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Barry Dufour
Barry Dufour
Born	3rd August 1942 London, England, UK
Nationality	British
Occupation	University Professor

Dr Barry Dufour (born 3rd August 1942) is a British educationist, university professor, writer and researcher, based in Leicester, England, where he conducts research and writes his books, while also teaching at De Montfort University, Leicester, as Visiting Professor of Education Studies, the first person at this university to be designated as such. Growing up in north and south London, he has worked and lived in Leicester since 1970, a city he loves because ‘Red Leicester’ does not just refer to the local brand of cheese.

Early Life and Education

Born in Islington, north London, to Frederick and Violet Dufour, Dufour is one of two children, his brother, Paul Dufour, being the famous rock and jazz drummer and ex-founder of The Libertines band (with Pete Doherty, Carl Barat, and John Hassall). Dufour had severe asthma till the age of fourteen – which affected his schooling; this, combined with family financial and housing pressures involving several moves, meant that by the time he went to university, he had attended fourteen schools and FE colleges, mainly in London (Highgate, Forest Hill, Camberwell, Morden) and, at the age of eight, a children’s boarding school, Sun Trap, for asthmatic children on Hayling Island, Hampshire. He attended two FE colleges – Carshalton Technical College and then Norwich City College when his family moved to Norwich. He claims that the FE colleges saved him and he continues to have a soft spot for the important FE sector. He also believes that the huge variety of schooling he experienced as a youngster, with one or two excellent schools and teachers but some indifferent, bad, and cruel (including his being subjected to electric shock treatment at the front of the class if he got a maths answer wrong), developed in him not only a lifelong interest in education but a commitment to promoting progressive, democratic schooling and curricula.

Persuaded by his supportive FE tutors in Norwich to apply for Cambridge University, he did not like the tone of response to his initial enquiries, and thus ended up going to the University of Hull to study social sciences, under the tutorship of brilliant and radical lecturers such as the late Professor John Saville (social history) and the late Professor Peter Worsley (sociology and anthropology). He then trained at the University of Birmingham School of Education to be a teacher, failed to complete two MA degree courses, but was then, late in life, strongly persuaded by Professor Sir Robert Burgess, Vice Chancellor of the University of Leicester, to submit all his published articles and books for a Ph.D by Published Works at the University of Hull - which he did successfully in July 2012, and was then designated ‘visiting professor’ by De Montfort University, Leicester, where he has taught since 2003.

Career

He has spent 50 years of his professional life researching, promoting and writing about social and political education in schools, whether labelled as anthropology, sociology, politics, citizenship, economics, history, geography, personal and social education, humanities, cross-curricular issues or similar titles of provision in schools.

He began along this route on leaving university, enthused by the liberating power of the social sciences and regretful at his own school education and that of many other children, where civic and social education were hardly on the agenda. He went to the University of Birmingham School of Education in 1965 to train as a teacher, where a liberal-minded tutor (Dr Richard Szreter) allowed him to spend more time than he should have in Birmingham City Library researching 19th century civics and related subjects through to the 20th Century. He wrote his dissertation on his own ideas about the potential ways by which school children could learn about society via the social sciences taught at a rudimentary level.

He found a secondary modern school in High Wycombe (Cressex School), with a supportive headteacher (Roger Martin), who encouraged him (between 1966-1970) to try out his ideas by developing an innovative curriculum. During this time, he was a founder member of the ATSS (the Association for the Teaching of the Social Sciences), along with Denis Lawton, and later became a vice president of the association. He began writing articles and speaking about his ideas at conferences.

In 1970, he was headhunted by Professor Brian Simon of the University of Leicester School of Education, who invited him to occupy a radical post, teaching a PGCE course on Social Science for half the week while, for the other half of the week, classroom teaching in a progressive Leicestershire 14-18 comprehensive school, Countesthorpe College, still in existence today but without acknowledgement, on its website, of its radical past.

He held this joint appointment for 14 years and wrote his first book, (The New Social Studies, 1973 and 1976), that proved to be very influential, with Professor Denis Lawton who later became Director of the Institute of Education at the University of London. Between 1988 to 1993, he left the university sector for five years to work in advisory roles with Local Education Authorities, firstly with the Leicestershire LEA (in multicultural education), then as County Inspector for Humanities in Dorset (1989-1991), where he headed up three teams of advisors and grew to love the county, its schools and the people; and finally as the Senior Education Adviser for High Peak and Derbyshire Dales (1991-1993), with responsibility for a big team of advisers and advisory teachers, but also with several county-wide responsibilities in Derbyshire.

