article extracted from 'race equality teaching' vol. 33 no...

16 Race Equality Teaching © IOE Press 2015

Do we really know who our students are? Are we aware of the issues they are grappling with? Should this be our concern? In this article I argue that we educators need to recognize the key sociocultural issues our students experience outside the school gates, discuss them in the classroom and relate the tricky concept of ‘identity’ to the school’s curriculum and pedagogy.

In my research exploring the identity of young people in the context of British Islam I discovered that they had a postmodern identity. It was dynamic, fluid, multifaceted, diverse, open to change and often contested by its members. In British society today, questions of identity have become less about who we are and more about how we have been represented. Identity is, as Stuart Hall observed, always in ‘process’ and never completed (1996: 2–3).

We construct our identity through a complex prism of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ (Lawler, 2013). The concept of the ‘other’ was central to the stories of the young Bangladeshis in my study – and my book , British-Islamic Identity. Their notions of otherness were: ‘non-Muslim’, ‘the white man’, ‘Bangladesh’, ‘British culture’, among much else. As Woodward (2004: 39) observes, ‘we present ourselves to others through everyday interactions, through the way we speak and dress, marking ourselves as the same as those with whom we share an identity and different from those with whom we do not.’ It is the similarities that mark out differences between us and them. The practice of ‘othering’ is a two-way process.

It is difficult to be a British Muslim in 2015 (Abbas, 2005; Hoque, 2015). British Muslims are constantly asked to make a choice between their religious affiliations and their national

British identity. Ever since the London transport bombings of 2005, British Muslims have been increasingly engulfed in the global ‘war on terror’. British-born Muslims are constructed as the terrorist; the violent and un-British other. Contemporary Islamophobia is rooted in an ‘orientalist’ philosophy (Said, 1979) that constructs Muslims as the distinctive other to the civilized West – as people who cannot govern themselves. This colonial ideology directs the exercise of power from the benevolent West towards the uncivilized East.

The ‘Trojan Horse’ affair – the alleged takeover of schools in Birmingham by conservative Muslims – hinged on a hoax letter (see Robin Richardson in this issue’s Comment). Nevertheless, the Department for Education (DfE) felt the need to reassert Britishness, partly in reaction to the alleged takeover and partly because Britishness is an ambiguous term that required definition. That three bright, seemingly happy British teenagers from Bethnal Green smuggled themselves into Syria this February puts the entire British Muslim community under scrutiny through an Islamophobic lens that normalizes the ‘fear’ and ‘dread’ of Muslims (Runnymede Trust, 1997). And constructing ‘British’ and ‘Muslim’ as oppositional and incompatible facets of identity in effect compels British Muslims to choose one or the other.

It is within the national and international backdrop of exclusion and the politics of ‘difference’ that my research participants, third-generation Bangladeshi teenagers born and living in East London, told their stories. When you speak to them, their rhetoric is of social justice, recognition and a yearning for belonging. But their reality is of dislocation, non-belonging, marginalization and exclusion. Three facets of their identity are explored here:

Knowing our students’ identities: British Bangladeshis in east London schoolsAminul Hoque

Article extracted from 'Race Equality Teaching' vol. 33 no. 1. A Trentham journal published by IOE Press. For Kinnari Patel's use. For subscription information go to the last page.

Race Equality Teaching © IOE Press 2015 17

their mother tongue, the multiple meanings of the hijab and non-belonging. They show that most of the prevailing assumptions held about them by their white neighbours are false.

Their mother tongueThese young people had abandoned their mother tongue of Bengali, seeing it as irrelevant, ‘backwards’ and ‘useless’ (Hoque, 2015: 56). They have instead adopted English and Arabic as a means of securing power, acceptance and belonging. One of them told me, ‘Bengali holds no relevance in my life’. Unlike their grandparents and most of their parents, they were not part of the Bengali-speaking community. Instead, they had differing, complex and competing bilingual and bicultural identities. Some of them clearly suffer from what Cummins and Skutnabb-Kangas (1988: 5) call ‘educational violence’: the ‘shame’ of being a ‘minority’ within education. Local schools should actively encourage and value the home languages of their students but we cannot assume that they know what the languages are. Few of the schools were aware of the intergenerational linguistic divide, nor of the cultural and technological tensions between young people and their parents and grandparents.

There is overwhelming evidence that children who are bilingual do well in school and in employment (e.g. Cummins, 1996; Conteh, 2003). And as Conteh (2003) argues, when the skills of bilingual and bicultural learners are recognized and valued in the classroom, students move confidently between community, culture and school. Learning through different languages affords significant cognitive benefits and it also enhances multilingual identities and provides a gateway into other cultural worlds (see Kenner and Hickey, 2008). But the students in my study spoke to their peers in a mix of English and colloquial Arabic, not Sylheti or Bengali.

