Given the state of the world, with war, mass enforced migration, climate emergency, spiralling food and energy costs and a rich array of governments manifestly incapable of providing solutions to any of these crises, you might need cheering up. We start this issue with a story that should do just that. Louise Torres-Ryan’s account of her own practice is located in the period after the end of lockdown in the UK. She describes a moment in education in which neoliberal values have been firmly reasserted: the priority, announced from on high and enforced on teachers and school student alike, is to make up for lost time – an approach that entails an act of deliberate amnesia, a suppression of much that the pandemic has made plain. But what happens in this moment, in Torres-Ryan’s classroom, is not an enactment of the mandated ‘catch-up curriculum’ but something infinitely richer and more valuable: a collective recovery of the space of English.
Torres-Ryan’s practice is both principled and, necessarily, oppositional and opportunistic, carved out of the gaps to be found in uncongenial institutional structures. Such possibilities are also explored in Francis Gilbert’s account of the work of an experienced teacher in what Gilbert characterises as an authoritarian school (a type of which there are abundant examples these days). Part of the strength of this exploration of what Reciprocal Teaching can achieve is that it lays bare the failure of the test-driven, teacher-dominated, monologic pedagogy that it displaces: the children formerly imprisoned by labels of deficit and ‘disadvantage’ are enabled to thrive intellectually, and to enjoy themselves, once they have found their voices, and found that others are prepared to listen to them.
Questions of culture, identity and representation are to the fore in the following three contributions. Vincent Price argues for a more expansive understanding of, and commitment to, the place of African American literature in the classroom, asserting the complementary value of, on the one hand, texts that might be seen as foregrounding race and the struggle against injustice and, on the other, texts where such preoccupations figure peripherally or not at all. From different sides of the Atlantic, Shea Kerkhoff and Daniel Talbot advance the claims of cosmopolitanism, with its more capacious conceptions of both culture and identity, as offering resources for rethinking classroom practice.
Critical or creative? Which comes first – and which should have priority in English? The next two pieces don’t attempt to answer these questions, but they might prompt us to think more about what we mean by either term – and what others might mean. Nazanin Dehdary’s research in Oman into English language teachers’ perceptions of literacy in general, and of critical literacy in particular, reveals quite sharply divergent versions of what literacy is, what it is for and how it might be developed. Duncan Driver’s excursion into Shakespeare’s schooldays is the starting point for an investigation of the meaning of imitatio within the teaching of rhetoric and what this might have to offer us in teaching for creativity today.
We conclude this issue with Brian Hanratty’s deft exploration of the possibilities of studying Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as an A-level text. Here, as elsewhere in this issue, what is on offer is much more than a single story.