This essay charts the experiences of a group of Year 10 students studying literature together. I challenge the current educational thinking that the literature classroom should consist exclusively of a set of canonised texts handed down from teacher to student. Instead I consider the importance of ensuring students have space to explore themselves…

In 2014, The Urban Education Collaborative at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte hosted its first biennial International Conference on Urban Education (ICUE) in Montego Bay, Jamaica. In 2016, the second hosting of the conference took place in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Additionally, in 2018, the third hosting of the conference took place in…

An enduring concern for educational policy in many affluent countries is the endemic nature of educational inequalities that are predominately located in poor urban contexts. Given the inabilities of school reform "per se" to deal with these inequalities, the paper focuses on issues of scarcity and spatial processes that are implicated…

"Nativeness" has been recognised for two decades now as a problematic concept within applied linguistics, yet other areas of language analysis have been slow to question it, with some continuing to treat it as a primordial fact of nature. This paper briefly examines the history of the "native speaker" and the shifts in thinking…

The "Countryside Live!" events, organised by the Countryside Foundation for Education (CFE), provide a unique opportunity for urban children to explore a whole new area of possibilities and learning, through becoming aware at first-hand of what goes on in the countryside. The event at Staunton Country Park, Havant, Hampshire, which took…

This manual is a guide to setting up a project to work with disadvantaged urban youth. It is based on the Dalston Youth Project, an English program that combines mentoring with an education program to reconnect young people to mainstream education, training, and employment opportunities. The manual is designed to be used by statutory bodies,…

This activity pack is designed to help youth workers raise young people's awareness of the world by looking beyond stereotypes and assumptions to examine global issues. Eight activities are suggested: (1) "Complete the sentence," an exploration of what the youth group already knows about global concerns; (2) "Match the…

Describes some current work in preventing racism among young white people in London. A newly dominant factor in the justification offered for racial activity is the backlash from many whites to antiracist policies. A strong equal opportunity ethos must be developed, eliminating widely held perceptions of unfairness. (SLD)

This book describes a project, the Bede Detached Youth Work Project, that was designed to combat racism in a community in London (England). It also presents information that should be useful to community workers and activists, teachers, and others involved in antiracist work with young people. An introduction provides an overview of the project…

Argues that proposals recently put forth by the government for the improvement of educational achievement in England will not solve the problem, and suggests a focus on teachers and students and real partnerships with communities, with equal contributions by stakeholder groups, including racial and ethnic minorities. (SLD)

Surveyed urban educators in England to study educational practices related to teaching community languages and training teachers in those languages for bilingual education. Responses of 17 educators show few opportunities at the primary level for children to learn their home languages in school. (SLD)

The study reported in this book was designed to address the experiences of educationally disadvantaged young people in English cities. The study, called "Changing Lives," involved a survey of over 3,000 inner-city 16-year-olds from 34 schools in 6 urban areas of England. The young people surveyed were eligible to leave school in spring…

This book is an account of a study of racism among young people in the central and southern parts of the London (England) Borough of Greenwich. It builds upon an earlier study in the Thamemead area in seeking to understand the social basis of racist activity in order to design strategies to combat it. Greenwich is an area that has experienced…

This book consists of papers presented and discussions held at two Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation conferences on education and the urban crisis in Britain. Fundamental changes taking place in British cities are examined and are compared to urban problems in the United States. It is stated that the "urban crisis" is simply another way of…

Although education in England is dominated by the rhetoric of "standards," this paper attempts to show that the overall shape and drive of English education reform has remained largely consistent. The annually published School Performance Tables continue to be assigned a special place in the reforms, as a means to and as an index of…