Over the last few years, I have started to intertwine the work of Dr Rudine Sims Bishop within my school’s (Grove Road Community Primary School in Harrogate, North Yorkshire) reading curriculum offer. Bishop’s windows, mirrors and sliding glass doors metaphor (below) was a real catalyst for my thinking, and from there I started to develop high-quality, diverse reading spines to underpin our curriculum.
More recently, I’ve been reflecting on how this metaphor might apply more broadly to our whole curriculum and learning offer: imagine the power of a child seeing themselves and their community represented, not just in what they read, but throughout their entire learning journey. The positive impact wouldn’t just engage learners and create buy in, it would – more importantly – foster a lifelong love of learning by making the curriculum content meaningful, relevant and representative of our wonderfully diverse society.
Over the last year, we have started to carefully personalise, or ‘Grove Roadify’, our curriculum offer. As we approach each unit in our two-year cycle, we look at how it represents our community at a school, national and global scale. Some units, such as WWII, we feel do this brilliantly and we have simply interwoven elements like trips to the local CWGC cemetery and books like Bali Rai’s Now of Never: A Dunkirk Story into this to support our children in accessing and engaging with it. Other units needed completely updating or overhauling. Below is an example of how we’ve done this in a powerful way:
Upper KS2 have a term-long study of journeys, based on the Rising Stars Geography unit. This is split into journeys of people and journeys of products and we have usually learned about Shackleton’s voyage as a main topic here because it’s such a unique story. Our children have always found it reasonably interesting, but we never saw the ferocious levels of fascination that we always hope for. That changed this year, when we changed the unit to an exploration of Mostafa Salameh’s life.
Mostafa is a Jordanian refugee, born and raised in Widhat Palestinian refugee camp. He was the first Jordanian to summit Everest and the 13th person to complete the Explorer’s Grand Slam (an adventurer goal to reach the North Pole and South Pole, as well as climb the Seven Summits). As an inclusive school, we take great pride in our diverse intake of pupils and we are a School of Sanctuary (a school committed to creating a culture of welcome and inclusion for refugees and people seeking asylum – learn more about Schools of Sanctuary here: https://schools.cityofsanctuary.org/), so learning about Mostafa is hugely relevant and relatable to our pupils.
You can read more about the learning journey our children went on via the planning and resources I put together, available here on my Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vlhjtiygwktzn3e/AADLgi0raUw9PJvmWC1K7I5ra?dl=0
Interestingly, not only did the whole class find Mostafa’s story absolutely fascinating, they also jumped right into the subsequent learning (Everest Expedition Instructions and, later on, studies or Alpine regions) because they had a real-world, context-rooted understanding alongside genuine buy-in and curiosity. You can access my Everest Instructions unit, inspired by Mostafa and also the amazing videos by Mammut #Project360 here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/s1w35kd6s6lhpuy/AADiCIWziHt1Y6dsBAYJ7k4la?dl=0
I could ramble on all day about how wonderful I think Mostafa is (he has written a brilliant book, called Dreams of a Refugee, and he has a stunning picture book as well, called Everest Adventure) and how cool the Mammut Everest tour is (available here: https://project360.mammut.com/#route/mount-everest/south-route/1/details), but I want to draw your attention to a young, refugee boy in my class – we’ll call him Hasan (this is not his real name). During this unit, Mostafa sent us a video of himself on Kilimanjaro, where he shared some of his story with us. This was backed up with a photograph of him at the summit of Kilimanjaro holding our school’s PRIDE values in his hands (see below). During the video and when sharing the photograph, I couldn’t take my eyes off Hasan: the look of utter awe and wonder on his face when he saw our PRIDE values in Mostafa’s hands almost had me in tears and I popped over for a chat with Hasan when we were packing up for break. He turned to me and simply said “I didn’t know I could do that…”
We can tell children until we’re blue in the face that they can be whatever they want to be, but until they see others like themselves actually do it then the message is far less likely to hit home. We should be constantly questioning how our children’s learning diet balances finding out more about other communities as well as understanding more and sharing expertise about their own.
Our curriculum offer should be built as a window into other places, sliding glass doors to enter new environments and a mirror, within which our learners can see themselves genuinely and accurately reflected back. Then, and only then, can we say our learning offer is truly inclusive.
Mr H the Teacher 