basis for class discussion in our next lesson.
A few lessons later, we came across our first character of colour in the text, when Holmes
and co. visit a home in London and the door is opened by a ‘Hindoo’ servant (Conan Doyle
[1890] 2019, 15).

ZAHRA: Wait, how do they know he’s Hindu?

IOAN: He’s probably wearing Hindu clothes.

ME: What do you mean, Hindu clothes? What are Hindu clothes?

IOAN: I don’t know, like [gestures] the turban?

ME: Is it only Hindu people who wear turbans?

ZAHRA: Probably he’s Indian and they don’t know the difference.

Zahra’s objection to Conan Doyle’s use of the term ‘Hindoo’ here likely arose from her
understanding of what it means to be Indian in relation to her own identity. Zahra has
heritage from the Indian subcontinent and is a Muslimah; she therefore questioned the
assumption that the Indian servant must necessarily be Hindu. Her analysis went beyond the
mere description of the character and addressed the contemporaneous custom of referring to
Indians as ‘Hindoo’ apparently indiscriminately and with little appreciation for cultural or
religious diversity. This interjection created space for me to share my own reflections on
British society’s seeming ignorance of the rich histories that existed before colonial contact.
I had gotten pretty passionate on the subject when Kayla put up her hand. As she often
refused to participate in class activities, I was happy to see her seemingly engaged in the
discussion.

ME: Yes, Kayla?

KAYLA: Miss, are you Indian?

ME: No. [pause] Not that that’s relevant in any way!

My initial response to Kayla’s question was an automatic negative, but the question
struck me as insinuating that my passion for defending the richness of Indian culture in the
era before British rule could only have come from a personal relationship with that culture.
Kayla had never asked me about my cultural heritage before but had obviously felt it to be
pertinent in this moment. Of course, she may simply have been attempting to establish my
credibility on the topic – had I identified myself as Indian, and therefore more of an
authority on Indian culture, she may have ascribed more value to my opinion on the
richness of this culture pre-colonialism. Either way, I felt I had to qualify my initial response
as being irrelevant – I wanted to emphasise that learning about the richness of different
cultures is something everyone should be invested in, irrespective of their own background.
It occurred to me much later that there might have been some value in delving into my
personal relationship to the term ‘Indian’. I could have answered Kayla’s question by
374 H. IFFATH

invoking a history of conflict, referencing the divisions established and exacerbated by the
British Raj, the resistance to and end of colonial rule, the partition of India, the creation of
Pakistan and the eventual independence of Bangladesh. I could have brought up the
concept of economic migration to so-called ‘first world’ countries such as the UK being a
consequence of the lasting impact of colonialism on generations of people whose ancestors
would have been classified as Indian. Exploring the complexity of my personal relationship
with colonial history in this way might have enabled my pupils to begin thinking about and
interrogating their own.
Another moment of contention arose in a lesson where we encountered the descrip­
tion of the young children whom Holmes employs as spies as ‘street Arabs’ (Conan Doyle
[1890] 2019, 48).
CHRISTIAN: Were there Arabs in England then?

ME: Oh, they’re not ethnically Arab. ‘Arab’ is used here as a derogatory term – I think it’s in
reference to their skin being so covered in dirt they look dark.

CHRISTIAN: But that’s racist! That’s like saying all Arabs are dirty.

ME: Yes, well, British society was very racist.

CHRISTIAN: How come we’re even reading this book, man?

For Christian, the text’s racism here disrupts his assumed position as an objective
reader; his experience of living as a person of colour in a racialised society means he
identifies more with the Arabs the text is referring to derogatorily than the expected
readerly position that does not object to this derogatory reference. His questioning the
presence of this text on his course of study is, of course, entirely valid. As Chinua Achebe
states in reference to the racism inherent in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ‘the
question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes
a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot’
(Achebe 2016, 21). Whilst The Sign of Four may not be celebrating dehumanisation in
quite the same way as Achebe describes, the novel’s treatment of difference is obviously
problematic, and Christian is perfectly within his rights to question the place it has been
given in his classroom.
A simple answer to Christian’s question might have been that the text was one of those
on the GCSE syllabus and the HoD had chosen it for pupils at this school. I feel, however,
that in questioning why we were studying the text Christian was really questioning the
value that he felt it was being ascribed – by the government, by his school, and by me, his
teacher. Although I would (and do) argue against such a text being privileged in the way
that it currently is, I am reluctant to advocate for its removal off the curriculum entirely;
I believe it is important to consider the text’s place as a historical artefact. Walter
Benjamin argues that ‘[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same
time a document of barbarism’ (Benjamin 1955/1970, 258), and while the barbarism of
a particular document may shock or discomfit, surely it is necessary to recognise this
barbarism – to recognise the racism evident in The Sign of Four, and to consider this
alongside its place as very much a part of the English literary heritage?
Edward Said proposes ‘contrapuntal reading’; he argues that the reader of a text ‘must
open it out both to what went into it and what its author excluded’, making ‘an effort to
 DECOLONISING ENGLISH 375

draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or
ideologically represented’ (Said 1993, 78–79). The burden is on the reader to be aware of
the context in which the author is writing and the fact that the values reflected in the text
are situated in this specific time and place. For pupils in a classroom, since texts are
mediated through their teachers, their schools, and the policy-makers who determine
their curriculum in the first place, I would argue that the onus falls on these people to
ensure sufficient context is provided for pupils to be able to read contrapuntally – that is,
to acknowledge the meanings that are evident whilst simultaneously being aware of
meanings that may have been ignored or erased.
The questions raised in these conversations with my Year 10 class made me consider
the topics and texts taught across other year groups at this school. I reflected on a six-
week scheme of work I had just finished with my Year 8 class on poetry about London.
This had consisted of studying one poem every week – William Blake’s ‘London’,
Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Ruined Maid’, William Wordsworth’s ‘Composed Upon
Westminster Bridge’, Kayo Chingonyi’s ‘Grief’ and Grace Nichols’ ‘Island Man’ – with
the final week reserved for assessment. It was the department’s first time teaching this
particular scheme of work, so at the end of the six weeks the HoD called a meeting to
discuss the experience and to enable teachers to share ideas and resources for next time.
When teachers brought up the difficulty of finding resources on Chingonyi’s poem –
none of us had been able to find it online in either written or oral form – the HoD
remarked that this poem had mainly been added to the anthology as ‘a bit of flavour’.
I was taken aback by this throwaway comment; it bothered me especially since the
scheme of work had clearly been designed out of some sense that it would be good for
pupils to explore London’s literary history in light of the school’s inner London location.
Given that pupils of African or Caribbean heritage made up the majority at this school, it
seemed problematic to me that the work of a poet who lived in and was writing about the
same place, who existed in society at the same time and under the same label, could so
easily be dismissed as simply ‘a bit of flavour’.
The comment reminded me of my experiences during my final year of undergraduate
study when my personal advisor – a senior lecturer in postcolonial studies – asked me to
host a teach-out (as an alternative to teaching cancelled during lecturers’ strikes against
proposed changes to their pension scheme), alongside another lecturer, on decolonising
the curriculum. Staff and students from across the university attended and contributed to
conversations around the legacy of colonialism and, specifically, how it features on
curricula at undergraduate and postgraduate level. One of the issues that came to the
fore was the ‘Week 10 Problem’: many twelve-week modules were structured in such
a way that texts written by authors of colours or prominently featuring characters of
colour were largely studied only during Weeks 10 and 11 (which coincidentally happened
to be the two weeks of teaching and learning most severely affected by the strikes), with
Week 12 usually occupied with preparing for assessment. This realisation led to the
convenors of these modules beginning to have serious discussions about tokenism and
about the place of ‘diverse’ texts in English modules.
When I considered the shaping of the London poetry scheme of work at my SE1
school in light of this, the HoD’s attitude appeared to be evidence of such tokenism. His
comment seemed particularly problematic when I reflected on my experience of intro­
ducing the poem in question to my Year 8 class – we spent a single lesson on it, but
376 H. IFFATH