The multiple meanings of the hijabMany British-born Bangladeshi girls wear the hijab in the community, at home and at school. But do we educators know why they wear it,

what it means to them, what it symbolizes? One thing is certain: it’s a mistake to discuss the girls’ choices in terms of ‘oppression’ vs ‘liberation’ (Mernissi, 2003; El Guindi, 2000; Bullock, 2007).

One of my participants viewed the hijab as a ‘public statement’ of her ‘inner faith’ and has worn it since the age of 11. The hijab is ‘the most important’ part of her identity: ‘It is much more than a piece of cloth to me … my personality, spirituality, my faith … it gives me confidence, direction, pride … The hijab means everything to me’ (Hoque, 2015: 149).

As a social practice of identity, the hijab means different things to each girl who wears it – religion, culture, fashion, community, identity, privacy, space, protection, power, autonomy, respect, confidence, and as a discouragement to male harassment. We need, therefore, to think of the hijab as having ‘multiple meanings’ (Bullock, 2007). So might it not be useful to discuss the complexity of hijab within the curriculum? To hear about these issues directly from those it affects, rather than falling back on stereotyping or feminist politics that are shaped by what we see and read in the media and hear from our political leaders?



The complexity of the issue has led some educators to take a negative view of the hijab. For example, in his study of 92 Muslim girls and their teachers in Luton, north of London, Farley (2009) examined whether a state school should offer the hijab as part of the school uniform for Muslim students. He found that many of the teachers saw it as a symbol of oppression and a way of constantly reminding the girls of their cultural obligations. One teacher regarded the hijab as repressive and a form of ‘control’ exerted by parents. Others assumed the task of trying to ‘save’ their pupils from veiling. Clearly, the orientalist discourse of Islamophobia, racism, difference still informs teaching pedagogy in many classrooms across Britain, despite research evidence that strongly contradicts such views (see, for example, Shain, 2003).

Non-belongingThe identity riddle for these British Bangladeshis is complicated by yet other issues: notions of community and ‘home’, the exclusiveness of Britishness, feeling like a ‘tourist’ in both the country of their birth and the country of their ancestors, the increasing social and spiritual role of Islam in their lives, their exclusion by the racial discourse of difference, the trauma and dislocation of migration … and much more.

Central, perhaps, is the migrant story – the story of non-belonging. Marginalized by sections of mainstream British society, they may also be excluded from the Bangladeshi community because they’ve adopted a seemingly western lifestyle. Then they are dismissed by their kin when they visit Bangladesh and told that they’re British or ‘Londonis’. So where is home? As one 15-year-old girl said, ‘they keep on telling me to go back to where I came from. I was born here. I am 100 per cent British. Where is it exactly that I am supposed to go back to?’ (Hoque, 2015: 2). This identity conundrum weighs them down and is very hard to negotiate.

Art, literature and poetry offer ways into discussing issues of non-belonging’. David

Calder’s poem, for example, explores the migrant story of non-belonging:

And you grow up in a placeThat is never quite your homeAnd all your childhood people

With a smile or a fist sayYou’re not from here are you

And part of you says fiercely yes I amAnd a part of you feels no I’m not

I belong where my parents belongedBut when you go to their town, their country

People there also sayYou’re not from here are you (an extract from

Citizen of the World, 2009)

Here is one poem to use within educational spaces.

A British-Islamic IdentityThe peaceful religion of Islam can help fill the identity void. Amidst the daily reality of non-belonging, poverty, Islamophobia and alienation, Islam offers many young Bangladeshis a sense of peace, humanity, belonging, family and spirituality. And it offers a platform for a political search for identity that revolves around equality, voice, recognition and a commitment to social justice. Importantly, Islam helps manage the question ‘who am I?’ and helps construct a positive British-Islamic identity. The definition of ‘British Islam’ enables third-generation Bangladeshis to comfortably identify with and fuse their multifaceted identities: national, linguistic, ethnic, racial, cultural, religious and gendered.



The role of education in supporting complex identity Non-belonging, exclusion and alienation are the experience of many young people in the UK. Teachers need to try and understand the everyday social worlds of all our school students, whatever their social class and ethnic background. Their evolving stories of identity are rich and resourceful, and invite constructive classroom discussions. Existing curricula and subject disciplines – geography, humanities, English, history, religious education, citizenship – can embrace their life stories and thus become meaningful, rewarding and educational.

