‘Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferals of information.’―Paulo Freire

In this blog post, I will share how autoethnography has shaped my doctoral research on discourses of Black and ethnic minority representation in the British education workforce. The Department for Education (DfE, 2023) reports that 89 per cent of teachers in England’s state-funded schools identify as white, with 92.5 per cent of headteachers also being white British. This underrepresentation has sparked discussions among educational policymakers and other sectors, emphasising the need to prioritise recruitment efforts to attract Black and minority ethnic candidates to the profession.

Bernard Coard’s seminal (1971) publication on the experience of Black/West Indian children in British schools articulated the painful realities of systemic oppression, capturing both the detrimental impact on workforce representation and the negative experiences endured by students. He presented a dual perspective: first, the relentless presence of racism within educational institutions, which profoundly shapes students’ views of their educational journeys; and second, the concerning absence of awareness regarding the need for a more representative workforce within schools. More than 50 years later, the recent report by Joseph-Salisbury (2020) for Runnymede focuses on the current dynamics of race and racism in English secondary schools, offering a nuanced critique of persistent shortcomings, particularly in the racial and ethnic make-up of the teaching workforce. Despite the decades separating Coard’s and Joseph-Salisbury’s analyses, both reveal stark commonalities that echo through time, emphasising the pressing necessity for ethnic minority agency in ongoing educational discourse.

In the past decade, organisations such as Teach First, Mission 44 and the Church of England (CoE) have initiated various recruitment programmes to enhance the representation of ethnic minority educators in the UK. However, these initiatives have primarily targeted specific areas, such as STEM fields. The CoE’s ‘Leaders Like Us’ programme aims to promote more Black school leaders in response to underrepresentation in senior leadership roles. While these initiatives signal a progressive step towards addressing gaps in the teaching workforce, they often overlook the underlying reasons for these discrepancies.

‘My autoethnographic approach seeks to challenge the oversimplified narratives surrounding ethnic minority representation in British education by drawing upon my experiences as a practising teaching professional.’

As a qualitative method, autoethnography can enable deeper understandings of lived experience (Adams, 2017; Ellis, 2004; Huber, 2022) and contribute new knowledge to the question: Why is there a lack of Black male teachers in the United Kingdom? This approach can support going beyond mere symbolic explanations (Huber, 2022) and allows researchers to challenge discourses through embodied experiences and alternative methods of knowledge sharing.

My autoethnographic approach seeks to challenge the oversimplified narratives surrounding ethnic minority representation in British education by drawing upon my experiences as a practising teaching professional. My doctoral study will contribute to this discourse through my positionality and lived experiences as a Black male currently teaching and will aim to shift focus away from merely repeating statistics on ethnic minority representation in education and instead try to get at the ‘why’ of underrepresentation, specifically of Black males, in teaching. In order to address the established scarcity of Black male teachers within the education sector, structural factors that influence power dynamics, such as silence, opposition, coercion or domination (Karlberg, 2005), have to be explored explicitly, with a conscious intolerance of elements that have historically upheld and continue to result in the current levels of disparity.

Autoethnography enables contributions to the field, both practical and empirical, that deepen knowledge of Black male teachers’ experiences in schools and how this may shape recruitment and retention. Moreover, autoethnography enables revealing the normalised social injustices in educational institutions through lived experiences and can ‘make public the oftentimes demeaning and violent … experiences that have been accommodated … within institutions claiming to be nurturing, democratic and adhering to principles of social justice and equity’ (Bullen, 2024, p. 1).

References

Adams, T. E., Ellis, C., & Jones, S. H. (2017). Autoethnography. In The International Encyclopaedia of Communication Research Methods (pp. 1–11). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0011

Bullen, P. (2024). Auto-ethnography, action research and reflections on home, resistance and survival. The South African Review of Sociology, 54(3), 365–380. https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2024.2403733

Coard, B. (1971). Making Black children subnormal in Britain. Equity & Excellence in Education, 9(5), 49–52.

Department for Education [DfE]. (2023). School workforce in England. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england  

Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Rowman Altamira.

Huber, G. (2022). Exercising power in autoethnographic vignettes to constitute critical knowledge. Organization, 31(1), 49–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084221079006  

Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2020). Race and racism in English secondary schools. Runnymede Trust.

Karlberg, M. (2005). The power of discourse and the discourse of power: Pursuing peace through discourse intervention. International Journal of Peace Studies, 10(1), 1–25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41852070

Méndez-López, M. (2013). Autoethnography as a research method: Advantages, limitations and criticisms. Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 15, 279–287. https://doi.org/10.14483/udistrital.jour.calj.2013.2.a09