This symposium consistes of 3 papers.

Paper 1: 

This paper presents the four-year (2015-2019) journey of Nabah, a young Bangladeshi-British Muslim woman. Her story lies on a spectrum that runs from being a ‘science refuser’, through ‘science hesitancy’ to ‘science responsive’, and then to being a ‘science habitue’. The group we call ‘science refusers’ is substantial in the UK. It includes those who are virulently anti-science, who, for example, believe the earth is flat, that the Covid19 pandemic is a government ploy to microchip the country’s population etc. (Watts, 2023). However, more germane to our discussion here, this group also contains people who find science inhibitively difficult, for whom science makes little or no sense at all. More importantly, for some, science is simply ‘not for them’ because they belong to racially and economically underprivileged British backgrounds, and so they reject science education/career status (Archer, 2018; Wells, Gill and McDonald, 2015). For this group, science is seen as counter-intuitive and fails any personal cost-benefit analysis. We have coined the term ‘dysciencia’ (Salehjee and Watts, in Production) to describe anti-science beliefs because ‘symptoms of disaffection…are grounded in a person’s functional worldview’ (Holton, 1993, p.145).

Paper 2:

This paper develops the inclusion of organizational hierarchy and contemporary leadership in discussions around the decolonisation of the curriculum by use of a critical realist approach (Thorpe, 2019) that helps to identify hierarchical fragility and the dominant leadership approaches that support hierarchy as a mechanism to justify privileges and maintain racism and other forms of injustice. The paper outlines how modern leadership’s roots can be traced back to the accounting practices of the slave plantations (Rosenthal, 2019) and managerialism (O’Reilly and Reed, 2010) with its wish to create and maintain hierarchy even in its discourses, such as collaborative leadership, that appear to offer liberation (Lumby, 2019). It then identifies how much energy has been expended in seeking to eradicate fragility in organizations with the goal of improving efficiency through ‘strong leadership’, before moving to link racism and hierarchy as constraints upon the decolonisation of the curriculum.

Paper 3

This paper calls for the continued raising of cultural awareness through diversity training at all levels of education, through kindergarten / nursery into further, higher and adult education (Race, 2015). Maria Montessori obtained her doctorate and worked at Sapienza University in the 1890s. Her approach to learning that focuses on developing independence amongst learners and personal development in the classroom is still very much applicable today. It is this application of the Montessori theory and method in Italian and international contexts that needs to be encouraged and developed (Williams, 2021; 2022). But that, or any development, has been affected by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The need to educationally adapt in unpredictable times provides both challenges and opportunities for professional practitioners. UNICEF (2020) encouraged the use of multiple delivery channels with 68 out of 127 countries reporting in relation to remote learning with Covid-19. Access to content is the key to remote learning but also to provide children with psychosocial support and encourage the safe use of technology. Gilead and Dishon (2022) talk about the possibilities or adapting educational practice, but future predicted crisis situations hinders both change and wider transformation. Within these European and Global climates, how to be continue to advocate multicultural dialogues within multicultural education?  

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