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.
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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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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Novice language teacher identity construction: similarities, differences, and beyond
- The expectations-reality dissonance in student teaching: a discourse analysis of one pre-service teacher’s perspective
- The knowledge-rich project, coloniality, and the preservation of whiteness in schools: a raciolinguistic perspective
- Quantity and quality of literacy instruction for English language learners in Indiana elementary schools
- Plurilingual Chinese learners of French Lx: agentic assembling of semiotic resources for learning
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Novice language teacher identity construction: similarities, differences, and beyond
- The expectations-reality dissonance in student teaching: a discourse analysis of one pre-service teacher’s perspective
- The knowledge-rich project, coloniality, and the preservation of whiteness in schools: a raciolinguistic perspective
- Quantity and quality of literacy instruction for English language learners in Indiana elementary schools
- Plurilingual Chinese learners of French Lx: agentic assembling of semiotic resources for learning