Editorial

A group of four boys is kept behind at the end of their English lesson because of the way they have been behaving. Three acknowledge their misdeeds and are released; the other continues to resist, reluctant to concede he has done anything wrong. Eventually, he engages in dialogue, of a sort, with his teacher. It’s a moment of classroom life so familiar that it might be construed as belonging to that category of events which Georges Perec (1997, 206) classified as the ‘infra-ordinary’ – events so mundane that they tend to escape our notice. But, as Malcolm Reed argues in the essay which opens this issue, this is a moment that demands not merely our attention but the resources of cultural-historical theory if we are to appreciate its significance and its pedagogic potential. Viewing the classroom incident through a Vygotskian lens, Reed encourages us to analyse the history behind the contradiction, to listen carefully ‘to narratives in which people express their positioning and subjective sense of reality’, and thus to understand the student’s resistance as an opportunity for development.

Contradictions are also prominent in Mandie Dunn’s account of the complexity of becoming an English (or Language Arts) teacher. Dunn explores the ways in which competing ‘authoritative’ and ‘internally persuasive’ discourses (Bakhtin 1981) figure in a pre-service teacher’s account of her practice. These different voices and the demands that they place on a teacher are not to be reconciled; to identify them is, however, to acknowledge the complexity – and the sheer difficulty – of the work that teachers accomplish. This theme is taken up in Francis Gilbert’s account of his own practice as a classroom teacher. Charting his engagement with the strategy known as Reciprocal Teaching, Gilbert’s story offers a caution to any simple notions of evidence- or research-informed practice: what starts off by looking like a set of off-the-peg procedures to be implemented as faithfully as possible becomes something quite different, refined and reshaped in the light of experience, his students’ as well as his own.

Esther Schupak takes a somewhat similar approach to the place of performance pedagogy in the teaching of Shakespeare. Methods that emphasise performance have become so widespread that they may now seem like plain common sense. However, as Schupak notes, such approaches are very different from each other, ranging from full-blown theatrical productions to an orientation towards the text that does not necessarily entail any form of physical exertion. She recognises, too, that the adoption of performance pedagogy brings with it a series of practical challenges – and she suggests ways in which these might be met.

The shift in Shakespeare studies, from text to performance and from page to stage (or screen), might be construed as one instance of a more general transformation of our understanding of literacy, our recognition of literacy practices as necessarily plural, situated, multimodal and (increasingly) digital. Reflecting on a variety of recent projects in different media forms, Michelle Cannon, John Potter and Andrew Burn offer conceptual resources for the framing of literacy pedagogy that are responsive to the ways in which the new technologies of communication and representation are being used in contemporary digital culture.

We conclude this issue with two essays, each of which focuses on a single text. Adam Wolfsdorf offers a reading of Hamlet that considers the problem of Gertrude. The key to understanding her, Wolfsdorf suggests, lies in attending to her other self, the queen in the play within the play. Andrew Newman investigates the teaching of The Great Gatsby in American high schools in the 1980s, thereby illustrating how reception study might be applied to pedagogical contexts. What emerges from his study is a sense of the novel as the accretion of historically and culturally specific re-readings – and the generative proposal that this approach might enable students to gain a historical perspective on their own reading of the text, and on themselves as readers.

John Yandell
Institute of Education, University College London, UK
[email protected]