School principals and racism: responding to Aveling

Abstract

This study responds to Nado Aveling's call in ‘Anti-racism in Schools: A question of leadership?’ (Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2007, 28(1), 69–85) for further investigation into racism in Australian schools. Aveling's interview study concluded that an overwhelming number of school principals denied the presence of racism in their schools, and that there were no discernible differences in how principals in different schools constructed racism. In contrast, our research found that school principals' constructions of cultural racism are strongly influenced by their school contexts. We elucidate these differences examining the various intersections between race, class and religion deployed by principals in different sites, and argue for the utility of examining and theorising cultural racism using an intersectional approach. By bringing context into our analysis we provide a more nuanced insight into the different ways in which racism is constituted and understood by Australian school principals.

Keywords:

• racism
• class
• religion
• schools
• leadership

Notes

1. All school, principal and student names are pseudonyms.

2. The MySchool website is a government initiative that provides detailed data on all Australian primary and secondary schools, including performance on national literacy and numeracy tests.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number LP120200319].