
John Stuart Mill famously found in poetry “the very culture of the feelings” that rescued him from the oppression of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy. Today, a twenty-first century utilitarianism ordained by Ofsted exerts multiple modes of oversight over the minds and bodies of teachers and pupils. Within an ever-changing inspection framework, early years readers and their teachers negotiate their way through Ofsted’s demands for phonics “fast and first” while senior staff play the Progress 8 game to maximise their school’s GCSE results. The 2022 Ofsted English “Research Review” insists that pupils learn “the structures of language” before using these “across their spoken language, reading and writing” (Ofsted 2022, 5) – as if language were not learned by doing.
In the last issue of English in Education, we published “found poetry” by English teachers who found their work “factory-like”. They valued writing as an “opportunity, [an] outlet for ideas and feelings”. The first issue of 2023 opens with three poems by teachers. Sue Dymoke recalls the texture of tapioca in her school dining room. Sleiman El Hajj articulates the experience of teaching creative writing in a Lebanese classroom where affection may be implied rather than said. Robert Hull evokes the peace of an US classroom about to be catastrophically violated by an armed extremist.
The articles that follow all place the quality of classroom experience above performative duty. Michael Rosen’s presence and publications have enlivened classrooms well beyond the UK. In her review of his new book What is a Bong Tree?, Mari Cruice reflects on the ways Rosen has influenced her life and work – and that of many others.
One of Rosen’s passions, classroom talk, is given a post-pandemic and technological turn in the following two articles. Working with pre-service teachers, Jennifer VanDerHeide and Mandie Bevels Dunn explore ways of using multiple communicative modes in virtual spaces. Lucinda Kerawalla and her colleagues report on students’ perceptions of Talk Factory, a visual classroom technology to aid participants structure their talk.
The final articles in this issue approach the relation of pedagogy and knowledge in the curriculum. Trace Lahey evaluates three teachers’ interpretive approaches to a poem by Walt Whitman in terms of their affordances for students. Bill Green reflects on the work of Margaret Meek Spencer and James Moffett to consider the ways in which a literary text itself provides curricular elements of both pedagogy and knowledge.
English in Education 57.1 will be published online within the next week or two. NATE members and journal subscribers will receive printed copies by post. To join NATE, please see contact details on the right.