Social Justice, Equality and Human Rights

A catalyst in the classroom

• Julia Hope

Julia Hope describes her study on how primary school teachers use certain picturebooks and storybooks that relate refugee children’s experiences, so that young refugees feel validated and their classmates can understand something of what they’ve been through. It gives teachers both pedagogical support and the resources to tackle this urgent topic. 

Transforming Black history in secondary schools

• Abdul Mohamud
• Robin Whitburn

Doing Justice to History provides new insights into Black history at local, national and international levels, and will become a key resource for the annual Black History Month. The authors’ accounts of excellent practice in presenting an inclusive view of history to students, teachers and teacher trainers offer inspiration and guidance.

Racism, fundamentalism and a democratic education

• Linden West

This case study of one distressed post-industrial city struggling with various discontents is based on the stories of those who live there. They illuminate how racism, Islamophobia and Islamism take hold, and show how the city is emblematic of wider problems across the world today. But the book also describes the resources of hope in the city.

Black women in the UK – the Abasindi Cooperative

• Diana Watt
• Adele D. Jones

Photographs, poems and press cuttings enhance this account of the achievements of the women of the Abasindi Cooperative, who carved a space in their Manchester community to determine and redefine their conditions – along the way making a significant contribution to community activism in the UK today against race, class and gender oppression.

Struggles for citizenship and human rights education

• Hugh Starkey

Democracy provides a framework for lively struggles against discrimination by gender, ethnicity, class, or sexuality. In this lecture Hugh Starkey argues that education for cosmopolitan citizenship provides expression for multiple voices and promotes common standards that both include and transcend so-called fundamental British values.

Third-generation Bangladeshis from East London

• Aminul Hoque

This ethnographic account of the lives and multifaceted identities of six British-born third-generation Bangladeshis from East London asks whether they see themselves as Bangladeshi, British, Muslim, Londoners, none of these or a fusion of them all. It shows how young English Bangladeshis construct a new British-Islamic identity for themselves.

• Jeremy Cunningham

Conflict transformation changes the relationships, attitudes, interests, discourses and underlying structures that encourage violent political conflict. Uganda after twenty years of war provides a case study of the role of education in building sustainable peace, and how the school curriculum can contribute to or impede conflict transformation.

International perspectives

• Geri Smyth
• Ninetta Santoro

Educational researchers highlight challenges of researching in culturally and ethnically diverse contexts and describe innovative approaches in seven countries that give agency to the children who are being researched, rather than to the researchers.

Safe spaces and inequality

• Kate D’Arcy

This book explores the use of elective home education (EHE) by Gypsy and Traveller families. The accounts of their experiences and their views about education spaces reveal the racism and discrimination their children encounter in school, and how they still lose out when they opt for EHE.

Dreams of success

• Kate Hoskins
• Bernard Barker

This book examines Government plans to improve upward mobility in England and considers the chances of success in the light of qualitative interviews with 88 school students. It suggests that governments consistently underestimate the resistances to mobility that are embedded in social and occupational structures.