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

Growth and the category of experience

In John Dixon’s account of Dartmouth, experience is seen as central to the business of English as a school subject. Experience, for Dixon, is the raw material that is worked on in the classroom. What kinds of theory inform this emphasis on experience, and what are the curricular and pedagogic implications of this version of English? How does Dixon’s argument about experience sit with the work of other Dartmouth participants, such as D. W. Harding and James Britton? Does it have anything to offer us now, fifty years on

UA68/6/2 Chapel Program

Early history of WKU\u27s founding institutions presented at chapel. Louis Yandell was a member of the Class of 1931