I would argue that the class was more engaged in this single lesson than any other in the
four months I spent with them.
Responding to my reading of the poem, I planned the lesson around language;
specifically, the language used both by and in reference to young people in London.
We began with a starter activity considering different meanings of words – e.g. ‘safe’,
‘mad’ and ‘peak’ – which I hoped would encourage pupils to share experiences of
language use from their lives outside the classroom, as young Londoners. Because
I knew this class to be none too responsive at the start of a lesson, I called on a few
pupils to suggest a meaning for the first word and demonstrate its use in a sentence.
Ahmad then put his hand up; when he identified a more colloquial use for the word,
I noticed different reactions across the class – while some pupils looked sceptical, others
sat up eagerly and turned to me to see how I would respond. The Teachers’ Standards
contains an injunction on teachers across all subject areas to demonstrate and promote
‘the correct use of standard English’ (DfE 2011), and my pupils seemed to be wondering if
I would contravene this injunction. When I merely nodded and thanked Ahmad for his
contribution, other pupils put their hands up to volunteer meanings that they had not
considered sharing until this point.
I was pleasantly surprised, at the end of this segment of the lesson, to find that the
pupils who had engaged most enthusiastically included Ahmad, Samuel and Omari, three
pupils whose names made up the list of ‘low-achieving’ pupils from this top-set class.
Omari, in particular, suggested meanings for almost every word I put forward – where
normally he tended to be slumped in his seat and when called upon would respond
asking what the question was, in this lesson he was sitting up straight and offering his
opinion voluntarily. With many of the words, he was first to offer his interpretation –
followed closely by Ahmad and Samuel. The responsiveness of these three boys came,
I felt, from a sense of agency located in seeing language they used regularly being valued
in the context of the classroom – this lesson was about them, these words spoke to ‘who
they [were] and where they live[d]’ (Zancanella 1998, 104) and they therefore felt
empowered to contribute.
After this activity, we read the poem as a class. My main focus for this portion of the
lesson was on the ending lines, which reference news reporting on youth crime reducing
young people to mere statistics – with the media in control of their narratives (Chingonyi
2017, 40). Alongside these lines, I presented the class with a collection of headlines about
youth crime in London and asked them to pick out any language that stood out to them.
Omari immediately zoomed into a headline featuring Vue cinema’s decision to stop
showing Blue Story nationally after an incident in Birmingham involving young people
and the police, something that had happened only a few days prior to this lesson. He
informed the class that both the move by the cinema chain and the newspaper’s
representation of the incident were ‘obviously racist’, given that the incident was unre­
lated to the film itself and overshadowed its overarching message. Although he had not
yet seen the film – none of the pupils in this class would have been able to watch it in
cinemas – he clearly had strong feelings about the events surrounding it. Omari’s
interjection here made a connection between the content of our lesson and our wider
lives as members of a racialised and structurally unequal society. In expressing his
feelings about the structural racism that affected his existence in society, he was also
opening up a conversation with pupils who had never experienced structural racism in
 DECOLONISING ENGLISH 377

the same way, ultimately enabling us all to consider the place that cultural production by
or featuring people of colour is given across the nation. As a visible Muslimah, I am very
conscious of the role that media representations of different groups can have on the
existence of these groups in society, and I knew that many of my pupils fell into similarly
demonised groups. Chingonyi’s lines gave us a way into having ‘meaningful commu­
nication’ (Barnes 1976) about these everyday lived realities that are otherwise often
overlooked in the arena of formal education.
During this activity, I remember describing one of the headlines as ‘jarring’.
SAMUEL: [delightedly] Yo, Miss said jarring!

ME: Sorry?

SAMUEL: You said jarring!

ME: Oh, right. You mean because we can use it as slang? It’s an actual standard English word
as well.

SAMUEL: No way! [laughs uproariously] What does it mean?

ME: If something’s jarring it’s unexpected, it surprises you, but it’s more than just surpris­
ing, it’s quite shocking. I think of it as something that knocks you out of place.

SAMUEL: Oh yeah, it’s the same meaning.

Samuel’s delight confused me initially, until I realised that he was familiar with the
word being used in a different context; my use of what he knew as a ‘slang’ term broke the
rules about the kind of language he believed to be permissible to use in the context of the
classroom. In reassuring him that this word was considered ‘standard English’ in addi­
tion to slang, I was authorising his use of it in an official setting. In subsequent lessons
with me, Samuel – and others – frequently used the word ‘jarring’, prompting smiles and
titters from the rest of the class. Their amusement seemed to come from the continued
perception of breaking the boundaries of ‘standard English’; they were able to use what
they still thought of as a ‘slang’ term in the classroom and my authorisation meant no one
could claim they were breaking the rules.
Having considered the language used both by and about London’s youth, I concluded
the lesson on Chingonyi’s poem with reference to three of the most common questions
suggested by Google when searching ‘Newham’:
Is Newham safe?

Is Newham the poorest borough?

Is Newham dangerous?

I presented the class with an image of the road outside the school and asked about their
experiences of living in Newham. Given the pertinence of place to the scheme of work,
I felt it was important to link the content of the lesson to the class’ experiences as a group
of young Londoners.
OMARI: Yeah, it’s calm, except sometimes it’s a bit booky.

ME: What do you mean?

378 H. IFFATH

OMARI: Oh, booky is like weird.

ME: [laughs] No, I know, I meant how is living in Newham sometimes a bit booky?

OMARI: Like when those guys last year or the year before came and broke our windows.

[general mutterings of ‘oh yeah!’ and ‘I forgot that happened!’]

