Historical geographies of alternative, and non‐formal education: Learning from the histories of Black education

Abstract

Shining a light on the various non‐formal education spaces that have garnered attention in geographies of education over the past two decades, this review takes stock of how historical spaces of education and learning have become a key focus of this body of work. In so doing, the review signals prominent and emergent themes around which scholarship in this subdiscipline has cohered: most notably, geographies of citizenship and morality in informal education spaces, and the radical pedagogic practices of alternative education spaces. As well as looking back, the review also signals two areas that scholars in the field should consider engaging with more closely: Black education and decolonial education. Analysing literature in history and sociology on the Black education movement in Britain, the paper calls for geographies of education to engage more closely with work published in cognate disciplines and not to overlook the relational nature of decolonial education in global north contexts.

Geographies of supplementary education: Private tuition, classed and racialised parenting cultures, and the neoliberal educational playing field

“…Pursuing success, Black British Diane Thomas demonstrates the importance of local, racialised social capital as she follows a Black African friend in using tuition in London (Bourdieu, 1986). This is not activist, community-led Black supplementary schooling, which emerged in the late 1950s to counter racist schooling (Fairless Nicholson, 2023;Gerrard, 2013). Indeed, Joseph-Salisbury and Andrews (2017) argue that Black supplementary schooling declined significantly in the twentyfirst century, as state schools embraced some of its cultural lessons, and private tuition burgeoned.…”