Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
It’s Friday. 2:55. The sky a granite-grey as the heft of the clouds seem to throw themselves into your classroom. You’ve just spent 45 minutes teaching, exploring, discussing a poem. In fact, not just any poem, but a great poem. A beautiful poem. Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-Picking’. Mid-sentence you notice a hand shoot up from the corner... Continue Reading →
We often think very carefully about what material we want students to retrieve, but of equal importance is how they retrieve it. As with much of teaching, this ‘how’ is probably best filtered through the lens of subject specificity, triangulated of course with the underpinning science of how we learn. Yet, the mechanism by which... Continue Reading →
Yesterday, I taught a lesson about the literary canon to Year 10. One of the ways I tried to explain how the canon functions, an idea inexorably abstract to a group of 14 year olds, is through the example of Radio 1. Now, this isn't done out of any desire to increase engagement or play... Continue Reading →
Each year I'm fortunate enough to be able to offer my Y10 students a short enrichment course that lasts 6 weeks and which I title, after Bob Eaglestone's superb book, Doing English. The aim of this enrichment course is to get the students thinking much more conceptually about literature and its study, asking questions such... Continue Reading →
Networks of Creativity within Literary Studies One consequence of the increasing disciplinary specialisation of knowledge is that it can sometimes become all too easy to draw boxes around what we teach. In the case of English Literature, we can often overlook the wider artistic and creative networks that surrounded and influenced the writers we discuss.... Continue Reading →
I recently listened to a superb episode of the BBC's In Our Time, which discussed the American poet Emily Dickinson. I was struck, as I often am when listening to the show, by the richness of its discussion and the rigour and precision with which the guests explored the various topics. For those who may... Continue Reading →
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