| 1: A Framework for Diversity
The National Curriculum Forms Part of a School’s Curriculum
The National Curriculum is not the whole curriculum.
“The school curriculum comprises all learning and other experiences that each school plans for its pupils. The National Curriculum is an important element of the school curriculum.” (My emphasis. The school curriculum and the National Curriculum: values, aims and purposes) The statement on values, aims and purposes makes repeated reference to the need for schools to adapt and develop their curriculum in response to their particular pupils and community.The National Curriculum is part of a framework “designed to enable all schools to respond effectively to national and local priorities, to meet the individual learning needs of all pupils and to develop a distinctive character and ethos rooted in their local communities.”
(The school curriculum and the National Curriculum: values, aims and purposes
http://www.nc.uk.net/nc_resources/html/valuesAimsPurposes.shtml QTS 2.2)
In other words, schools have to be able to create a curriculum for diversity. What then, might such a curriculum for diversity entail?
Here I turn to the work of John Blanchard.
Elements of a curriculum for diversity
John Blanchard Out in the Open, Cambridge: CUP 1986
In Out in the Open, which predates the national curriculum by some three years, John Blanchard gives an eloquent description of what he terms "an emancipatory, convivial curriculum". He explains that he had been goaded into this articulation of “the theory and practice” of English teaching by various challenges, and wanted to counter the charge that:
“there is a hidden curriculum of schooling which narrows learning, weakens confidence, disrupts solidarity, and whose overall effect on many pupils can be understood as an assault on their dignity. A hidden curriculum is what a school systematically, implicitly, but perhaps unintentionally, transmits to the pupils. Divisiveness, a sense of insecurity and failure, an assumption that one needs to be taught before one can learn...”
Blanchard tries to make explicit and bring ‘out into the open’ a curriculum which
“endeavours to convey to pupils the systematic, explicit messages that working together is essential; that preparing work through talk not only helps us to learn it is learning; that learning is an activity enabling us to fulfil our own purposes; that our multicultural society is something to rejoice in; that we each and every one of us have talents, interests, needs and handicaps which we can act on.” (Blanchard, 1986, p.20)
The English curriculum, he writes, “is a multicultural curriculum because it embraces literature and language.” I love this. There are, of course, powerful reasons – social, moral, political – extrinsic to English, why we might want to ensure that the English curriculum is multicultural. What I like about this definition is that it argues that English is intrinsically multicultural. He goes on: “Literature invites us all to inhabit other worlds, and language involves, in thought, word and feeling, the development of intelligence, sensibility and sensitivity: both literature and language are corrupted by any community’s claim to exclusivity or superiority. A curriculum cannot begin to be multicultural only at the point when Sikh or West Indian, Japanese-speaking or Roman Catholic pupils, or any others thought not to represent the supposed indigenous norm, enter the school. A curriculum is either multicultural, or it is not, according to its design, ethos and practices. This is a multicultural curriculum because it promotes pupils’ capacity to observe, perceive, contrast, sympathise, hypothesise, propose solutions to problems, abstract, generalise, and resolve conflict and contradiction, because it encourages pupils to appreciate other cultures alongside their own and to experience what is human and common to all cultures.” The very nature of English requires us to draw on and promote diversity in our teaching.
Certain principles and emphases derive from such a view.
 
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