The system of initial teacher training in England is changing and this presents new challenges for Black and Asian students whose lives are already impeded by memories and experiences of racism.  This presents an increasingly uncertain future and compounds the backdrop of existing racialised structures that occur recursively to continually suppress them (Marom, 2019). Teacher training in the mid-21st century has consistently standardised and normalised practices that reinforce white spaces and cultural knowledge (Warner, 2022).  The new changes to teacher training begins in Autumn of 2024 will intensify and further embed hidden racialised and oppressive expectations and practices in the training curriculum (Department for Education, 2022).  This Paper examines the debilitating effect of becoming a teacher, on British South Asian people who are often positioned as deficit and under-performing. 

The teacher training curriculum in England does not include teaching about race, culture or ethnicity (Department for Education, 2019) despite the UK’s rich multicultural position.  Alongside this, the forthcoming new restructure will increase time on school placements; which is recognised as the main combustion point for Black and Asian student teachers, leading to acute emotional and mental difficulties or leaving the course (Warner, 2022). Being undermined, under-supported and marginalised, are some of the findings of the research of the Paper.  The research conducted in an English university, was motivated by the annual recurrence of the same problems experienced by South Asian students. There were 10 female and one male student teachers, identifying as British South Asian.  Their narratives of obstacles and problems that obfuscate and impede their progression and understanding are manifold. Racialised practices, embedded within both university and school systems, are found to disproportionately affect them.    

Attrition rates and under-achievement of student teachers who identify as British South Asian, in the English system of initial teacher training, are an unfortunately common occurrence (Tereshchenko, Bradbury & Mills, 2021).   The Pakistani heritage of nearly all of the participants in our research, raises specific intersectional cultural issues such as high parental and community expectations, gender roles of marriage and motherhood expectations and lack of knowledge of gaining entry into and navigating higher education systems (Subedi, 2008).  There are also fears of losing their cultural and religious values through the university process.   However, possession of self-efficacy means they are able to transform and rework their parents’ cultures and religion to reflect their contemporary world, thus retaining links with the past while being successful in their personal lives.    

It is evident that British South Asian student teachers navigate through a social system that fears their presence and devalues them. Subedi (2008) suggests that systems of teacher training mark South Asian teachers as “inauthentic”; signifying them as “marginal, perhaps deviant, both of which are interwoven with tropes of national identity and values” (p.57). The concept of ‘gendered Islamophobia’ stigmatises them and sets them against Eurocentric, white ideals, that essentialises and categorises people according to colour, language and culture (Bibi, 2022).   However while they also engage in self-motivation and agency to navigate these situations, they become enmeshed in power hierarchies, that are evident in teacher education requirements and categorises them as non-legitimate in their teacher identities (Subedi, 2008). 

This research is undergirded by the epistemic and methodological approaches of the ‘Silences Framework’ (Serrant-Green, 2011) and what we have called ‘Racialised Identifications’ (Gunaratnam, 2003). These approaches support anti-racist and de-colonised analyses and begin to claim the connection between race, identity and knowledge production. They offer an alternative to ITE policy in England, in which standardised discourses entangle and disregard identities of Black and Asian student teachers and where race, ethnicity and other forms of cultural difference are problematically absent (Warner, 2022). The ‘Silences Framework’ is cyclical and includes: working in silences, hearing silences, voicing silences working with silences. It generates affirmative spaces to talk about deeply personal responses, bringing together unspoken and little articulated ideas, with memories and experiences. ‘Racialised Identifications’ (Gunaratnam, 2003) seeks to draw on individual narratives of identity, honouring how participants express, resist and mediate within themselves and those around them. Alterity can be mapped onto their narratives, avoiding the diminishing effects of essentialism and othering and instead promoting ideas of narrative elusiveness, contradictions and instability that racialised subjects experience. This approach asserts individuals seeing and projecting themselves as changing in response to the effects of their environments, identifying stigmatisation and erasure within dominant discourses. Interviews and focus groups are the main methods of gathering narratives and which frame these ethical considerations: Interviews were conducted online allowing participants to not be videod to further protect anonymity; sensitive questioning was used to facilitate difficult and emotional recounts; and the Findings’ section draft were shared with individuals before publication. Our researcher position is also called into question because while we our research began with a Pakistani, Muslim colleague, we ended as two non-south Asian researchers. This necessitated shifting our mind-sets to confront questions of whose cultural territory within which we are we engaging? Working in negotiated spaces supported dissipation of researcher privilege and epistemic control (Gunaratnam, 2003) and differences in researchers’ and participants’ ethnic heritages can be a positive dynamic if it is premised on the inter-play between sympathy, authenticity and a desire to move forwards in knowledge construction (Gabi, Olsson-Rost, Warner and Asif, 2023). These methodologies can facilitate knowledge production around race and exclusion and enable the positional ‘other’ to come into the view and speak the unspeakable that White methodologies cannot grasp (Serrant-Green, 2011).

This research paper recognises and implicitly challenges systems within UK teacher training that reduces British South Asian students to tropes of vulnerability and inauthenticity. It understands how racialized challenges and imposed dominations in ITE, renders them voiceless in the system, although measures of resistance and agency enables some to navigate a way (Mirza, 2013).   The conjoined methodologies of the ‘Silences Framework’ (Serrant Green 2011) and the ‘Racialised Identification’ methodologies (Gunaratnam, 2003) redress the silo-ing of their racialised voices to challenge deficit and assimilationist understandings. Our epistemic base is of listening and affirming words, phrases and concepts that speak of deeper issues and systemic repressions and that insist South Asian student teachers bring about their own destinies and are a possible danger in the classrooms and society (Farrell & Lander, 2019). Through its specific focus on British South Asian student teachers who leave their teacher training course or experience debilitating problems that affect their progress, this paper offers some detailed insights into their experiences in university and school spaces. Through their narratives, the paper probes how the nature of ITE, university cultures and school placement cultural norms, pose ethnic and social challenges for them and explores how they navigate or even reject these impositions (Mirza, 2012). We recognise ourselves as non-South Asian researchers, in powerful positions as university tutors and we work to negate this situation through clear communication, using a flexible and listening interview process and sharing writing drafts before publication. In moving towards an understanding of the emotional and psychological dangers that threaten the stability of British South Asian student teachers, we recognise that gender, social class and religion dictate how exclusionary practices operate around them (Phoenix, 2019). These pressures conspire to limit them and transform them into sites of inability and non-legitimacy.

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