Despite the injunction contained in the Teachers’ Standards, I had no desire to

challenge Omari’s use of the words ‘calm’ and ‘booky’ here. Privileging the use of
standard English in this moment would, I felt, have been nonsensical, not to mention
‘an absurd reminder of colonialist values’ (Shah 2014). In my position of authority as
Omari’s teacher, I did not want to undermine his agency as a learner; instead, I felt that
he had taught the class a valuable lesson. It was as if, in opening up the discussion during
our starter activity about words having multiple meanings, each as valid as the next, we
had redefined what we meant by ‘standard English’ for the purposes of this lesson.
Instead of deferring to language deemed to be of a certain ‘standard’, my pupils felt
free to use words that were ‘standard’ to us in that we shared an understanding of their
meanings. Omari’s willingness to explain what he meant by ‘booky’, too, demonstrated
a desire to include me and the rest of the class in his understanding of it – in other words,
to become ‘the author of his own new narrative’ (Shah 2014). Richard Quarshie argues:
that ‘[o]ur “one shared culture” cannot remain immutable and fixed. It is changed by the
different cultures of which it consists. A common culture itself changes when people of
different cultural backgrounds become part of it’ (Quarshie 2007, 20). By the same token,
then, ‘standard English’ cannot be a single, set thing; its definition must shift as different
people come to use it and populate it with different meanings. Pupils will necessarily have
different experiences of language use, even of the same words, and in sharing these they
are simply expanding the class’ shared lexicon.
For my Year 8 class, granting legitimacy to the language many of my pupils experi­
enced and used in their lives outside of school meant they were able to confidently bring
‘the language and culture of the home’ over ‘the school threshold’ (DES 1975, 286).
Studying a poem written by someone from a similar background to theirs and hearing
this language in the context of an English lesson carried with it a validation of their
identities outside the classroom in an official setting. I felt that the ‘low-achiever’ label
assigned to Omari, Ahmad and Samuel, and their disengagement in other lessons, spoke
to the consequences of rarely experiencing anything relevant to their wider lives in the
course of their studies. The prevailing attitude at my SE1 school, however, seemed to be
that pupils’ experiences of language and culture beyond the school gates were more or
less irrelevant to their education, if not barriers that they would have to overcome in
order to progress.
I was wary of a similar attitude existing at my second secondary experience [SE2]
placement school, which was in the same borough and had a similar pupil demographic.
Upon arrival at the school, however, I was extremely gratified to discover that this was
not the case; one of the first schemes of work I encountered was dedicated to ‘Culture
Poetry’ – introducing poems from Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, Australia,
and the United States to Year 7. The anthology for this scheme of work included a wide
range of poems, and in my first weeks at the school I observed lessons where pupils
confidently read these aloud in their ‘home’ accents. In one class, two pupils laughed in
 DECOLONISING ENGLISH 379

amazement when a third did not know what yams – so central to their own diets – were.
In foregrounding different pupils’ cultures, this module allowed pupils to claim owner­
ship of their identities; it explicitly highlighted the value of different pieces of knowledge,
especially those which pupils may otherwise have felt played no part in their lives at
school. These few weeks were characterised by teachers coming into the staffroom and
sharing with colleagues what their pupils had shared with them. Overall, it seemed the
scheme of work created a space for not simply tolerating or accepting difference but for
celebrating diversity. It also provided an opportunity for teachers to share and celebrate
their own cultural backgrounds too, participating in classroom discussions as learners
themselves instead of established authorities.
Although I enjoyed this scheme of work, I felt there were some problems with how
pupils’ experience of the poems had been conceptualised. During one lesson I observed
on Niyi Osundare’s ‘Not My Problem’ – the first poem in the anthology – I came to the
realisation, while circulating the classroom, that pupils had no idea what the poem was
about. They had been given the poem and told to ‘look for culture’ in it; therefore, they
had identified the references to food in every stanza and picked out different names, but
had not engaged with what was actually happening. I stopped at one table and asked the
group to read the poem again, this time without the focus on identifying culture (which
seemed in some ways an exercise in establishing difference); one pupil began to decipher
what was happening in the poem and excitedly share this with the pupil next to him.
When the same thing happened in a second class, I again tried to circulate the classroom
and encourage pupils to engage with the poem itself, instead of just ‘looking for culture’.
Responding to these incidents, when the time came for planning my own lessons,
I decided not to defer to the department’s standard lesson plans. At my SE2 school,
English teachers were allowed to structure schemes of work according to personal
preference, as long as the standard three pieces of writing (creative, transactional and
analytical) were produced. This gave me the freedom to rearrange the anthology, group­
ing poems according to theme instead of place. I was hoping to highlight similar cultural
experiences across different groups of people instead of perpetuating the equivalence of
culture with difference. Themes that emerged included food; language; the concept of
belonging; the impact of colonialism; subjugation and systemic oppression; conflict;
protest. (Something that caught my attention later, subsequent to discussions with fellow
student teachers, was that the vast majority of these poems dealt with ‘issues’ – it seems,
when explicitly addressing ‘culture’, that ‘issue’ themes emerge most strongly. This
mirrors the publishing industry phenomenon that Darren Chetty discusses, where
works by writers of colour or prominently featuring characters of colour are often
designated as little beyond ‘issue’ books (Chetty 2016, 98).)
I taught a single week of this adapted scheme of work, featuring Benjamin Zephaniah’s
‘The British (serves 60 million)’, Vladimir Lucien’s ‘Donbwé’ and Valerie Bloom’s
‘Sandwich’. During these lessons, I tried to give pupils opportunities to share aspects of
their lives outside the classroom, including reflections on the meals they ate with their
families and the names they called their family members. The class’ varied responses to
these simple stimuli led to fascinating conversations about how food represents culture
and whether names actually shape relationships. My experience of teaching this scheme
of work was, unfortunately, interrupted by school closures due to the Covid-19 pan­
demic. I was especially disappointed about missing the week I had planned on poems
380 H. IFFATH