On taking voluntary early retirement from Derbyshire LEA at the age of 50 in 1993 (his only child Ben was now two years of age), he was approached by Professor Ivan Reid, Professor of Education at the University of Loughborough, who invited him to run a History PGCE group but, crucially, to set up an undergraduate course on disruptive behaviour in schools. Eventually this ten-week course became so popular right across the campus but especially with the School of Sport students, that he was lecturing to 350 students every Friday afternoon, no mean achievement for the graveyard slot for any lecturer. He ran these courses until 2006 when he resigned because his work was now becoming overwhelming – he was by then concurrently visiting fellow at three universities - the universities of Loughborough, Leicester and De Montfort University (DMU), Leicester.

During this time, as well as his university teaching, he was also an Ofsted inspector and went on to be involved in thirty six inspections, but he was never comfortable with the theory and practice of Ofsted. He also did consultancy work as a ‘friendly inspector/advisor’ helping schools to improve in Leicester, Coventry and London. In addition, his management courses for a private education company on ‘how to run the best department’ were well-attended. In the year 2000, he was also appointed by SHA, the Secondary Heads Association, (now ASCL, the Association of School and College Leaders) to deliver nationwide in-service courses for headteachers on school self-evaluation – how to ‘inspect’ their own schools.

He has taught undergraduate and MA courses in education at the University of Leicester, the University of Loughborough and De Montfort University, Leicester, at the latter since 2003, and where he is now Visiting Professor of Education Studies.

Ideas on Education

Dufour’s continuing passions and commitments are founded on interweaving principles related to society and education. On the acknowledgement page of his 1982 book, New Movements in the Social Sciences and Humanities’, he offered a dedication as follows:

‘This book is dedicated to my mother, Violet, and my late father, Frederick Dufour (1915-1978). Their life-long qualities have always been a sympathetic curiosity towards their fellow beings, a sense of humanity and a concern for justice in an unjust world. It is hoped that this book places these abiding values into a social, political and educational context’.

His entire research, publications and engaged educational activity have been grounded in these principles. None of his published articles and books on education has ever just been about education: they have always explored the social context in which education and schooling take place.

His three major commitments and publishing areas have been largely related to promoting and researching the broad social curriculum in schools, with many articles and books addressing this area over the years. But in the background has always been his second interest, in humane and democratic teaching, leadership and management in schools. His third area has been, since 1994, disruptive behaviour in schools. The three specialist fields all link together around his commitment to school regimes that are both liberating and successful in terms of pupil/student achievement, while also being happy places to be educated in, with some degree of individualised learning within a democratic framework. All of these interests and values are infused throughout his articles and books, composed from the late 1960s onwards.

His extensive writing and research on the social curriculum in schools was the subject of his late-in-life doctorate-by-publication now housed in the University of Hull library as: The Development and Consolidation of New Areas of Knowledge and Practice in the School Curriculum and Education Profession (with special reference to the social curriculum in schools).

Writing

He has written around 50 published articles and chapters in books, many in peer-reviewed journals, but many in the professional journals of subject associations, such as The Social Science Teacher, journal of the now terminated ATSS (Association for the Teaching of the Social Sciences).

His first book took three years to compile and publish, in 1973, and went on to a second edition in 1976. This was the groundbreaking, The New Social Studies, (Heinemann), written with a young education lecturer at the London Institute of Education, Denis Lawton, who later went on to wide publishing success, world-wide academic recognition, and the directorship of the Institute. In 1977, Dufour published The World of Pop and Rock (Macdonald), a populist and highly-designed and colour-illustrated introduction to music and youth culture, aimed largely at school pupils and young adults, that went into five languages.

His wide-ranging survey of the current state of academic social subjects and their school manifestations followed in 1982 as New Movements in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Maurice Temple Smith/Gower). In 1990, he published The New Social Curriculum: A Guide to Cross-Curricular Issues (Cambridge University Press), an overview of the non-statutory ‘subjects’ that were supposed to be tagged on to the statutory subjects within the new National Curriculum of 1988. With his intervening LEA work, Ofsted inspections, consultancy work with schools, management courses for heads of department and headteachers, and teaching at the University of Loughborough, he did not manage to publish his next book till 2006: this was, Developing Citizens: A Comprehensive Introduction to Effective Citizenship Education in the Secondary School (Hodder). This was a well-received handbook on teaching citizenship that brought together nearly three dozen UK experts on different curricula areas. It was edited by Dufour and his ex-student, good friend and guru, Dr Tony Breslin, who at the time, was chief executive of the influential organisation, the Citizenship Foundation.

