In among all the wailing and rending of clothes, by me and others, bemoaning the state of the subject, the relentless focus on exams and results, the narrowing of the curriculum, the fixation on forms and formulae rather than ideas, the shrinking of English to something where personal response is neglected and devalued – there are also real glimmers of hope. It’s easy to forget that the loud voices proclaiming the importance of memorisation, factual recall, explicit learning, direct instruction, learning set sentence starters and ‘high utility’ words, are not those of all English teachers. Not at all! There are vast numbers out there whose own experience of the subject has been nothing like this, whose enjoyment has come from a quite different set of ideas and who strive, sometimes against the odds, to offer those same pleasures to their students. They enjoy hearing their students’ ideas, try to nurture their independence and creativity, see knowledge as an unending conversation rather than a catalogue of items to be learned off pat, and develop a thirst in their students for more.
A few things have come to my attention recently that have been more than just glimmers of hope – they’ve been brilliant rays of sunshine. And all from English teachers.
First, I have been getting increasing numbers of emails from teachers, sharing exciting work that they are doing with their students, work that is not narrowed and constrained by exam preparation or results anxiety. Such an email came recently from teacher Lucinda Gilchrist, at Wimbledon High School for Girls. Here’s what she said:
The pedagogical focus for our school at the moment is the concept of ‘playful scholarship’, as a result of which we’ve developed a scheme of work known as the ‘Hamlet Portfolio’ which has resulted in some really stunning work from my Year 12 English Literature class. The idea is to give pupils freedom to explore the text in whichever way they wish, as creatively as possible, while enabling them to engage with critical interpretations in a really detailed way. I’ve been so struck by the way that they have engaged with this project, and the quality and creativity of what they have produced.
Playful scholarship is a beautiful way of putting it, in my view, and is something we might all aspire to in work with students, not just at A Level but across secondary English. The ‘playful’ seems to have got lost in recent years and perhaps that not only makes students enjoy English less, but also detracts from the scholarship itself. EMC’s work in CPD on courses such as ‘Beyond the Critical Essay’, and in all our publications on texts, tries to put ‘playful scholarship’ at the heart of English. For instance, why does all critical writing have to be in the form of a GCSE or A Level essay or paragraph? Why does all thinking about texts need to be bound by the constraints of Assessment Objectives? In the five years of compulsory secondary education, is there not time to explore some of the other ways in which people talk and write about (and around) texts – in reviews, articles, book groups, Q&As with writers, on book blurbs and covers, in multiple kinds of text adaptation and more? Hamlet the play becomes Hamnet the book becomes Hamnet the play and so on and so on. All of these alternative critical/creative genres are also about developing understanding and interpretation of literary texts.
My own book for secondary classrooms, An Inspector Called is nothing if not an attempt to offer students enjoyable fresh angles on texts they’re studying, providing interpretations in the form of fictional adaptations and then encouraging them to do the same themselves – be inspired to write an interpretation in a form that is itself literary, whether that be a poem, a script, or a short story, answering a question that the text itself has raised.
When developing their Hamlet portfolios, Lucinda Gilchrist gave her students some compulsory tasks, alongside lots of options for other oral and written explorations of the text. They ended up doing many different kinds of responses, in different forms, making choices about what interested them most. One asked them to investigate and write about a pattern of imagery in the play, from a long list of possibilities. This seemed to me to be a wonderful opportunity to encourage detailed linguistic exploration but a far cry from the sterile picking away at individual words and phrases that one sometimes sees in student writing at GCSE and A Level. The task encourages exploration of a pattern of images across the whole text. It is about looking at what’s significant, making detailed analysis serve much bigger ideas. Here's one student's work that looks at the use of bird metaphors, images and motifs. Another piece on the significance of ears and hearing, has been submitted to emagazine, and will be likely to appear online as a future emagplus article.
Other tasks were more different and distant from what the students will do in a final exam – a film programme for instance, along the lines of what one might buy at a National Theatre production of Shakespeare – but the outcomes were no less scholarly nonetheless. The caricature of the loose, fluffy, uncritical, creative task simply does not apply here.