referencing colonialism – I was eager to see if teaching at a school which made a point of
celebrating diversity through explicitly-designed modules might have been more pro­
ductive and generative than my experiences during my SE1 placement.

Confronting the colonial legacy

While the classroom conversations of my PGCE year have exposed some of the problems
that present themselves when government and school policy privilege a very narrow
version of the English literary heritage, they have highlighted for me the impact that
individual teachers can hope to have on pupils’ experiences of set texts.
As I look forward to my NQT year, I am excited by the very real possibility of affecting
change in our national conception of the English literary heritage that emerges from the
present moment. I write in the aftermath of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol being
pulled down and thrown into the Avon by protestors representing the Black Lives Matter
movement. Many have reflected that the removal of this statue, that of a slave owner whose
ships cast the bodies of 19,000 men, women and children into the sea but who was
recognised and celebrated for his philanthropy towards (only white) members of his local
community, has educated British people on Britain’s colonial past in a way that primary and
secondary school, and even college and university, have routinely failed to. The passion of
the protestors led many to research both Colston’s life and the fight by Bristolians to have his
statue removed – or at least a plaque explicitly recognising Colston’s slaveowner status
placed alongside the existing plaque extolling his virtues – which was ongoing up to the point
of removal. Many were confronted with the undeniable fact that we as a nation continue to
laud slavers and racists, a phenomenon that comes out of our failure to engage with them
explicitly as slavers and racists. The narrative that celebrates these figures as philanthropists,
for example, ignores the fact that their wealth would have stemmed from exploitation, from
the destruction of human lives and livelihoods. This is a narrative that erases the histories
and stories of those people and denies the value of their lives and livelihoods.
While it is impossible to change the history of this nation, it is imperative that we
acknowledge this history – both on individual and collective levels – in order to truly
move forward as a society. Maya Goodfellow posits that ‘if histories of exclusion,
colonialism and the fierce resistance to much of this were more widely known, it could
mean a more nuanced, inclusive understanding of the present’ (Goodfellow 2019). As
Claire Chambers puts it,

we should recognize that racism is not an aberration but pervades every aspect of society.
We are all implicated in it and need to be critically self-reflexive, looking to challenge
systematic inequality rather than individualistically seeking to prove that our teaching is
somehow “colour blind”. Education is a part of the problem but it can also spearhead the
solution. (Chambers 2016)

With regards to English teaching, this means opening up the curriculum to literature
from beyond the British Isles and foregrounding more works from writers of colour. It
also includes explicitly acknowledging that many of the texts currently on the curriculum
are problematic, and giving teachers the tools to have the difficult conversations that will
likely emerge from this. Above all, it will require that policy-makers, schools, and
 DECOLONISING ENGLISH 381

teachers create space for pupils to feel comfortable and confident in sharing their own
languages, cultures and experiences of the wider world in the classroom.
As James Baldwin states, ‘[n]ot everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing
can be changed until it is faced’ (Baldwin 1962, 38). Britain must face up to its colonial
past before we can move forward to a better future.

Note
1. Names of pupils and teachers have been changed to culturally appropriate pseudonyms.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Humayra Iffath has completed her PGCE at the Institute of Education and is hoping to begin her
NQT year at an inner-London secondary school. She is interested in the place identity is given in
the classroom, and continues to advocate for better representation in education and academia.

ORCID
Humayra Iffath http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7699-3537

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