Miracle Weir returned to the University of Sussex in 2023, where she had trained five years earlier, to lead a session on race, diversity and inclusion. Drawing on her experiences as a mixed-heritage teacher, equalities advocate and literature enthusiast, she explores what it means to move beyond the buzzwords and make diversity in the classroom meaningful and transformative

When I was invited in April 2023 to lead a training session at the University of Sussex, I was in genuine disbelief. Having been a trainee myself there five years previously, fresh out of my English Literature degree and unknowingly hurtling towards an NQT year slap bang in the middle of a global pandemic, it felt unlikely that I would be truly ready to hop over to the other side of the seminar and teach teachers how to teach. And to teach teachers how to teach about race, of all things? Diversity, stereotypes, inclusion, appropriate labels, discrimination – all those fizzy, popping topics which cause even the steadiest of educational jaws to clench in apprehension. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t slightly reeling at the prospect. 

But I was also very much up for the challenge. On paper, at least, it would seem that I am perched serendipitously atop the intersection of the fences painted ‘race’ and ‘diversity’. I was born to a white Australian mother and a Jamaican father in London, the eldest of five children raised in a thimble of a house in the middle of a council estate. I was the first in my family to go to university. Indeed, my mother moved here before even completing her O-levels, spending many of her adult years squeezing in coursework and college hours whilst raising us almost entirely alone. I am a woman who has been in love with both men and women, and have been lucky enough to have found comfort in the Queer community here in Brighton. I also struggled with adverse childhood experiences and trauma, and ultimately was diagnosed with ADHD after seeking medical support for my own mental health two years ago. As I joked at the beginning of my session at Sussex, if diversity were a game of bingo, I would be clutching the winning card with both hands.

‘In a previous school, I was shouted at during my lunch break and told I was ‘aggressive’ by a key stage coordinator, having asked her for clarity on a mark scheme.’

During my training year, I was the only mixed heritage trainee in my cohort, and it was isolating at times; often I felt a certain responsibility to posit alternative views and interpretations of the content we were exploring. I distinctly remember feeling a sense of confusion, struggling to get my head around precisely what ‘British values’ were, and how exactly I was supposed to uphold them. Teaching as a mixed heritage person in a predominantly white space, in even the most reputable schools, is bound to have its challenges. Some are more blatant than others. In a previous school, I was shouted at during my lunch break and told I was ‘aggressive’ by a key stage coordinator, having asked her for clarity on a mark scheme. 

I once had another member of staff very loudly joke ‘so what, I can’t do this?’ as he reached out to grab my Afro — we were walking out of an Anti-Racism CPD session held by the Equalities team there. Several members of staff around us saw this, flinched, and said nothing. 

In these times, it is hard to ignore how hypervisible you can feel, how your sore-thumbness can reverberate throughout the space. But throughout my career thus far, I have found that there is also opportunity to utilise my differences as strengths. I am an active part of the Equalities team here at Cardinal Newman Catholic School, led by the wonderful Shareen Hone. The team works hard to create and deliver diversity training and assemblies in our school, as well as running Culture Days, peer mentoring groups and safe spaces for black and racially minoritised (BRM) students. We have also had the pleasure of collaborating with Varndean’s brilliant Equalities lead Angela Simmons, as well as Flo Sparham and Wafa Paton who oversee the Brighton & Hove Anti-Racist Education Strategy, connecting with both primary and secondary educators from across the city through incredible and informative workshops and conferences.

Additionally, I have been able to form many constructive, supportive working relationships with BRM students in all of the schools I have worked at. They tend to gravitate towards me, with an underspoken understanding that I will wholeheartedly support them in their endeavours, as well as do everything in my power to acknowledge and address any prejudiced or harmful experience they disclose to me, and combat these with education, patience and a focus on respect. Unfortunately, many BRM students struggle to understand why their grievances when expressing experiences of racism and prejudice even now are often minimised, or ignored, or entirely dismissed when reported to some members of staff. And given that a 2023 report by the Department of Education revealed that 30% of teachers lack confidence addressing racism in their classrooms, that according to the Runnymede Trust (2020) pupils from Black Caribbean backgrounds are three times more likely to face permanent exclusion, those students have a right to feel concern. When speaking with students through our equalities work, the feedback that frequently echoes is this: ‘I wish other teachers knew… I wish they understood’. And so, nerves and all, when I was invited to share my experiences and give some advice to a cohort of trainee teachers about inclusion and diversity in the English curriculum, I knew I had to go for it. 

‘Pupils from Black Caribbean backgrounds are three times more likely to face permanent exclusion.’

In spite of this, I still doubted that I would have anything groundbreaking to offer the trainees when it came to the topic of diversity. And I fretted even more at the idea of encouraging an entirely — if not majority — white cohort to feel comfortable enough to explore these issues with me, without taking offence, or being too paralysed by bias to see the content I had to offer at face value. And why should they even care? ‘Diversity’ has become a buzzword, plastered all over ‘X’ and other social media, peppered through CPD sessions, littered across educational articles like detritus on Brighton Beach in the aftermath of the first real day of sweaty, searing sun.

