Remembering Margaret Meek Spencer, teacher, critic, researcher and writer: 14 January 1925 – 4 May 2020

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Notes on contributors

Colin Mills

Colin Mills has been a member of NATE since 1972. He did an MA at the London Institute of Education with Margaret in 1975-1977 and worked with her from 1984 to 1986 as a research assistant on the Language in Inner City Schools project. After working as a primary school teacher, an advisory teacher and a lecturer at the Universities of Exeter and Worcester, he is now an Honorary Teaching Fellow at the University of Manchester Institute of Education. He co-edited with Margaret in 1988 Language and Literacy in the Primary School: Contemporary Analysis in Education (Lewes: Falmer Press). He has taught, researched and written about children’s literature, literacy learning and teaching and, more recently, literacy policy. He has a book in press, Literacy/ies for sale: power and pedagogy in primary schooling (Bloomsbury Press, 2021) and has been invited to edit an “intellectual biography”, focusing on Margaret’s work and writings: Reading Margaret Meek Spencer (Routledge 2022).

Judith Graham

Judith Graham was teaching in a London Secondary School when she and other teachers co-authored Achieving Literacy with Margaret Meek in 1983 (Routledge. Reissue in 2012).Thereafter she taught at the Institute of Education, University of London, the University of Greenwich, the University of Surrey (Roehampton) and the University of Cambridge. For NATE she published Pictures on the Page (1990), Cracking Good Books (1997) and Cracking Good Picture Books (1999). With co-author Alison Kelly she published Reading under Control and Writing under Control (David Fulton, 1997,1998 with later editions published by Routledge). With co-author Fiona Collins she published Capturing the Past:Historical Fiction for Children (David Fulton 2001, Routledge 2016).