Quality of experience

The three short poems at the head of this issue convey moments of education that are at once affective, reflective and profound. John Stuart Mill famously found in poetry “the very culture of the feelings” that rescued him from the oppression of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy. In the nineteenth century, the utilitarian calculus of “the greatest good of the greatest number” provided a rationale for classrooms where up to a hundred children were marshalled to be (in Dickens’ evocation) “filled to the brim” with facts. Control was maintained by a Bentham-esque panopticon of monitors and pupil-teachers. Today, a twenty-first century utilitarianism ordained by Ofsted exerts multiple modes of oversight over the minds and bodies of teachers and pupils. Within an ever-changing inspection framework, early years readers and their teachers negotiate their way through Ofsted’s demands for phonics “fast and first” while senior staff play the Progress 8 game to maximise their school’s GCSE results. The 2022 Ofsted English “Curriculum Research Review” insists that pupils learn “the structures of language” before using these “across their spoken language, reading and writing” - as if language were not learned by doing. For both teachers and pupils, anxiety over performance – in assignments, examinations or Ofsted inspections – trumps pleasure in the learning conversation of the classroom. This sadness was registered in the “found poetry” by teachers quoted by Martin Matthews in our last issue (EIE 56.4, 357). Given their experience of teaching as “factory-like” (“mark what pupils need in order to achieve this”), they valued writing as an “opportunity, [an] outlet for ideas and feelings”.

The writers of the poems that open this issue are all experienced teachers, but they have also been pupils, and the short poems speak with multiple voices. Sue Dymoke recalls the texture of tapioca in her school dining room. Sleiman El Hajj articulates the experience of teaching creative writing in a Lebanese classroom where affection may be implied rather than said. Robert Hull evokes the peace of an US classroom about to be catastrophically violated by an armed extremist.

The articles that follow all place the quality of classroom experience above performative duty. Michael Rosen’s presence and publications have enlivened classrooms well beyond the UK. In her review of his new book What is a Bong Tree?, Mari Cruice reflects on the ways Rosen has influenced her life and work – and that of many others.

One of Rosen’s passions, classroom talk, is given a post-pandemic and technological turn in the following two articles. Working with pre-service teachers, Jennifer VanDerHeide and Mandie Bevels Dunn explore ways of using multiple communicative modes in virtual spaces. Lucinda Kerawalla and her colleagues report on students’ perceptions of Talk Factory, a visual classroom technology to aid participants structure their talk.

The final articles in this issue approach the relation of pedagogy and knowledge in the curriculum. Trace Lahey evaluates three teachers’ interpretive approaches to a poem by Walt Whitman in terms of their affordances for students. Bill Green reflects on the work of Margaret Meek Spencer and James Moffett to consider the ways in which a literary text itself provides curricular elements of both pedagogy and knowledge.

We conclude with a call for papers for a Spring 2024 special issue on race, language and (in)equality in English education. Along with the planned special issues on social justice (Spring 2023) and critical literacy and social media (Summer 2023), this special issue stems from our research agenda setting exercise (EIE 55.4, Autumn 2021).