My research shows that it is vital to value and incorporate students’ cultural, linguistic, ethnic and religious identities within the curriculum and pedagogy so as to:

■enhance students’ cognitive development

■expose all students in the school or college to a variety of languages and cultures

■prepare young people for living in a modern multicultural, multiracial society

■prepare young people to compete economically in a global society

■enable the expression of cultural identities

■instil a positive sense of identity, and enhance confidence and self-esteem.

The findings I describe may cast new light for readers of Race Equality Teaching on the linguistic repertoire of British Bangladeshi school students, their attitudes to veiling and their feelings about belonging. But my overall findings are hardly revolutionary. We know that students perform better academically if value and importance are attributed to issues that matter in their lives. The idea of an inclusive curriculum underpinned by a pedagogy of collaboration, democracy, dialogue and humanity, has been historically championed by many prominent educationalists, among them Paulo Freire and John Dewey. At the heart of it lies the realization that young people do

not leave their sociocultural worlds behind once they enter the school gates – and nor should they, as the Bullock Report asserted back in 1975. School, community and language are all part of children’s ‘interconnected worlds’ (Kenner and Ruby, 2012). The ‘funds of knowledge’ young people bring to the school stem from their personal and cultural experiences – and thus become central to their learning (Moll et al., 1992).

An inclusive curriculum requires the teacher to become socioculturally conscious and to strive to narrow the gap between community and school. So can educators become mediators between language, community, culture, identity and the school? There are a number of steps they can take, but first they need to recognize that the incorporation of the cultures, languages, real life ‘everyday’ issues, worries, anxieties and concerns of pupils can and should underpin educational pedagogy.

Within the boundaries of a national curriculum, local schools need to develop a curriculum that is relevant to the lives and aspirations of its student population. Local issues such as those identified in my study should inform the school curriculum, especially an exploration of identity, ancestry, heritage, culture, language and a history of local area immigration. British history needs to be rewritten to include the stories of its ethnic minorities and acknowledge their important contribution to the development of the British national story. Black history needs to become a ‘mandatory’ part of the curriculum (Mirza, 2015). This will help all students build an accurate picture of the town and the world they live in. Handled sensitively, the stories of the people of today’s Britain can instil in children a positive sense of belonging and make them proud of their own histories. They will make better sense of the ‘past–present’ identity conundrum – the sense of knowing who they are and where they have come from (Bhabha, 1994).



Encouraging students to discuss issues of cultural, social and religious identities with their peers within an educational setting may well affirm and interest them in trying to understand each other’s ‘map[s] of meaning[s]’ (Hall, 1990: 222). And an open and trusting school ethos encourages students’ personal and academic achievement.

Teachers need to be more than just competent classroom professionals. If they choose to play an active role within their local communities, they are more likely to gain insight into the cultural worlds their students are living in and, one hopes, deepen their own understandings. I argue that strong community partnership will enhance their pedagogy and the educational experience for all concerned. This should derive from a genuine desire to get to know the sociocultural worlds of their pupils, not be tokenistic.

This means that schools have to offer support and allocate time within their existing teaching timetable for the staff to enhance their knowledge about the community the school serves. Allowing time specifically for this purpose means that it is not a voluntary school activity, but a mandatory, though organic, part of what it means to teach in that school. This would help ensure that teachers don’t maintain outdated notions about their pupils’ linguistic repertoire or make stereotypical assumptions about practices such as wearing the hijab. Students need to be listened to by staff who want to understand them and give them plenty of opportunity to draw, act, talk, write and speak about the many layers of their identities and who they think they are.

Not that this is easy. Even when conducting research with school students was my major task as I worked towards my PhD, I found winning the young people’s trust, and the intensity of the interviews, demanding. Teachers today are overworked and overburdened with bureaucracy and data management. They are expected to be not just teachers but also administrators – and to find time to pursue

their own lives. But they know – at least partly know – their pupils, and the young people know them. Countless teachers and schools already propagate, practise and preach this community/student-centred education on the model I am advocating. Importantly, that the leadership of such schools is brave and visionary is a given. Providing a safe space for students to grapple with the knotty idea of identity within the school curriculum is not a solution to young people’s struggles with identity, but it is, surely, a start.

Dr Aminul Hoque, MBE, is lecturer in Educational Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London and visiting lecturer at London Metropolitan University. His book British-Islamic■Identity:■Third■generation■Bangladeshis■from■East■London is published by Trentham Books at IOE Press, 2015. Follow him on Twitter @BrIslam2015

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