Mind the gap: Investigating test literacy and classroom literacy

Focusing on the 2006 examination paper on Richard III, this article starts by examining the assumptions about reading Shakespeare that inform the Key Stage 3 national tests for fourteen-year-olds in England. It then analyses one student’s response to the test, contrasting this performance with evidence drawn from classroom observation and digital video data

Investigating literacy practices within the secondary English classroom, or where is the text in this class?

The Vygotskian concept of the zone of proximal development has been interpreted in such a way as to provide theoretical support for particular, government-sponsored, models of both pedagogy and literacy. This article proposes a radically different interpretation of the ZPD, informed by Bakhtinian understandings of heteroglossia. This alternative model is then used to describe and interpret the pedagogic and literacy practices that are observed in a secondary English lesson, in which students deploy a wide range of cultural and multimodal resources to make sense of a complex text

The social construction of meaning : Reading Animal Farm in the classroom

The novel, it has generally been assumed, was from its very beginnings a literary form designed to be read by solitary, silent individuals. One consequence of this assumption is that the class novel, read amid all the noise and sociality of the classroom, tends to be treated as a preparation formore authentic, private reading, or even as poor substitute for it. This essay argues that the history of novel-reading is more complicated and more varied than has been assumed; it goes on to explore, through the story of a single lesson, the possibilities for meaning-making that are the product of particular pedagogic practices as well as of the irreducibly social process of reading the class novel

Lighthouses or follies? Academies and New Labour's version of history

This essay focuses attention on the UK government’s Academies project, and more specifically on the claims that have been made for the project by its apologists. It contests the version of history that underpins these claims, challenging the notion that comprehensive schools amount to a failed experiment. Linked to the Academies programme is the goal of social mobility: this is critiqued both as an abandonment of long-standing commitments to social justice and as unrealisable through the pursuit of current policies

Let's lose the labels

Right from the start, New Labour made clear where they stood on the issue of pupil grouping. The white paper, Excellence in Schools, published within three months of David Blunkett’s arrival as Secretary of State for Education, announced the intention to “modernise” the comprehensive principle. In a move that is entirely characteristic of New Labour’s dismissive attitude to past social gains, the white paper represented mixed ability teaching as a failed experiment. The authors asserted that mixed ability had worked well in some schools but that it “required excellent teaching.” This was, apparently, a criticism – albeit an odd one in a white paper whose title might have suggested some sort of commitment to, well, excellence. (In retrospect, with the rote teaching of the NLS and the promise of education on the cheap through workforce remodelling, New Labour’s wariness of “excellent teaching” makes a great deal of sense.) “In too many cases,” the white paper continued, mixed ability had “failed both to stretch the brightest and to respond to the needs of those who have fallen behind.

Book Review: Young People, Popular Culture and Education, by Chris Richards, London and New York, Continuum, 2011, 200 pp., £22.99 (paperback), £70.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-84706-544-5

The present government has developed an analysis of what is wrong with education in the UK and what needs to be done about it. The problem is the lack of academic rigour, the restoration of which, Michael Gove insists, will be achieved by reforming the curriculum so that its focus is on canonical texts, the inculcation of standards of correctness in grammar and punctuation, and the re-telling of ‘our island story’ (Gove Citation2010). Salient in this discourse is the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ subjects, with the implication that a return to rigour would achieve two desirable (and, so the argument goes, linked) outcomes: economic prosperity and social mobility