People hear ‘diversity’ and shudder; teachers everywhere seem to picture the shadow of it looming over the curriculum, reaching down its taloned claws to snatch the likes of Shakespeare and Milton and bite their brilliant British heads off. This recent focus on diversity seems to signal an inherent historical failure of our education system, some distant past mistake which we are somehow all to be held accountable for now. Diversity is dust-like, shifting, too difficult for many to understand let alone pin down; but the issue of ignoring the necessity of diversity in our curriculum is gathering, building and clogging up the space. It cannot be left to settle. 

So I typed out some real life scenarios of a few problematic comments and situations from the classroom — names anonymised of course — to explore with the trainees. I created the beginnings of a reading list, recommended titles and non-fiction extracts which could be used as alternatives or to supplement the content which is already widely included in the curriculum. And armed with my slides and my little list, I headed over to the University of Sussex.  

I began the session with my diversity bingo joke, which seemed to break the ice. I reminded the group that this was a safe space to ask questions and figure out solutions, that being worried or concerned about causing offence or getting things wrong in the classroom is simply an indication that they cared. We ran through the scenarios, discussed the ways in which they were problematic, and came up with phrases or plans of action to address any harmful behaviours presented in them. I showed them ‘Sonnet 130’ by Shakespeare, explained how reading this as a student blew my mind, that the Bard himself could have seen enough value in a woman who looked just like me (‘black wires grow from her head’, her skin is ‘dun’, her eyes are dark and ‘nothing like the sun’, her complexion is too deep to visibly blush so ‘no such roses see I in her cheeks’). I spoke about the pride I felt that this dark skinned figure could be presented in a Shakespearean sonnet as someone worthy of cherishing and respecting (‘I love to hear her speak’, ‘by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare’), how I found this sentiment particularly moving in a world where misogynoir is so rife. How my head nearly fell off my body when I did some digging and discovered that there were in fact twenty-six Shakespearean sonnets dedicated to ‘the Dark Lady’ — how this discovery inspired me to dig even deeper into the canon, determined to find other glimpses of myself, of my Black-British cultural heritage, within it.

I then gave a selection of poems from black writers — Jackie Kay, Dean Atta, Warsan Shire, Grace Nichols, Benjamin Zephaniah — and asked them to find parallels between these poems and ones we already taught. They identified feelings of isolation, emotional conflict, belonging, family, resilience; we made lesson plans in groups to consider the ways in which the poems could be taught alongside those already in the curriculum, as unseen poems for example as per AQA’s GCSE English Literature Paper 2. We rounded off the session with Q&A, shared experiences, and ended with my insistence that every teacher be made to read ‘I Heard What You Said’ by Jeffrey Boakye, who beautifully articulates his layered and invaluable insight into racism in modern education, sparking the necessary discussion to instigate change within our systems for the better. The feedback I received from these trainees following our session was one of gratitude and overwhelming relief. 

Remarkably, I have been invited to run this session for a fourth time next February. It seems there is great catharsis when staff are given the space to explore and hash out these issues, to address the elephant in the classroom, regardless of their cultural background. 

‘We must shake off the anxiety attached to the buzzwords, shift our focus away from semantics and onto the people and lives they represent.’

It is time to demystify diversity. Put simply, the objective of diversity in the curriculum is to provide variety in the topics we teach. That’s it. It is crucial that we, to the best of our ability, include texts and narratives which reflect the many different lived experiences which permeate our society. It is essential that we take the advice we so often give to our students; to challenge themselves, to open their minds to new modes of thinking, to explore perspectives which were previously alien to them. Ultimately, the exam skills are the same — as professionals, we drill analysis, critical thinking, comprehension and evaluation with our students every day. Practice makes progress. It is up to us to challenge ourselves and consciously provide variety in the topics and resources we choose to teach these skills through. 

We must shake off the anxiety attached to the buzzwords, shift our focus away from semantics and onto the people and lives they represent. There are real and significant implications to only teaching one perspective, one way of thinking, one side of a narrative. As award winning writer of postcolonial feminist literature Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche reflected in her TED Talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, it did not ever strike her that she had the capacity to write about black characters, based in settings like her home of Enugu, Nigeria, until she read African texts written by the likes of Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye which revealed this as a possibility for her. Diversifying the texts we teach to students opens them up to understandings they might not otherwise have access to — narratives about people from other cultures, other countries, other socio-economic backgrounds. It enables us to teach inherently with compassion at the forefront. It gives students who have never been able to travel the vocabulary to describe, to comprehend, a setting outside of the one within which they exist, a life other than theirs which still bears the same level of importance, which still holds the same weight. 

We all want our work to help guide and inspire the students we serve, to lay the foundations for the young people we work with to grow up and engage in a society with compassion and understanding at its heart, and I believe diversity in the curriculum is fundamentally imperative to this cause.