There were opportunities to write in role and one student undertook the fiendishly difficult task of writing an extra speech for Gertrude, in the style of Shakespeare, in blank verse in an attempt to replicate the qualities of the verse and the language, as well as offering an interpretation of her character.
In ‘performance tasks’ students were clearly exploring Shakespeare as production in ways that both took them deeper into the text and gave them greater understanding of the living, breathing dramatic genre. Interestingly, if you talk to Shakespeare scholars in academia, this is not dissimilar from some of what they do with their undergraduate students.
What’s exceptional about this work at A Level is the quantity, range and level of commitment and enthusiasm generated by it. Will this improve their A Level results. Surely it cannot fail to offer all those aspects so highly prized in examiners’ reports – independent thought, creative thinking, personal response, as well as the ability to judge significance, write in apt and relevant ways, think about the text as drama not just as character descriptions or thematic expositions. Will it encourage further study at university-level? Again, the excitement generated cannot but act as an advert for the subject. As one student said:
I have definitely gained not only useful critical interpretations and understanding for the A level mark scheme and course but have also gained a wider understanding and enjoyment of the play.
Another student commented:
I think I have gained far more depth of critical interpretation, and greatly improved my ability to form an argument from evidence as I was able to write about something I truly enjoyed and had genuine interest in. I have also gained a greater depth of critical understanding of the play.
A second cause for optimism came from another teacher, Harriet Parks, from Woodhouse College. She also emailed me recently, sending me a monologue she had written in the voice of Miranda, in The Tempest, along with a commentary on what she was trying to reveal about the character in the world of the play. She is currently using it with her students, both to explore Miranda but also to allow them to do something similar themselves, opening up the text through adaptation. The monologue with commentary is a wonderful example of creative-critical writing which will appear in the April issue of emagazine, so that other teachers and students can be inspired to do the same.
Because of my role with emagazine, the examples I am sent are often associated with A Level but there is absolutely no reason for this kind of work not to be taking place in KS3 and KS4. And for many teachers, it is! KS3 provides a perfect opportunity to loosen the exam reins and allow students’ development of their reading and writing to be enriched by going well beyond the constraints of exam writing. Focusing more on reading and interpretation, expressed through a more accessible medium than the essay, is an obvious strategy for younger students. We see examples of this with schools we work with on various projects, and those trialling aspects of our new publications and sharing with us how they’ve gone down in the classroom. Head of English, Richard Long, for example, has done terrific work with his students using Diverse Shorts and getting them to write letters to the Headteacher, for instance, advocating for the inclusion of a text in the curriculum for next year’s students.
Additional glimmers!
Two more glimmers of hope…I have finally got round to reading Andrew Atherton’s book Experiencing English Literature: Shaping Authentic Student Response in Thinking and Writing. While the section on writing doesn’t really include much of what I am describing here, and is more about examination writing, the framing of it is more open and generous than is common, and includes phrases like generative writing, freewriting, expressive writing (James Britton’s phrase) and ‘just write’ (which EMC has used for the title of our own publication for KS3). The idea that writing isn’t just a formula applied but that thought emerges in the act of writing is recognised and seen to be of fundamental importance. And, while I’d have loved to see more varied forms in the writing section, in the reading section at the start of the book, there is much to enjoy and applaud in the range of imaginative, creative and engaging approaches recommended. The title of Atherton’s book is a good indication of what he regards as important and I’d very much agree with him.
Finally, we have the imminent publication of Carol Atherton’s book Reading Lessons. Carol, who is delivering the keynote at EMC's Reading and Writing for Pleasure teacher conference on June 7th,is an English teacher and Head of Department with a deep understanding of the subject and longstanding commitment to bringing it to life for students. The term ‘playful scholarship’ is one that I’m sure she would endorse. Her new book is all about the role that books can play in young people’s lives and, as she herself has said in the past, the complicated, messy, slow, sometimes indirect nature of learning about books in English classrooms. Her final sentence, ‘The best reading lessons never really finish. There is always something else to say’ is a wonderful statement of what English should be – not finite answers, fixed exam formats, conversations shut down and ended, but an open and exploratory, unending process of thinking and responding to texts. The work of teachers like Lucinda and Harriet, Andrew and Carol is testament to that and very much to be welcomed.