In 2011, based on his teaching on the undergraduate Education Studies course at De Montfort University, he published a textbook, with Dr Will Curtis, called Studying Education: An Introduction to the Key Disciplines in Education Studies (Open University Press) that included chapters on the history, politics, philosophy, economics, sociology and psychology of education, along with a chapter on comparative education.

In 2016/2017, his wide-ranging study of disruptive behaviour in schools will be published by Bloomsbury Publishers, as Disruptive Behaviour in Schools: A Critical Introduction. He is especially proud to be working with Bloomsbury, a successful, insightful and rigorous company who saw the potential of, and published, the Harry Potter books by J.K.Rowling, after Rowling was rejected by several other publishers on the grounds that there’s no future in wizards. Like Rowling, Dufour’s book was rejected by several publishers.

This will be followed, in 2018, by two books on outstanding schools around the world, dealing with progressive school management, successful teaching and learning, and broad-based curricula, in the context of inspirational and democratic regimes.

Works and Activities

He has spoken at and attended conferences all round the world while also visiting schools, around 500 schools so far, mainly in the UK, but some in Northern Ireland, the USA, France, Germany, Gambia, Finland and Japan.

From the late 1960s until its closure in 2012, he was active in the main organisation for school sociology teachers, the Association for the Teaching of the Social Sciences (ATSS), attending and speaking at their annual conferences, serving on the national executive committee and occupying the role of vice president for many of these years. This organisation has now been subsumed into the British Sociological Association as the Sociology Teachers’ Group.

Hobbies and Interests

His abiding passion is music – all genres. He loves opera especially Puccini and Wagner, jazz, especially McCoy Tyner, a great jazz pianist who uses a thundering, percussive style, and he’s followed the Rolling Stones since their beginnings in the 1960s. He is chair of the committee of the Regent Jazz Club in Leicester. He took up the piano very late in life and can now read music (slowly) and play tunes from across the music spectrum. His young piano teacher is now a good friend. He volunteers at a food bank in Leicester, indignant at the number of UK citizens who now have to resort to food banks in order to keep themselves and their families with bread on the table.

He teaches at De Montfort University one day a week, where he enjoys interacting with staff and students, and spends the remainder of the week researching and writing, practising the piano, cooking for his son, Ben, when he stays for a few weeks, and looking after his Japanese garden, complete with a pond, waterfall and four koi carp called Marx, Engels, Habermas and Wagner.

Awards and Membership of Distinguished Organisations

1977 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute (FRAI) – he is still active on the RAI Education Committee.

1993 Elected a Member of the Institute of Management (1993).

1997 Designated Visiting Fellow by the University of Loughborough.

I998 Appointed a Fellow of the Keizai Koho Institute (Japan Institute for Social and Economic Affairs), Tokyo, that funded his two-week tour of Japan visiting businesses, cultural institutions and schools.

2001 Designated Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester

2006 Awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award (De Montfort University)

2007 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

2010 Designated Visiting Senior Research Fellow (De Montfort University)

2010 Awarded an Erasmus scholarship to lecture at universities in Finland (Oulu University and the University of Lapland at Rovaniemi on the Arctic Circle) and to visit schools.

2012 Awarded a doctorate by published works at the University of Hull

2012 Designated De Montfort University’s first-ever Visiting Professor of Education Studies

For several decades he was a Vice President of the Association for the Teaching of the Social Sciences (ATSS), an organisation that he helped to establish in the 1960s.

References

Over 50 articles published, but his main books are:

Lawton, D. and Dufour, B. The New Social Studies, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973 (first edition) and 1976 (second edition)

Dufour, B., The World of Pop and Rock, London: Macdonald, 1977

Dufour, B., (ed), New Movements in the Social Sciences and Humanities, London: Temple Smith/Gower, 1982

Dufour, B., (ed), The New Social Curriculum: A Guide to Cross-Curricular Issues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990

Breslin, T. and Dufour, B., (eds) Developing Citizens: A Comprehensive Introduction to Effective Citizenship Education in the Secondary School, London: Hodder Murray, 2006

Dufour, B. and Curtis, W., Studying Education: an Introduction to the Key Disciplines in Education Studies, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2011

Dufour, B., Disruptive Behaviour in Schools: A Critical Introduction, London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2016/2017

External Links

De Montfort University profile: www.dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/academic…/barry-dufour

barrydufour.com

Google search for his books and other publications