Startseite The knowledge-rich project, coloniality, and the preservation of whiteness in schools: a raciolinguistic perspective
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The knowledge-rich project, coloniality, and the preservation of whiteness in schools: a raciolinguistic perspective

  • Ian Cushing ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 28. März 2023
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Abstract

Since the early 2010s, education policy in England has been shaped by so-called knowledge-rich ideologies of curriculum design, built around a purportedly essential body of knowledge which all children must be taught if they are to succeed in school and experience upward social mobility. The knowledge-rich project is underpinned by a colonial, missionary and conservative narrative that the homes of working class and racially marginalised families are illiterate, degenerate, and symptomatic of cultural, linguistic, and cognitive deficit – and these defects must be compensated for through Western-centric curricula. In this article I adopt a raciolinguistic perspective to trace the colonial histories of the knowledge-rich project and its emergence as a political and academic agenda in the 1980s. I argue that the knowledge-rich project is actively designed to sustain white supremacy through the systematic discrediting and annihilation of language practices of racially marginalised children, particularly those racialised as Black. I show how raciolinguistic ideologies are integral to the knowledge-rich project, circulating through racist perceptions about language and society which frame racialised children as displaying linguistic inadequacies which carry a threat to social and national cohesion.


Corresponding author: Ian Cushing, Faculty of Education, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk L39 4QP, UK, E-mail:

  1. Ethical and legal declarations: Ethical approval was granted by Edge Hill University for this research. The authors received no financial support for this research.

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Received: 2022-09-28
Accepted: 2023-03-01
Published Online: 2023-03-28
Published in Print: 2023-06-27

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