Tag Archives: Experience

London Conference on the Legacy of James Britton – IOE, 12th March 2016

If you were a newly-qualified teacher of English today, would you know who James Britton was? If you had done a PGCE, it is an interesting question. As an English graduate, it would have been unlikely for you to have encountered Britton in your EngLit course. But would your PGCE tutor, at any stage, have made you aware of Britton’s contribution to English and literacy teaching (a truly worldwide contribution, at that)? Would you have looked at the Bullock Report, for example, even just Chapter 4? Or Language and Learning? Or would you have read his piece ‘Vygotsky’s Contribution to Pedagogical Theory’? For it was Britton, perhaps above all others, who first made the teaching profession in England aware of Vygotsky’s work, soon after the first English translation of Thought and Language in 1962.

Britton was more than a populariser of Vygotsky, however, if indeed he was that. Britton was then and now, in my opinion, the exemplary academic educationist: once a teacher, always fully engaged with the work of school teaching and motivated by educational questions; hugely supportive of the profession developing its own leadership (through subject associations, for example); intellectually ambitious in ways that crossed the academic humanities and social sciences – in today’s grotesque parlance, a writer of ‘four star’ papers; and a researcher with huge impact, both in today’s reduced ‘REF-compliant’ terms but also over longer timescales and across continents and disciplines. Britton shows the way you might, as someone who works in a university Education department, do good work in every sense. It’s an aspiration many of us struggle with and fail at – but it’s worth the struggle nonetheless. It is ‘the Blob’, otherwise

The London Association for the Teaching of English (LATE), the longest-standing subject association for primary and secondary English teachers, is organising a day conference on Saturday 12th March at the Institute of Education in Bedford Way to look at the legacy of Britton’s work and what it means for the teaching profession today. A flyer for the event is available here. The organisers of the event – Tony Burgess and Myra Barrs (themselves highly distinguished teachers and researchers in the same mould) – have also produced a really lovely anthology of extended quotations of Britton’s work which they will introduce at the conference. The selection gives you some real insights into the depth and reach of Britton’s thinking.

If you are interested in finding out more about James Britton in the context of teacher education and the HE discipline of Education, he features prominently in an article I wrote called ‘Disciplines as Ghosts’ which is available to download from the Articles page of this site. Karen Simecek and I have also drawn substantially on Britton’s work about the poetic mode of language use in an article that will be published shortly in the Journal of Aesthetic Education.

Learning Teaching from Experience: Multiple Perspectives, International Contexts

Learning Teaching from Experience is published by Bloomsbury today! The book came out of a Society for Educational Studies seminar I organised with Janet Orchard in Oxford. It includes chapters by many leading researchers in the field, including Ken Zeichner, Madeleine Grumet, Daniel Muijs and Anne Edwards, as well as newer scholars such as Lauren Gatti (winner of the AERA Division K best dissertation award 2012) and California school teachers Torie Weiston-Serdan and Sheri-Dorn Giamoleo.

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The book will be launched at a seminar in Bergen on Thursday 23rd January and then again (!) in London on Friday 21st February, both followed by drinks receptions. And then probably in Bristol. And perhaps again at AERA….. Further details to follow.

Pre-publication reviews were stunning and exceptionally generous. Thank you to all the reviewers from us both:

“At last, a book which combines a breadth of cross-disciplinary education scholarship, a breadth of focus – across North America and Europe – and accounts of practice in a range of contexts. This is book goes beyond factional rhetoric while demonstrating passionate commitment to the education of our young people. It addresses the deepest questions of education for what purposes, for whom, how, and in what conditions teachers learn from their experiences. Read the book to understand the complexities underlying that widely used phrase ‘learn from experience’. Fascinating and enlightening.” – Morwenna Griffiths, Professor of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK.

“This book should be required reading for courses of teacher education, particularly in the current context in which ‘learning on the job’ and the craft idea of a teacher is increasingly the norm. In this context, the rhetoric of ‘learning from experience’ is frequently invoked. But what does it mean to learn from experience? Is understanding theory not experiential? The contributions in the book approach these questions with a wealth of research and applied knowledge, which at times challenge orthodoxy on learning theories and policy. The diversity of approaches, as well as the detail and exemplification they give provide a highly informative account of aspects of learning from experience from multiple perspectives, and give us pause for thought that there can be ‘a science of education’, a formulaic application of research data and policy borrowing. The book’s chapters invite us to think carefully about the best way to develop teachers. It provides a rich account of why ‘formation’ is required, not some kind of technical ‘training’.” –  Dr. Ruth Heilbronn, Institute of Education, University of London, UK.

“An important, timely and challenging book; an essential resource for everyone interested in the future of teacher education.” –  John Furlong, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Oxford, UK.

A sample chapter (our introduction) is available in the Chapters section.

Given that Tough Young Teachers is now showing on BBC3, this is an even more topical book than we expected.

The Uses of Poetry: New AHRC Project

The Uses of Poetry: Measuring the Value of Engaging with Poetry in Lifelong Learning and Development (Arts and Humanities Research Council; Cultural Value project)

With the wonderful Kate Rumbold (PI, Birmingham University) and Tricia Riddell (Reading University), I have started work on a new interdisciplinary research project that will bring together literary, psychological and educational interests to focus on the ‘uses of’, meanings and definitions of poetry – or the poetic mode. The research is part of the AHRC’s major Cultural Value project and will include public events for both data generation and dissemination purposes. Our guiding questions are:

What are the perceived benefits of poetry to people’s learning and development at all stages of their lives? How do researchers and practitioners in literature, education and psychology currently express the value of poetry in their separate spheres? How can we best combine those insights into a rigorous interdisciplinary approach that will more effectively measure and evaluate the value of engaging with poetry?

And our research will address the following questions:

  • What research exists across our disciplines about the value of engaging with poetry?
  • What constitutes ‘evidence’ in our respective fields?
  • What is the assumed value of poetry in our fields, and how can we test that assumption? How is ‘value’ defined?
  • Which of our approaches, from e.g. subjective well-being analysis to reader response, comes closest to being able to measure, evaluate and articulate people’s actual experiences of engaging with poetry? Can existing research techniques transcend individual experiences without simply aggregating them?
  • On what forms of measurement do we currently rely, quantitative or qualitative? How could these be combined?
  • Does our disciplinary approach tend towards understanding the affective, cognitive or aesthetic role of poetry? How could we better understand these from an interdisciplinary perspective?
  • How can we optimise the strengths of our approaches to pilot a new, truly interdisciplinary valuation of the benefits of engaging with poetry?

I will post about future seminars and related events about the next six months. I am particularly keen that we try to offer practical educational alternatives for working in the poetic mode that go beyond ‘feature-spotting’ and have the potential to transform young people’s engagement with the spoken and written word inside schools (just as so many things have outside).