Redefining English for the More Able

A Practical Guide

Ian Warwick, Ray Speakman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351137362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Redefining English for the More Able is a practical guide offering English teachers a range of strategies to stretch and challenge their students. Written by Ian Warwick, founder of London Gifted and Talented, and Ray Speakman, this book provides a fresh perspective on the purpose of English teaching and the benefits it can offer all students.

Drawing on an array of ideas and examples from different genres of literature, the book discusses how 'threshold concepts' can be used to frame English teaching and push the boundaries of students' learning. The chapters provide example lesson plans targeted at different age groups from Key Stages 2–5, and address different aspects of English, including short stories, poetry, film, drama and science fiction. Warwick and Speakman examine how the requirements for teaching more able students have received more recent focus under Ofsted, and offer specific examples of activities and reflective questions that can engage students more deeply in their appreciation of English.

This well researched and accessible guide will be an invaluable tool for English teachers, teaching assistants and school leaders wishing to reflect on new ways of motivating and teaching the more able in order to develop the intellectual curiosity of all their students.

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Part one
The background

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An overview of the journey in Part one of the book

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Trust those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.

(Gide, 1954)

The aim behind the first part of the book is simply to try to look at the teaching of English with a fresh pair of eyes. Specifically, through the eyes of a teacher of the more able, as we all are. To ensure colleagues are on board with the more able agenda it is essential to frame it in subject specific terms, which focus on how a subject sees itself. Unfortunately, over the last generation English seems to have lost that sense of what it is there to do. There has been a great deal of nonsense written by an academic wing that has served only to undermine what we do and has shown itself to be unhelpful in allowing us to defend our discipline from government intervention with any real conviction. Therefore, we want to look again at the essential simplicity of the ‘Big Ideas’ that define English. What are the ways of thinking, perceiving and apprehending that help to cohere and conceptualise our subject?

Research from cognitive science leads to the rather obvious conclusion that students must learn the concepts that come up again and again – the unifying ideas of each discipline. For a subject devoted to stories, astonishingly, English has yet to come up with a convincing narrative about what it’s there to do. To a great extent, English is still at the crossroads and still seeking a vision for a direction of travel. So, we want to address these issues head on, to look closely at the point (and the excitement) of teaching English, to work out what hurdles are still in place and to see if current research can help us be more effective practitioners as we seek to stretch and challenge the students in our classrooms.

We believe that as English teachers we need to more fully engage with what Meyer and Land call ‘threshold concepts’, defined as critical points when students make ‘learning leaps.’ Working a couple of thousand years ago, Aristotle came up with some concepts, namely mythos, mimesis, catharsis, phronesis and ethos (plot, re-creation, release, wisdom and ethics) that we argue might serve to clarify the cause of English.

We need to be able to help our learners to challenge and develop complex ideas, to recognise and accept ambiguity, to explore authorial values and bias, and to attack texts from as many angles as possible. We need to support them to make connections and judgments within and between texts, and to understand how written language expresses meaning in powerful ways.

Introduction to Chapter 1: Analysing the backstory

We begin the story of English in the era of confidence before the middle of the last century and then look at the crisis of confidence that occurred in the world of literary criticism a few decades later. With the changing of the critical guard, through formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism et al., came the focus on the interconnections between literature and society, and the role of literature in reinforcing cultural beliefs. On one key level, the clash was between those who saw literature as a world within a world, and those who believed literature should be up there on the barricades with others who wanted to change the world. Inevitably, the argument spilled over into classrooms, with the Bullock Report, A Language for Life (1975) with its ‘back to basics’ message, and a series of books by David Holbrook, culminating in English for Meaning (1980).

Subsequently, the battle between Bullock’s ‘mechanics’ and Holbrook’s ‘meaning’ has echoed down the years ever since and so the rest of this first chapter traces that echo through a series of UK reports, all addressing the success or otherwise of English in the UK’s schools, and what schools ought to do better. Bullock’s and Holbrook’s voices can be heard throughout, sometimes one is louder, sometimes the other. These debates are much wider than the UK. They have worldwide implications. Our job has been to tell the story and at the same time resist premature synthesis, partly because the story is not at an end and partly because we are teachers, not politicians; we believe in ‘things being various’ not in simple answers and prescriptions.

As the time for assembling my reflections approached, I resolved that a premature synthesis was the thing to be avoided. So, this book is about how not to reach one. If I have done my job properly, themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible.

(James 2007)

Clive James is making the point that understanding does not come from one distinct and separate perception of how things are, but from the connections between those perceptions. Adherence to a single theory or a single voice subtracts rather than adds to our understanding. As the 20th-century critic William Epsom might have added, had he been writing about teaching and learning in English, the important thing is not to turn our observations into dogma but rather give just enough information for the reader to digest and then leave the rest to them.

