‘The Dramas Themselves’: Teaching English in London in the 1970s

Abstract

My starting point is Staying Power, an exhibition that aimed to increase the number of photographs representing Black British experience in the UK. The exhibition was recommended by a former pre-service/PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) student who had grown curious about the language and culture of her students. One photograph of London’s Black music scene evoked powerful memories of the year I started teaching. I recall Harold Rosen’s insistence on making the students’ social realities – ‘the dramas themselves’ – the starting point for work in English, broadening out into systematic ‘school’ knowledge from there. I bring out something of what the photograph can tell us about the place of reggae, sound systems and sound contests in the life of the Black community, and I give an instance of writing in the vernacular by a Black student that arose from classroom talk about ‘sound contests’. Implicitly, I raise questions about how much a new teacher might be expected to know about their students’ languages and cultures. I also try to show what you can learn from students themselves when you listen attentively to what they have to say and I record my indebtedness to three students in particular: Michael, Lennox and Derrick, each of whom helped me to appreciate ‘the dramas themselves’.

Keywords:

• Harold Rosen
• urban classrooms
• cultural diversity
• representations of Black experience
• learning and development
• history of English teaching

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Lennox, Michael and Derrick for their stories. Thanks to Peter Traves and Malcolm Reed for reading an early draft of this article and for making invaluable comments and suggestions. And thanks to Elisabeth Bowling for setting the wheels in motion.