Exploring ethnic minority students' stories through their representations

Students who identify as being from an ethnic minority are under-represented within school geography in England at key stages 4 and 5. At these key stages geography is an optional subject, and how students view geographical knowledge may influence their GCSE and A level subject choices. This article describes recent doctoral research undertaken with year 12 and 13 students in a girls' grammar school. It employs an intersectional lens to explore how students of different ethnicities represent geographical knowledge through collages, critical incident charts and interviews. The article does not attempt to develop a typology of students of different ethnicities and their particular representations. Such an approach would strip out the detail inherent in the students' descriptions, compartmentalise their view of geographical knowledge in a singular context and encourage the reader to generalise regarding individual ethnicities and particular representations. Instead, while the under-representation of ethnic minority students at GCSE and A level provided the starting point, this research was designed to move beyond a single ethnic stereotype to capture the richness of all the students' stories. The main findings suggest geographical knowledge was represented in different ways given different methods and that it was diverse, individual and difficult to categorise along ethnic lines. Instead, the students' representations reflected the characteristics and concepts from their recent formal geography lessons and, to a lesser extent, their informal experiences, although the latter were not always explicit or straightforwardly definable. Drawing on these findings, the article suggests a model that reflects the complexity of students' representations and offers a language for discussing them.