Introduction to Chapter 2: Redefining the discipline

Our stories make our condition human. We need them to invite us to see the signifying meanings and hidden causes of things. Leonardo da Vinci used the word Connessione to describe what was for him an important yet hard to achieve purpose in learning. Beyond the detail, the trial and error, the ambiguity, the inconstancy of words and the plethora of experience, Leonardo needed to know how does it all connect? When he took up a new pen he would try it out by writing in various empty corners of his notebooks the word, dimmi – ‘tell me’. He was seeking clarity and connection in a fragmented and often capricious world. There must be students of English in classrooms at this very minute all over the world feeling exactly as Leonardo felt. What, they are asking, does all this add up to? What are the big ideas behind the seductive details?

When we read, someone else’s internal world transports us and can even become more important than our own. We know that stories engage us, but sense that they are telling us more than meets the eye, and we know that words have meaning, and we also know that if we could unwrap them, their meaning would amaze us and take us to the heart of things. How do we see beneath the surface, how do we ‘unwrap’ meaning?

In this chapter, we attempt to find some clues, some ways to achieve, and help students achieve, an understanding of what makes the reader hear, feel and see. Our attempt puts together Mayer’s and Lands’ idea of ‘threshold concepts’ and Aristotle’s discourse on the complexity and elusiveness of art and poetry, and consider how these ideas might spark ‘leaps of learning’. These ‘penny drop’ moments represent leaps of faith beyond comfort zones when students acquire new ways of seeing English as a subject and of their own work.

Introduction to Chapter 3: Overcoming the hurdles

In this chapter, we are not just talking about how, in an attempt to make our work in the English classroom engaging, entertaining and ‘relevant’, we can run the risk of taking our students nowhere in terms of their learning. A key barrier is the lack of appropriately deep and broad reading experience at a sufficient level of challenge. Wittgenstein’s belief that, the limits of language are the limits of the world is key to this chapter; ‘We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either’ (Wittgenstein 1922, 5.6–5.61). Literature offers a vision of other lives and other vistas. One of its potential benefits is therefore to enlarge a reader’s sense about the many possible ways to live. But sometimes teachers can unwittingly restrict their students through the tyranny of ‘relevance’, which at times can seem to suggest that only more advantaged students are capable of looking at material further distanced from their immediate ‘reality’.

Imparting contextual knowledge through literature is significant. We can’t ‘give them’ shortcuts to cultural capital, but we can teach them how to decode. Unless they are exposed to a wide variety of reading experiences, students are unlikely to ‘get it’ in a way that influences how they write and think for themselves. Introducing students to texts that require them to become used to dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty, to engage with and experience moral dilemmas is significant in building their ability to situate and understand texts within other texts.

We argue that finding ways to take our more able students beyond the confines of the syllabus is critically important. ‘Off-piste’ lessons that go beyond the syllabus requirements create a sense that there is so much more to learn, which is vitally important for igniting our students’ passion, thirst and enjoyment for learning. This relies on our own expertise. We are obliged to understand the purpose and function of English fully in order to help our students develop their own clarity and passion, but teaching well is more than the quality and quantity of what we know. It is also the more specialised ways of thinking that become the language of instruction that we use and share. We, too, need to be capable of making references to wider texts, to broader literary contexts, to ‘the big picture’ of textual analysis.

The examination boards may encourage and make it easy for us to teach Of Mice and Men for the twenty-third time, but we should not let that stop us seeking out twenty-three different ways of approaching the same text – nor in finding scores more connections between that text and others that will surprise us, and through us our students.

During every academic year we should expect to find, like those we teach, knowledge and understanding that we did not have when we started the process of preparing and teaching those sequences of lessons.

Introduction to Chapter 4: Driving the engagement

This chapter is about how we are lucky to be teachers of English because we know that what we are undertaking in lessons when we explore texts is encouraging students to enrich those texts, and themselves, by bringing to them their own individual experiences and interpretations. As the Russian poet, Olga Sedakova said, reading is art that generates art and thought that generates thought and, most importantly, experience that generates experience. No wonder we feel lucky. As Bennett comments, literature helps us all to feel, Here is someone who knows what it is like to be me (Bennett 2016).

Our words shape our ideas and alter how we see our world and voice our insights. Our perceptions and our communications are all expressed through our language. It’s too safe for students to spend much of their time in just one world; it’s our job to make them take a look at other worlds. To introduce them to the possibilities and excitement of alternative existences. Another reassuring, even inspiring view comes in a book of interviews where the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, says:

To me … [curiosity] evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the ‘care’ one takes for what exists and what could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain readiness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervour to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.

(Foucault 1984)

This chapter revels in the possibilities of a curiosity-driven classroom, and offers considerable evidence from research that beyond intelligence and conscientiousness, curiosity is the third pillar of academic achievement, and that the journey from messiness to mastery is entirely feasible. Our aim as English teachers is to begin to provide complex texts which challenge and as a result invite a level of dialogue which encourages that feeling that writer and reader are somehow in it together.

Introduction to Chapter 5: Investigating the theory

Knowing things, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, allows us to ‘open the universe a little more’ (1982). E.D. Hirsch, known to some as an educational conservative, says that knowledge is like mental Velcro: once acquired it becomes easier to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Part One The background
• Part Two The classroom
• Glossary
• Index