John Yandell

It Ain’t What You Say...

This essay takes as its starting-point the recent announcement that GCSE English, the high-stakes test taken by 16-year-olds in England, will no longer include the assessment of speaking and listening. It attempts to place this decision, and other recent policy interventions that will have an impact on how talk in the classroom is conceptualised and valued, in a longer history of schooling, attitudes to spoken English and the notion of a spoken standard. The essay then explores, through an account of an observed GCSE English lesson, something of the complexities involved in taking talk, and the assessment of talk, seriously.

Investigating literacy practices within the secondary English classroom, or where is the text in this class?

The Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development has been interpreted in such a way as to provide theoretical support for particular, Government‐sponsored, models of both pedagogy and literacy. This article proposes a radically different interpretation of the ZPD, informed by Bakhtinian understandings of heteroglossia. This alternative model is then used to describe and interpret the pedagogic and literacy practices that are observed in a secondary English lesson, in which students deploy a wide range of cultural and multimodal resources to make sense of a complex text.

Exploring multicultural literature: the text, the classroom and the world outside

In this essay I want to do three things. First, to explore the notion of multicultural literature. What do we mean by the term? What is it? And where did it come from? Second, I want to look at the relations between texts, teachers and school students. And third, I want to glance at the world beyond the classroom, and suggest ways in which the literature read and written in the classroom can contribute towards students’ understanding of and engagement with the wider world. In today’s parlance this last focus might count as something to do with citizenship. So what is multicultural literature? It certainly didn’t exist when I was at Oxford in the late 1970s and early 1980s – by which I mean that I spent seven years within the English Language and Literature faculty without ever being troubled by any awareness that there was such an animal as multicultural literature. In 1985, I started work as a schoolteacher, in a boys’ comprehensive in Tower Hamlets. One of the first texts that I chose to read with my Year 8 group was Young Warriors (1967). The novel, by Jamaican author, V.S. Reid, tells a coming-of-age story of five Maroon warriors who help their people to outwit and ambush the occupying Redcoat army. At this distance, I do not know why I chose it – whether it was to do with the boys’ adventure story format of the novel, with its anti-imperialist narrative and positioning, whether it seemed to be accessible enough, to my highly inexpert eyes, for my students to be able to cope with it (whatever coping with it might mean). I asked my students to look at the front cover, to describe what they could see and then to predict as much as they could about the novel they were about to read. It’s an interesting exercise, both as a way of activating students’ prior knowledge and as an opportunity to render explicit some aspects of the conditions of literary production. The content of the image – the foregrounding of the Maroon boys, the adoption of their perspective on the advancing Redcoats, the extent to which the image represents a particular moment in the novel – all provide useful ways into the written text, productive foci for the students’ conversation. But there are also issues about the style of the illustration – the use of primary colours, the lack of individuation in the four Maroon figures in the foreground (and maybe even the problematic, racialised stereotype of the Maroons in the treetops). When students returned to the front cover after reading the novel, many felt that the illustration marked a dumbing down of the content, a means to market the text as ‘safe’, unthreatening, childish. What immediately attracted the attention and interest of my first Year 8 group, however, was not the front cover but the back, and more particularly the photo of V.S. Reid in the centre of it. ‘Who is this?’ they asked. I explained that this was the

English and the politics of knowledge

Abstract Drawing on observational evidence of two classes working on Romeo and Juliet, one in England and the other in Palestine, this essay explores the nature of knowledge in relation to English as a school subject. It asserts the importance of paying attention to the resources that students, situated in culture and history, bring with them to the reading of a text. It seeks to contest a set of assumptions about ‘powerful’ knowledge as universal and transcendent, insisting that classrooms are places where meanings are made, not merely transmitted.

Valuing initial teacher education at Master’s level

The future of Master’s-level work in initial teacher education (ITE) in England seems uncertain. Whilst the coalition government has expressed support for Master’s-level work, its recent White Paper focuses on teaching skills as the dominant form of professional development. This training discourse is in tension with the view of professional learning advocated by ITE courses that offer Master’s credits. Following a survey of the changing perceptions of Master’s-level study during a Post Graduate Certificate in Education course by student teachers in four subject groups, this paper highlights how the process of professional learning can have the most impact on how they value studying at a higher level during their early professional development.

Different Ways of Reading, or Just Making the Right Noises?

What does reading look like? Can learning to read be reduced to the acquisition of a set of isolable skills, or proficiency in reading be equated with the independence of the solitary, silent reader of prose fiction? These conceptions of reading and reading development, which figure strongly in educational policy, may appear to be simple common sense. But both ethnographic data and evidence from literary texts suggest that such paradigms offer, at most, a partial and ahistorical picture of reading. An important dimension, neglected in the dominant paradigms, is the irreducibly social quality of reading practices.

Lighthouses or Follies? Academies and New Labour’s Version of History

This essay focuses attention on the UK government’s Academies project, and more specifically on the claims that have been made for the project by its apologists. It contests the version of history that underpins these claims, challenging the notion that comprehensive schools amount to a failed experiment. Linked to the Academies programme is the goal of social mobility: this is critiqued both as an abandonment of long-standing commitments to social justice and as unrealisable through the pursuit of current policies.

Measure for Measure, or Inspecting the Inspectors

This article considers the impact of an Ofsted inspection on an inner-city school. It focuses on the methodology of the inspection, on the data which the inspectors gather and the data which are omitted from their account of a school. It suggests that there are serious flaws in the model of inspectors as objective and impartial chroniclers.

Teenagers and Reading: Literary Heritages, Cultural Contexts and Contemporary Reading Practices Edited by Jacqueline Manuel and Sue Brindley Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press/AATE (2012) ISBN: 9781743050972 AU

Recent policy changes in England might plausibly be construed as encouraging a focus on a much narrower range of reading matter and purposes. The new national curriculum echoes Matthew Arnold in its promise to introduce learners to ‘the best that has been thought and said’ (DfE 2014; Arnold 1869/1993). This conception of a stable core of valorised texts is worked through in the detailed prescriptions of what secondary students are to read in English: Shakespeare, 19th century novels, poetry of the Romantic period, and so on. There is a recurring emphasis on the quality of the works to be read, works which will enable students is to ‘appreciate the depth and power of the English literary heritage’ (DfE 2014: 18).

29.95 (paperback)

The Labour Party has been in power for the past 13 years in the UK. What is its legacy in education? What have been the salient aspects of its policy interventions, and what impact have these policies had on the practice of English teachers? With its assumption of a straightforward correlation between education and economic development, New Labour’s education policy needs to be seen primarily as a failure of politics – an abandonment of any commitment to social justice in pursuit of a standards agenda that reduces teachers to a condition of mere compliance and education to a set of commodities.